Arsenal is set to lose Eddie Nketiah for free after valuing him at £20million around a year ago.
The Englishman is in the last months of his current deal and has refused to sign a new one that was offered to him by the Gunners.
He has watched the club promote Folarin Balogun to their first team and will now compete for a striker spot with his fellow academy graduate.
Nketiah has simply failed to take his goal-scoring form with the England Under-21 national team into the Emirates and Arsenal seem to be offering him a new deal just to protect his value in the event they do sell him.
The Sun says he is unwilling to renew terms with Arsenal and is now eyeing a huge payday abroad when he signs a pre-contract deal with another club in January.
This would come as a major blow to Arsenal who fielded interest from the likes of Crystal Palace and Brighton in the last transfer window.
The report claims that Arsenal’s asking price and the desire to have both a sell-on clause and a buy-back clause in the deal saw suitors turn away.
Nketiah has scored 16 goals from 17 competitive games for the England Under-21, but he has just 5 league goals from 38 matches for Arsenal.
Is Mikel Arteta really clearing out Unai Emery’s players?
The short answer would be ‘yes’.
Unai Emery’s Arsenal signings
According to transfermarkt, Unai Emery brought in 12 players during his three windows as Arsenal boss. He also promoted five players from the youth ranks to the senior team.
Of those 17 players, six are currently at the club, one of whom we tried to sell this summer and another will be allowed to leave for free next summer, his replacement already purchased for £24m. There’s also another on the list we would have sold had we not spent such a stupid amount on him.
Emery brought the following players to Arsenal:
Lucas Torreira (on loan)
Bernd Leno (will leave for free next summer)
Sokratis (gone)
Matteo Guendouzi (on loan, will be sold permanently next summer)
Denis Suarez (gone)
Stephan Lichtsteiner (gone, although Emery got rid of him)
William Saliba (on loan, still hasn’t played a single official minute for Arsenal after 2 years)
Kieran Tierney (renewed)
Nicolas Pepe (would most likely have been sold had Arsenal not spend £72m on him)
David Luiz (gone)
Gabriel Martinelli (renewed)
Dani Ceballos (gone)
Emery promoted the following Arsenal youngsters:
Eddie Nketiah (tried to sell this summer)
Dejan Iliev (on loan until the end of his Arsenal contract)
Reiss Nelson (tried to sell this summer)
Joe Willock (gone)
Bukayo Saka (renewed)
Contrast that with the players from the youth ranks that Arteta has promoted:
Emile Smith Rowe
Folarin Balogun
So, back to Emery’s players. There are 17 listed, 16 if we discount Lichtsteiner. Of those, seven remain at the club but only five play regularly (Leno, Tierney, Pepe, Martinelli, Saka).
Of those five, one will leave next summer (Leno), another was at the club before Emery arrived (Saka) and another was mostly an Edu signing (Martinelli).
Make of that what you will…
I’m trying really hard Guy
This is exactly why we need to start following the Chelsea model: hiring our own players then hiring a coach instead of a manager. Allowing the manager to hire his own players is clearly a recipe for disaster.
It’s nothing new. Arteta has been trying to clear out Emery’s players ever since he came not even minding their quality and the impact on team results. He started with Saliba. His ego is too big for a novice
Long on facts guy, though short on YOUR valued opinion, sadly!
Mine is that is shows how constantly changing managers -and some fans constantly calling for it too- can work against steady progress.
When you start every year or two with a new manager, you effectively go backwards in planning. We do NOT have a sugar daddy to throw unlimited funds our way year, after year, after year, as Abramovitch or Sheikh Mansoor does.
So any new manager is stuck with the previous managers choices or even the manager before him . We stillhave Wengers buys in our team, notably thre catastrphiclly stupid and harmful Xhaka .
I agree that UE and MA have both been stupid enough to keep him and play him.
I’d have thrown him in the rubbish bin on my first day as manager, given MY way!
Nketiah can still be a handy squad member with covid and injuries we’ll probably need him this season.
ARS need tireless & creative stars
for a club that pretends to be in the midst of a “rebuilding” phase, the mishandling of both Eddie and Laca, who are both entering their final contractual years, is almost unforgiveable…to think that we could once again find ourselves in a situation where multiple players, with market value, could be leaving on a free, is so counter-intuitive to the “process”…of course, some will suggest that we couldn’t have possibly replaced said players with the monies they might have raised in the open market, but that means very little, in the grand scheme of things, in light of the monies we’ve spent this window and the fact that this issue was largely self-inflicted…Laca should have been sold a year prior and Eddie likewise, which, if that had happened, it would have allowed us to properly address the CF/Striker position last off-season or this past window and/or it would have helped in Balo’s/Mart’s developmental process…not to mention, Arteta’s tactics, if you can call them that, made no sense whatsoever with Laca leading the line, so why do we keep trying to put round pegs in square holes…this is why so many supporters have little or no faith in our present manager’s ability to turn things around