Arsenal and Manchester City are reportedly battling for Barcelona’s sporting director Raul Sanllehi, with the Gunners looking to appoint him as a replacement for transfer negotiator Dick Law.
According to Spanish outlet Sport, Arsenal and Manchester City are both interested in hiring Raul Sanllehi, after reports from Marca that he’s left Barcelona.
Although those reports are still unconfirmed at this stage, it would make some sense if Arsenal were looking at Barcelona’s chief negotiator, given the current situation with Dick Law stepping down. Arsenal’s chief executive Ivan Gazidis is believed to have a close friendship with Sanllehi, reports the Mirror.
Marca write that Sanllehi negotiated the transfer of Neymar to Barcelona and convinced him to turn down Paris Saint-Germain in 2016. But after the sale of Neymar and the club’s decision to pull out of a deal for Jean Michael Seri when Raul was already in Nice to negotiate the transfer, he now wants to leave.
I feel Arsenal have had trouble getting good value for money when it comes to departures, with players around the first-team squad like Wojciech Szczesny, Gabriel Paulista and Kieran Gibbs all leaving for £15m or less. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s sale brought in £40m, but the fact he was the Gunners most expensive outgoing transfer of all time says a lot about the dealings of the last decade.
That’s before we even get into the fact that only two players joined in the summer and Arsenal chased Thomas Lemar for months, only for the deal to break down on the final day. A new transfer negotiator would be a welcome change, in my opinion.