Not many Arsenal fans will be expecting to see much action from these two young Arsenal players in the year ahead, with our summer signing Takuma Asano still not having been granted a work permit to play football in England and Serge Gnabry being one of the forgotten stars from the academy and seemingly nearing the end of his time with the club.
Both of them did their chances of breaking into the Arsenal first team no harm whatsoever this week though, as they began their Olympics campaign in Brazil with a well taken goal apiece. Unfortunately for the Arsenal pair, neither goal was enough to inspire their national teams to a win but on a personal note and from an Arsenal point of view it was definitely a positive day in Rio.
Gnabry’s Arsenal career has faltered after a strong and promising start, partly due to some bad luck on the injury front and partly because he lost his way and lost his form. There was some good luck for him today though, as an injury to the captain of Germany saw Gnabry brought on. He then scored a good goal and inspired the German to fight back twice and claim a draw with the reigning gold medallists Mexico.
Asano’s Japan were trailing 5-2 against Nigeria when Asano finished a fine flowing move with a great backheel to set up a frantic finish. Unfortunately for the new Gunner they fell just short and lost the match 5-4 but if he continues to impress at the Olympics it will certainly help his chances of getting that work permit.
Bob.
If Japan crash early, we might have Asano start the game against Liverpool 🙂
Players and not price is the reason we haven’t sign anyone else yet according to wenger on arsenal.com..
He said, “age ability and resale value” are the things he look at and not price when he’s pursuing players and they should tick all those boxes.
So now we we know why he didn’t went for higuain and that would rule out Johnny evans as well lol.
Greizmann surely ticks all those boxes though I should say.
And yet he signed Per, Cazorla, Podolski, and Arteta in recent seasons who all had little resale value (though Cazorla has stayed consistent enough to keep his perhaps) and 3 of them were arguably at the end of or past their prime. He has consistently shown that he generally buys 2 types of players, stopgap veterans and young unknowns. He has ended up consistently buying lots of underwhelming young talent, especially some way overpriced young English talent. I fear Arsene is too much in love with the idea of finding unknown gems and polishing them to sell for huge profits/break into the team to make him look like a genius.
Do the (very) few successes warrant this approach given the team’s supposed desire for trophies? Even though he has broken the bank a bit the past few years, is one top level player a year enough for a team that needs several more top level players to compete yearly?
To be fair to him, those players arrived when we were still in the austerity period due to the stadium, and it’s also fair to say that all those players did justice to their price tags.
Being the football purist that wenger is, I can say that apart from cazorla arshavin and Koss I don’t think most of who arrived between 07-12 would’ve end up here had it not been for the financial constraints on the club during that period.
With that said though, we need some quality signings before the window closed and preferably before the season starts.
Perhaps, but if that era has ended, it has turned into fixing one position each year when sometimes we need to fix as many as 5. I don’t know if that is really any better.
I also think many fail to see that we still have a lot of financial constraints. Our massive youth setup, huge scouting network, and socialist wage structure bleed us dry. The team is determined to not spend more than we make, even if we underspent in past years, and also Arsene counts wages for new players into his budget. So we have less to spend than most think. I think the wage issue is why Arsene usually won’t buy a player until he sells someone first. If he has trouble offloading a player for a price he feels is fair, he may just cancel his transfer plans.
Or maybe I am just trying to rationalize something that frustrates me to no end.
The problem as I see it is that last year there were glaring deficiencies in the team. Ozil and sanchez had three years left on their contract. Financially there were deferred payments to be made for existing players to their old clubs.
We should, last summer, have dipped in to the cash reserves and bought xhaka (or similar player) and a striker (welbeck last summer had long term injury). This would have shown ambition to the likes of sanchez and ozil, plus we would probably now be PL champions.
The situation we are now in is that xhaka has been bought, no striker as yet and we need CM. If this coming season is not a resounding success, I can see ozil and sanchez not signing new contracts and being sold next summer.
All of the above was forseeable last summer but we just bought Cech.
It seems obvious to me that if arsenal are going to make big signings like ozil and sanchez then the other glaring deficiences in the team need addressing before their contracts come up for renewal. Top Players with ambition will not stay. Rvp scored 30 goals, was player of the year and we were well off wining the PL, that is why he left.
I have just looked up the 2011/12 season, when RVP scored 30 goals for us in the PL and was player of the year.
Arsenal were third, nineteen point off the leaders and ony one point ahead of tottenham. We also lost 8-2 to manu. We had also lost fabregas and nasri in summer 2011 and they had not been replaced.
We ate not in the same financial position now but we have to show ambition if we are going to keep our top players.
I 100 percent believe that if we sign no more players, we will get to a stage in the season, when fans will say, lets just play Asano up top and see what happens. We will say he has pace, lets see if he can score with quality passing behind him. And if he can’t sort out stuff in order to join up, people will say what’s the point in buying a striker who isn’t available.
He’s 21, so I don’t really go for this future stuff. It’ll be this season or next season when he gets a decent opportunity. If he doesn’t get one, well then we bought him as a fail safe, third or fourth choice, replacing Sanogo possibly.
I do not think asano has a work permit yet.