Rival watch

Calhanoglu on the verge of joining Inter on a free from AC… That should go down well, I’m sure he’ll be getting a good reception in the Milan Derby.

 

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Dortmund season tickets range in price from €219 to €759. Must be nice...

 

Their keeper and playmaker gone for nothing. Several players with a year left on their contracts.
Not going well for Milan at the minute.

 

That's a few more Franck Kessie transfer rumours for us, then...

 

Good. Year left on his contract and Paratici should know who he is.

 

Anyone else starting to get worried that Paratici apparently doesn't know any players or managers outside of Serie A? It's like how The Pathetic doesn't know players outside the Bundesliga

 

Looks like the goons are gonna sign Ben White for £45m + £5m in add ons.

Good, promising player but that’s a very inflated fee for someone with just one year’s experience in the Prem. As an outsider looking in, I feel Arsenal need a leader-type CB, a Ramos/ Silva (just as we do) so will be interesting to see if White makes the desired impact.

Hopefully he flops…

 

Yeeesh, Everton look as much of a mess as we do right now

No manager and they're risking fan revolt when the name most strongly linked with them is Rafa Benitez, their statement signing James Rodriguez is already looking elsewhere after just one season, and their fans are questioning their chairman's commitment due to how ambivalent he seems about pretty much every aspect of running a football club

 

It's a pretty big and expensive vote of no confidence in their raft of young CBs, none of whom were cheap. Remember when William Saliba was going to be the next Marcel Desailly? And what does this mean for Gabriel, Pablo Mari and Holding?

@BrunelGunner to confirm.

 

Apparently, Arteta (and Arsenal) want to go for more Premier League-proven players which is why we've been linked with the likes of White, Maddison, Bissouma, Ramsdale etc. Obviously this will naturally mean their transfer fees are higher, and I'm not entirely sure how we're going to afford some of these players, considering we're in a very precarious situation from a financial standpoint. I have to trust the club know what they're doing, but it doesn't seem likely.

The whole Saliba situation pisses me off no end. He's been so badly treated it's untrue. He looks likely to be on course for his 3rd consecutive loan spell before having even played a second of football in an Arsenal shirt. A total waste of £27m.

What frustrates me is that he's not been given a chance at all. He joined Nice in January 2021 and STILL made the Ligue 1 Team of the Season, which is a testament to his talent, but Arteta thinks Rob Holding should be ahead of him in the pecking order? Before he went on loan, Mustafi and Sokratis were ahead of him in the pecking order last season when it was abundantly clear neither of them had a future at the club. It doesn't make sense to me.

Regarding other young CBs, Dinos Mavrapanos, a young Greek CB we signed in 2018, has joined Stuttgart on loan again (after a very successful initial loan spell) with an option to buy for....£3.5m . We're not even good at selling players.

In terms of Ben White, again, I don't think this is a wise distribution of resources. It stinks of Pepe 2.0 where we spent huge money on an area that wasn't a priority and then spent a pittance on the area that actually required an upgrade. White's a decent player, but £50m? Not for me.

It leaves me questioning whether a) KSE are going to finance these transfers with FFP being relaxed, b) we anticipate to recoup a lot of money from player departures this Summer or c) we are vastly overspending money that we don't have and are set to meet the Grim Reaper in the near future...

We'll have to wait and see, but on the surface of it, this is more questionable transfer business by Arsenal.

 

Is Ben a chopper? He'll do well at Highbury if he is!

 

City supposedly going to sign Grealish after the Euros for £100m.

So glad we ****ed up that signing in 2018

This is probably why Villa have been making moves/ rumoured signings quite early on, especially with the Buendia one. Spending the Grealish money early.

 

Lucien Favre has reportedly turned down Palace's offer of a three-year contract

Fire up the merry-go-round once again, lads!

 

We didn't **** it up as I have repeatedly stated. Companies discussing takeovers usually cannot sell assets after the talks have started without the buyer's permission.

 

And as I have repeated many times Levy wouldn’t have bid multiple times and their manager AND player wouldn’t have spoken about the move either if it wasn’t able to have gone through.

 

Levy, the manager and the player would not have known about the takeover talks so Levy could have made a bid and the manager and player would have known about that. But it couldn't have been accepted without the agreement of the buyers.

 

Literally everyone knew about the takeover talks, let alone someone like Levy who would’ve been in contact with Villa. It still didn’t deter Levy from making a bid as Grealish had a price tag at the time due to Villa needing finances, we never met that price tag until close to deadline day which by that point the new owners stuck their middle fingers up at us for lowballing for so long. Levy messed that deal up horrendously.

 

Why would new owners come in and immediately sell their prize asset? It's just as likely that they had no intention of selling but wanted to see what the bid would be anyway. You simply cannot know what the motives of the new owners were, it is simply conjecture to claim it was because we were "lowballing for so long". So you can't make conclusions based on "facts" that aren't actually facts.

 

He was available for sale before the new owners. And was still available for sale during the talks.

Is that good enough facts for you?