Arsenal don’t have recall clause in Folarin Balogun’s contract for the January transfer window, with the striker starting strongly in France.

All Nigeria Soccer report that Arsenal didn’t include a recall clause in Folarin Balogun’s loan deal with Stade de Reims this season. As a result, he’s expected to spend the entirety of the current campaign with Reims.

For the time being, Arsenal probably aren’t too worried about that. Gabriel Jesus and Eddie Nketiah are both playing well, so Mikel Arteta isn’t in desperate need of another striker. But things can change quickly in football.

Balogun has certainly made a strong start to life with Reims, earning the Ligue 1 Young Player of the Month award for August.

The striker has scored five goals, assisted one, and won two penalties in just seven appearances so far. He’s the joint highest-scoring Englishman in Europe’s top-five leagues, and he has a better goals-per-90 than the other two on five goals – Harry Kane and Ivan Toney.

If the Arsenal striker continues in that kind of form and the Gunners pick up some kind of injury to one of their current strikers, or one of them falls badly out of form, perhaps they’ll then regret not including a recall clause in Balogun’s contract.

It’s worth mentioning that the lack of a recall clause doesn’t make it impossible for Arsenal to bring Balogun back.

If Arsenal reached an agreement with Reims, they could still recall the striker even without such a clause.

But it would be an open negotiation like any other transfer, with Reims able to totally refuse all offers if they wanted to. So it would be a costly move just to re-sign a player Arsenal already own.

Most likely, Balogun will stay with Reims and complete his first full campaign in senior football. In the long term, that’s probably the best thing for him anyway.