So that’s it. It’s over. Done and dusted. Finito. Kaput. Finished. Wound up. Over and done with. The transfer window is closed and now all that’s left is football.
All. I mean, that’s all there should be, but the transfer window and transfer deals hold a particular appeal and there’s no getting away from that. Ultimately it’s pretty grotty and obscene, Sky proudly trumpeting the fact that Premier League clubs have spent over £1bn, as if this is something to admire and be in thrall to. Buying humans from other grotesquely wealthy organisations propped up by Rupert Murdoch’s filthy lucre isn’t something we should consider a great achievement, but it is what it is, and we are where we are.
From an Arsenal point of view it was relatively quiet. As expected there were no further arrivals after the signings of Shkodran Mustafi and Lucas Perez earlier this week, but there were some departures. The most high profile of which is, of course, Jack Wilshere going on loan to Bournemouth. After talk of Crystal Palace, Roma, AC Milan and others, he’ll play his football on the south coast this season.
I have to admit this is a surprising move. Wilshere played in both the Leicester game and the Watford game, coming off the bench. He hasn’t been ignored or cast aside. He’s had a full pre-season for the first time in ages, and he appears to be relatively fit – if not as match sharp as he might like. Then again, that doesn’t really set him apart from, or behind, a number of his teammates, so I don’t think that was a big consideration.
I’m surprised that Wilshere – reportedly unhappy that he’d missed out on the England squad – pushed so hard for a move away from the club he’s been at for so long. I’m also surprised that Arsenal and Arsene Wenger agreed to it. They could very easily, and without any fuss or recrimination, have said no and simply refused to let him go. Perhaps there’s something to be read into that.
We have to assume that Wenger knows Wilshere as well as anyone, and we know what he thinks of his talent, so if he’s willing to let a player of that ability go, is there more to the story than is being made public? I don’t know, but I’m still a little taken aback at how quickly this has all gone through, and at how nuts it is when you step back and think about it a bit.
Imagine a few days ago someone had said Jack Wilshere would leave Arsenal for Bournemouth. You’d have laughed them out of it. And look, as I said when the story broke, I can see the benefits of it for him. When it comes to his choices in England I think Bournemouth are a much better fit than Crystal Palace, for example, and Eddie Howe is a very promising young coach whose team plays nice football.
Yet when it comes right down to it this is a step backwards in his career, at an age when he really should be pushing on. Bournemouth finished 16th last season, their ambition is probably to just stay up, and when you swap from a team whose aspirations, whether they realise them or not, involve winning the Premier League and trying to get as far into the Champions League as possible, then it’s impossible to say this is anything other than a step down.
I guess his options were limited in that Arsenal were not going to loan him to a team towards the top end of the Premier League, and he could do very well there. I hope he does. Maybe he’ll thrive on the responsibility he has there as a high profile player in whom there are great expectations. I really think there’s a lot of talent in there and if he can play regularly it might be just the thing he needs, but I have big reservations over the fact it happened at all. I would have liked him to stay with us and shown a bit more fight, but there you go.
I know some people have compared this to Aaron Ramsey going to Nottingham Forest and Cardiff on loan, but I can’t see how that holds up. Ramsey was only 19 at the time, and coming off the back of an injury far more traumatic than Wilshere’s, he played 5 games for Forest and and 6 games for Cardiff to get himself closer to match fitness. He then returned to Arsenal the same season. They were short-term moves. Wilshere, who will be 25 in January, is gone for the duration of this season with no recall clause, so the difference is obvious.
Anyway, I do hope it goes well for him, and I hope it’s a decision that neither he nor Arsenal come to regret. I feel there was more than enough football for him to make his mark in this team, but he’s made his decision and we’ll just have to see how it goes. I don’t really buy into the spin this is the best thing for him, but I suppose it’s down to him to prove it is.
Elsewhere, Serge Gnabry left the club on a permanent basis to join Werder Bremen for a fee of around €5m + €1.5m in add-ons. Not a huge amount of money, but for a non-English player in the final year of his contract who hasn’t started a game of club football for two and half years going to a comparatively much smaller club in Germany, it’s not a bad amount when you think about it.
I have no inside info on this at all, but I do know Arsene Wenger was/is a big fan of Gnabry and when he said he wanted to extend his contract last week, I think he meant it. I can only assume that the player flat-out refused to sign a new deal, and so Arsenal were forced into a situation where they had to sell. If a player is not committed there’s little point keeping him, especially inside the last 12 months of a contract when he’s not going to perform in a way that might jeopardise a move at the end of it. You take the money, and that’s what we did.
A bit of a shame, because he is a player of some talent, but at the same time he has done precisely nothing for Arsenal in the last two seasons. We’re not letting go a key contributor here, so it’s pretty easy to shrug this one off. Between himself and Wilshere we’re letting go of two goals in two seasons, between them. You’d like to think we’ve got the depth to cope with that.
There were some other minor ins and outs, some youngsters like Glen Kamara and Nigerian summer signing Kelechi Nwakali going out on loan, but let’s have a final look at our transfer business for this summer.
Ins
| PLAYER | FEE |
|---|---|
| Granit Xhaka | £35m |
| Rob Holding | £2.5 |
| Takuma Asano | £5m |
| Lucas Perez | £17m |
| Shkodran Mustafi | £35m |
| Total | £94.5m |
Outs
| PLAYER | FEE |
|---|---|
| Serge Gnabry | £4m |
| Isaac Hayden | £2m |
| Jack Wilshere | Loan (£2m) |
| Calum Chambers | Loan (£1m) |
| Joel Campbell | Loan |
| Wojciech Szczesny | Loan |
| Jon Toral | Loan |
| Total | £9m |
So, without wishing to get into the massive pile of blustering hyperwank that is ‘net spend’, we’ve spent £94.5m less around £9m coming in, making a total outlay of £84.5m. Not an insignificant amount of money, and when you consider the signing of Mohamed Elneny in January for £10m+, we have splashed some cash in 2016.
Now, we leave all that behind. We have a squad that is pretty much complete. For the first time in a long time I don’t think we’re in a situation where we fear we’re short in any particular position. Whether or not the players we have are capable of doing what we want them to do is another matter, but it’s time to leave all the market madness behind us and just get on with winning football matches.
And that is really what it’s all about. Tim Stillman will be here with his column later, I’ll be back tomorrow with a possible Arsecast, it is the Interlull after all, but let’s see.
Until then.
