Morning, welcome to a brand new week.
The team headed to Girona yesterday for a warm weather training camp ahead of the friendly there on Saturday evening. There’s a picture gallery on the official website which shows some familiar faces, but quite a lot of young ones involved to make up the numbers with so many senior players still away after the World Cup.
There’s work to do on the pitch, and off it, as we look to build the squad ahead of the new campaign, which is a little over three weeks away. The weekend stories about Vinicius Junior will bring this transfer window into territory we’ve rarely ventured into as a club. This is a superstar playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world, so there’s probably going to be a lot of noise around if it progresses.
SPORT, which is Catalan based, report this morning:
SPORT has learned that Florentino Perez has set a non-negotiable condition for considering the Brazilian winger’s departure: the offer, including fixed fees and add-ons, must reach €160 million. Below that figure, the club will not even sit down to negotiate.
I looked at Marca and AS, and there’s almost nothing to be found about Arsenal on either website as of right now, and the only story I could find about Vinicius Junior was on Marca. That, however, was a video of him laughing his head off while being given a piggyback by Terry Crews in front of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
Perhaps that tells us something about how seriously this story is being taken by those two Madrid based dailies. I take the SPORT story with a hefty pinch of salt, but €160m plus the wages, the signing-on fees/bonuses/agent fees etc, really would be an extraordinary deal for Arsenal to do. In a summer when it’s been clear we’ve been cautious about over-spending, this would be the opposite. Perhaps that’s part of why though, as we’ve been prepared to do a big deal like this.
The more I consider it however, the more unlikely I think it is, but I do think the fact we’re even having the conversation around a player of this profile is interesting. We haven’t signed a player of this stature in a long time, perhaps Mesut Ozil was the last one, but that was a signing that came out of nowhere in very quick fashion. The moving pieces that saw Gareth Bale go to Real Madrid opened the door for the German to come to Arsenal, but that all happened very late in the window. It was a bolt from the blue kind of signing. The way this one is playing out is very, very different, and gives us a lot more to contend with.
From our side there’s the discussion around how much he’d cost, and while I think it’s obvious he’d up the quality on the pitch, do we have to take into consideration how a player like this might impact the dressing room dynamics? Mikel Arteta has worked hard to cultivate a team spirit and togetherness that played a not insubstantial part in us winning the title. Does a ‘star’ player, whose character can be perceived as difficult sometimes, upset that? Or is that simply what you have to deal with if you want to move in these kinds of transfer circles, and to improve a team that is, already, very, very good?
The other side is whether or not this is about him trying to get a new, improved deal at Real Madrid, or signalling to the wider market that he’s available. Could it flush out some interest from Saudi Arabia, perhaps? They seem to have dialed it down a little bit in terms of their spending, but if they’re prepared to drop £70m on Crysencio Summerville, then maybe they’ll splash out for the kind of superstar to become the main man in that league as Cristiano Ronaldo withers away into the leathery old skeleton he is these days.
It looks as if Real Madrid are going to sign Yan Diomande, but he tends to play more on the right than the left, and is more likely a Rodrygo replacement than anything else. Still, as the pieces keep moving, we might see something shake out that works in our favour. You have to imagine that Arsenal would have known how difficult this was going to be before ‘exploring’ this as a potential deal, so hopefully they’re prepared for a lot of nonsense.
We’ve had a reasonably decent relationship with Real Madrid down the years. We saved them from a couple of seasons of Dani Ceballos, which should still grant us some goodwill, and obviously captain Martin Odegaard came from there in a deal which probably still stings a little from their side. Quite how it might play out with a former Atletico Madrid executive doing the negotiating etc is another thing, but I guess we’ll see how that plays out in the coming days. Thankfully Florentino Perez is a completely normal person to deal with an not at all an unhinged lunatic in the boardroom of a lunatic club, so that’s good.
Covet the player, covet the noise, as the saying I completely just made up goes. You might prefer some earplugs though.
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Right, I’m gonna leave it there for this morning. We’re back on normal time for the Arsecast Extra, and we’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com, so fire away using the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
For now, have a good one.
