Arsenal have been linked with a move for Napoli’s 26-year-old defender, Kalidou Koulibaly, for some time now, with reports really ratcheting up after Mislintat’s arrival at the club.
3Kostas Manolas
- Age: 26
- Current club: AS Roma
- Contract until: 2022
- Market value: £31.5m
Very late in the January window, reliable BBC journalist David Ornstein confirmed Arsenal were exploring the possibility of signing the Roma centre-back. He also revealed that Arsene Wenger was trying to sign the defender back in the summer of 2016, before settling for Shkodran Mustafi.
Clearly the club like the centre-back, so they could revive that interest again this summer. The Manolas links feel like they’ve been going on forever, but at 26 he still has a lot of football ahead of him.
The defender is great in the air, and he has a lot of top level experience as well. This week he helped Roma to a Champions League clean sheet as they progressed to the quarter-finals.
Perhaps Arsenal could bring him in to join Konstantinos Mavropanos, a fellow Greek centre-back who joined in January. Roma are under no obligation to sell though, with Manolas’ contract lasting another four years.