Arsenal’s deal for Internacional’s Charles Aranguiz seems to have got a lot more expensive…

A few days ago we covered the story of Internacional’s 25-year-old Chilean midfielder Charles Aranguiz whose name has been strongly linked with Arsenal thanks to a not so subtle retweet from his agent (who happens to be Alexis Sanchez’s agent as well).

Now depending on which article you read about Aranguiz to begin with, you’ll probably have been told one of (if not a combination of) the following things:

1. That Sanchez was asking Wenger to sign him.

2. That Wenger has been keeping tabs on him since the World Cup.

3. That a deal was close to being agreed for anywhere between £4.5m – £7m.

And the truth is that I’m not going to disagree with any of those things.

A player asking Wenger to sign someone is not without precedent (Welbeck), Wenger was at the World Cup and would likely be keeping tabs on any players that impressed him, and Arsenal working ahead of a window to get a transfer done is not unprecedented

The fee? Well I’ll come back to that in a second but it certainly looks like a fee that Wenger would be open to.

Whilst the reports initially looked like they were just his agent wanting to raise his profile ahead of the window, in the last few days some more reliable websites have gotten involved and I’m beginning to think that there is some weight to this story.

So just to recap. All good. Quite likely. I can see it happening, and that would be great, if this article from the Metro didn’t appear yesterday afternoon.

Now, not only is there absolutely nothing in the article that hasn’t already been mentioned by someone else three days ago but the Metro report also mentions that Arsenal are ready to spend £21m on the Chilean, something that I can’t find mentioned anywhere else at all.

It’s definitely not the £5m or £6m that was initially mentioned and they don’t even explain why the price has risen so much since the initial reports or even since the Metro linked Aranguiz with a £4.3m move to Chelsea on SUNDAY.

In the article it mentions that Internacional are holding out for closer to £25m, yet there is no mention of the somewhat massive fact that the club actually only own 30% of his rights (for more info on his rights, check this out from Sport Witness).

In truth though, I fully appreciate that prices can rise, prices can fluctuate and given the number of clubs floating round him, I fully expect him to leave in the summer for more than £7m.

But quite where the Metro have got their figures from this time around I don’t know.