There is no doubt that Arsenal currently are overloaded with strikers at the club, especially as we have no European football to give our backup players any much-needed game time.
After Arteta promoted Folarin Balogun to the first team to join Martinelli, Lacazette and Aubameyang in the pecking order, it seemed certain that Eddie Nketiah had to find another club or spend yet another year on the sidelines.
He was offered a move to another London side Crystal Palace where he could get a chance to resurrect his faltering career, but according to the talkSPORT reporter Alex Crook the deal fell through due to demands of the player and his agent.
He said on deadline day: “One Premier League chief executive said the problem with the Crystal Palace deal wasn’t Arsenal’s asking price.
“It was the demands of his agent, in terms of agent’s fees, and it was Eddie Nketiah’s wage demands that have priced him out of a move from Arsenal this transfer window.”
At 22 years of age, Nketiah should be playing regular football and try to regain his prolific scoring form of his days in the Arsenal U23 team, but it seems his chance at Arsenal has passed him by, with just 11 Premier League starts in his 3 years in the Gunners first team squad.
Now it seems that he is happy to languish on the bench for another year as his contract runs down instead of taking a pay cut to play regular football. The former Premier League defender Danny Mills believes that Nketiah is taking a big chance with his career by not taking the deal.
“He’s daft, that’s what it is,” Mills said. “He’s being badly advised. Sometimes you have to take a step backwards to take two steps forwards.
“You have to back yourself and say: ‘You know what, it’s not really what I want right now, I might have to take a little bit of a cut, but I’m going to go there.
“‘I’m going to go there and score goals, I’m going to show how good I am and then the season after that or the season after that, everyone is going to be coming in after me because I’ve scored 15, 20 goals in the Premier League.
“‘And then Palace aren’t going to be able to keep hold of me because there will be too many clubs in for me’.
“I think that’s very naive, because what will happen is you’ll have this season where you will do absolutely nothing, you end up on a free transfer and everyone is going, ‘well, you’ve not played for a year, you don’t really know what you’re doing’.
“You’re always best to go out and play, no matter what.”
He may not have been willing to take a pay cut this year, but he may find it even harder to get a deal elsewhere next summer. A fourth year on the sidelines with not much in the way of proven Premier League experience may mean an even bigger drop in offers to choose from, especially when he had an underwhelming half a season playing in the Championship with Leeds.
Nketiah may end up regretting this decision big time…