Depending on how credulous or gullible you are, you might be excited to learn that Arsenal will spend at least £150m this summer, targeting three positions. I’m not going to link to The Independent‘s reporting for reasons we’re about to get into. All they’ve done is looked at our transfer spending of the last two summers and come up with a number that a rough average of the two. They know as much as I do about Arsenal’s transfer budget, which is to say, nada.
Last summer, we spent roughly £168m. The summer before, roughly £145m. It’s reasonable to assume then that we may spend something similar, but why would any club reveal what it intends to spend? That’s just an invitation to other clubs to adjust their demands accordingly. West Ham have already come out and insisted that they won’t sell Rice for anything less than £100m, but if we were to officially announce how much we’ll be looking to spend, the club that employs Moyes for the foreseeable future might as well demand our full budget if only to negotiate upward from their original asking price.
Insisting on a player’s minimum fee is sound negotiation. While it might be intended to drive would-be suitors off, it also gives the club a chance at getting more than they hoped for. Of course, if Rice was truly untouchable, West Ham would make that clear by declaring he’s only available for something truly outlandish. £100m, while high, isn’t far off for a player of his profile & calibre. I suspect that they’ll be thrilled to get £80m (well, maybe not “thrilled”, maybe more like “content”). By contrast, a club announcing how much money it has to spend is foolhardy. It’s akin to agreeing to play three-card monte but saying you’re only carrying £50 banknotes.
We’ll find out how much the club will spend this summer when the transfer window closes 15 October. Given our needs and our Champions League qualification, I might go so far as to suggest our summer spend will exceed £150m.
Because we’ve qualified for UCL, I expect tons of stories like these with wild speculation and rumor mongering. We’ll be connected with everyone from Messi to Rice to Osimhein to Kane.
It’s kind of good thing, though – we can kind of measure how people think our season will go based on the kind of players we get linked to. If we
Fairpoint. I think I have blocked about that a while back. Maybe I should revisit the point…
Amen. Stories like this are just as pointless as stories about how close we are to signing a plyer. Until the club announces, it’s nothing but gossip.
If you’re bothered by these stories, just wait until the silly season actually begins! The tabloids at least have to cover actual events that happened during the season lol.
LOL indeed.
And there’s no way this club will announce how much it has available to spend.
true. Don’t put any stock in any of these stories. John, thanks for adding a dose of common sense to this nonsense.
I honestly think we will spend whatever Arteta wants. He will form a list and we will target them in order and pay IF the fee is reasonable for the player. I don’t think we have a limit in how much total as much as how much per individual target.
It is a refreshing change of pace from Wengers days when it seemed like he was telling us that we couldn’t spend. To a degree, that was true, but it also felt like an excuse. Arteta may not get 100% support, but he does seem to have a clear vision for who he wants, and he and Edu seem to have their wits about them as shown by their refusal to outbid Chelsea for Mudryk.
It’s just speculation.
Why would we have less to spend this season when we have qualified for CL and will have about £100 million from that?
Exactly. I think the Telegraph and any other sources offering this “insight” is just throwing a dart and using whatever number they hit.
We will be reading or hearing rumors well before the transfer window opens and all through that period until it closes. Then we will continue to hear about all those we allowed to get away by not offering enough, by letting Chelsea outbid us (if not the now-wealthy Newcastle, MU, MC, etc) until we get close to the enter transfer window when it starts all over. It is the cycle of life, much like budding trees, full leafing, dropping leaves, and bare trees, except this one has two periods of potential growth, rather than one full cycle like virtually (if not all) other major sports.
The only true hope for every Arsenal supporter is that, as was typically the case in the Wenger era, we do not wait for the last week or last few days, with the thought that those desperate to sell will lower their prices and allow us to get bargains. As we have seen too often, by that time, some of the better players were already gone and we were left to accept the outdated or second-best merchandise still on the shelf or the dregs at the bottom of the barrel.
What never quite worked for Wenger was working that fine line between over-paying, which was a legitimate idea, and being too frugal, if not cheap because he failed to understand how the sport and its now-wealthy owners operated and that, carrying the mantra of the limitations created by the construction of the Emirates, could only get you so far before nobody believed that any more.
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