£30million will do little for us in terms of replacing Aubameyang.
Arsenal have been in this situation painfully often in recent times, but we once again have a big decision to make over the future of our star player and captain.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is approaching the final year of his contract with us, and it’s little surprise to see transfer rumours regularly linking him with an exit.
Auba’s contract situation means we can’t get the kind of fee we’d ideally want for our top scorer, who would surely be worth £70million-plus in a normal situation.
As it is, the Sun claim we’ve now set our asking price as low as £30m as we desperately look to avoid losing him on a free in just over a year’s time.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that we are a club with the luxury to be making choices like this, but if that’s all we’re going to get for such a top player, I’d rather we kept him for the final year of his deal and lost him on a free.
I said as much in an interview with Manchester United blog Stretty News yesterday, as our rivals once again lick their lips at the prospect of raiding us for one of our best players on the cheap.
After selling Robin van Persie for just £24m (fee via BBC Sport) and losing Alexis Sanchez for nothing (getting Henrikh Mkhitaryan as part of the deal is actually almost worse than nothing), when are we going to learn that this capitulation solves nothing?
When it comes to Aubameyang, we’re talking about another world class attacking player who will be close to impossible to replace. There’s unlikely to be anyone we can afford who’d actually be good enough to fill that void up front.
Honestly, at this point, we’re facing such a crisis without him that it would surely be more beneficial to keep his 25-30 goals a season for one more year. It might well get us back into the Champions League and improve our finances more than pocketing just £30m for him now would.