Well, there’s only one place to start this morning and that’s the news that Arsenal have agreed a fee with Man City for Gabriel Jesus.
🚨 Arsenal have reached an agreement with Manchester City to sign striker Gabriel Jesus for £45m. Still some bits to sort but #AFC on course to secure 25yo, who also had interest from Chelsea & Tottenham. Arteta’s top target @TheAthleticUK #MCFC #CFC #THFC https://t.co/yeoOKuUutZ
— David Ornstein (@David_Ornstein) June 24, 2022
I don’t imagine anyone is even remotely surprised by this, given how obvious it has been that he is one of our major targets this summer. There has been talk of how, behind the scenes, Edu has been laying the groundwork for this for quite some time, and as we know when a club makes a bid for a player they’re pretty much certain that he’s willing to join (this is what makes the reported Raphinha bids interesting).
So this feels like the final hurdle in getting it done. Obviously there are some things to finalise in terms of the mechanics of the transfer, signing papers and sending City their money etc, but I bet everything else is done and dusted. Personal terms will have been agreed by now, he’ll know what the plan is for him as a player at Arsenal and where he fits into Mikel Arteta’s plans, so I doubt there’s much left to work out there.
More in-depth analysis will follow, but I like it. For some, £45m might be a lot of money for a player with just a year left on his contract, particularly when we’ve got issues of our own with players in that situation, but in the current market the going rate for a forward of his experience/pedigree is substantially more than that. The other thing to say is that when someone wants really a player with just a year left on his contract, they retain quite a bit of value, and that’s very much the scenario here. It seems like Mikel Arteta has been laser-focused on getting this guy in, and that factors into the price too.
I think there’s probably a wider conversation to be had about Arsenal’s spending in the last couple of windows, based on what we’ve done and what we might potentially do in the rest of this one. £45m on Gabriel Jesus + £30m already on Fabio Vieira. If you do Raphinha for anywhere near the fee Leeds are seeking, and you add Lisandro Martinez on top when you reach a number that Ajax find acceptable, you could be looking at another £90m on top of that.
When the manager said that this summer we have to go to another level, the first interpretation is that he was talking about the quality of player we bring in – and that’s probably the right one. Nevertheless, that was a very public statement, not exactly putting pressure on the people who own the club, but making it very clear what he feels we need to continue to progress and, hopefully, get back to the level we all want to see the club at.
KSE are obviously facilitating the money being spent, but I doubt very much that they are providing it from their own coffers. Stan isn’t sitting there telling Josh ‘Sorry son, but the Spanish lad in London needs your inheritance’, but as I said, that’s a conversation for another day probably.
So, let’s hope that everything gets done and dusted without any hassle, presumably over the course of the weekend and early next week. Stuart is at Glasto and I heard that Pricey is on a golf weekend with the lads in sunny Luxembourg, so we’re gonna have to wait to get the pictures done, then it should be announced 😉
Right, I’m gonna leave it there for this morning. There’s not much else happening from an Arsenal perspective, the sun is shining and I have dogs to walk. Enjoy your Saturday folks, more from me here tomorrow.
