With the transfer window now closed, let’s look at the madness Arsenal pulled off.
When Josh Kroenke said we should ‘be excited’ we declined and carried on moaning only for the club to deliver Nicolas Pepe for £72m. I think it’s safe to say the best word to describe Arsenal’s entire summer transfer window was ‘unexpected’.
The maths involved to spread £40m around and come back with six top players is quite impressive and it hits home, once again, how the only decent thing Ivan Gazidis did was to hire Raul Sanllehi and then sod off.
I, for one, am grateful that Sanllehi saw Arsenal as his chance to take control of a club.
Arsenal have also managed to shift an impressive £46m off their books in terms of wages through various sales, releases and loans.
So, having said all that, let’s look in our goodie bag now the shops are shut…
Signed
- Kieran Tierney – £25m
- David Luiz – £8m
- Gabriel Martinelli – £6m
- Dani Ceballos – £5m (loan)
- William Saliba – £25m
- Nicolas Pepe – £72m
- James Hillson – Free
- Catalin Cirjan – Free
Sold/released
- David Ospina – £3.1m
- Xavier Amaechi – £2.25m
- Takuma Asano – £1m
- Julio Pleguezuelo – free
- Charlie Gilmour – free
- Bayli Spencer-Adams – free
- Vontae Daley-Campbell – free
- Cohen Bramall – free
- Stephan Lichtsteiner – free
- Danny Welbeck – free
- Aaron Ramsey – free
- Petr Cech – retired
- Dominic Thompson – £3m
- Carl Jenkinson – £2m
- Krystian Bielik – £7.38m
- Laurent Koscielny – £4.8m
- Takuma Asano – £900k
- Alex Iwobi – £35m – £40m
- Kelechi Nwakali – free
- Nacho Monreal – £250k
Loaned
- Ben Sheaf – Doncaster
- Daniel Ballard – Swindon Town – back at Arsenal after picking up a knee injury
- Jordi Osei-Tutu – VfL Bochum
- Dejan Iliev – SKF Sered
- William Saliba – St Etienne
- Eddie Nketiah – Leeds United
- Mohamed Elneny – Besiktas
- Henrikh Mkhitaryan – AS Roma