Arsenal are claimed to be ready to accept as little as £25 Million to allow Nicolas Pepe to leave the club, a whopping £47 Million less than they paid Lille to sign him three summers ago.
The Ivory Coast international remains our club record signing after arriving from the French Ligue 1 on the back of an incredible season in which he scored 23 and assisted 12 in his 43 outings in all competitions, but he struggled to find anything close to that consistency in England.
Pepe did enjoy a strong end to the 2019-20 campaign shortly after Arteta had come in to take over from Unai Emery, and also enjoyed a short revival towards the end of the 2020-21 season also, but each time the new season came around he struggled for game time.
Those short spells of form are clearly not enough to warrant a first-team role, especially when we have the likes of Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe and Gabriel Martinelli fighting for the two wider roles at present, and TheSun now claims that we are set to cut our losses and allow him to leave for as little as £25 Million, almost a third of the price we paid for him in 2019.
I don’t think any of this will come as a shock to anyone, as we can hardly demand a substantial fee for a player who has just one goal and one assist from his 17 PL appearances this term, in which he was selected to start just five times thus far.
That £25 Million may not cover much of our outlay, but his value is only on the downturn, and with just two years remaining on his current terms, it would be silly to allow this to go on any longer.
Does anyone believe Pepe should have been given more playing time this season?
Patrick