Danny Mills insists Arsenal is keeping Eddie Nketiah because it makes more business sense to give him a new deal.
The former England Under-21 star would have left the club on the expiry of his contract at the end of June.
Arsenal tried to get him on a new deal before now, but he wouldn’t accept it and it seemed certain he would leave because of a lack of playing time.
But Mikel Arteta gave him some chances to lead the attack in the last few games of the season and that may have made him change his mind about leaving.
The striker will now sign a new long-term contract, but former Premier League player, Mills believes the Gunners didn’t have a better option.
He tells Football Insider: “Arsenal are now in a situation where it’s a little bit desperate. If they lose Lacazette then they are going to have to pay £30million to bring a player in.
“They’ve got Nketiah there so they’re going to have to bite the bullet. They will say ‘We’ve got him here, we’re going to have to pay more than we want but if we don’t do that we’re going to have to pay even more to get an equal replacement’.”
Just Arsenal Opinion
Nketiah has proven he can score goals for us, and as they say, it is better late than never.
We are lucky that he hasn’t signed a pre-contract with another club just yet.
This means we can now keep one of our best academy products. Hopefully, he would keep getting better and score even more goals for us next season.
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Makes business sense?
100k a week, 5 year contract to a championship level poacher?
Good business sense would let be let Nketiah see himself that he won’t fetch 100k a week or anything close from other clubs.
Then offer him half that (50k) a week, if he leaves no big loss; he’s not the dominating or dependable backup we need.
So we decimated the squad in January to save wages, and then piss away those savings overpaying Nketiah?
And that’s good business? Just like Mavro and Guendouzi sales combined for less than 13 million I suppose is good business too.
For sure this would have been the best solution if we had the benefit of time on our side. Imagine going into the transfer window “strikerless”. We would be leaving ourselves exposed to exploitation by greedy agents. Nketiah on our books, at least, gives us greater leverage to negotiate for other strikers. And even if Nketiah doesn’t work out in the future, we can always sell him to recover our academy costs.
Great idea,and i’ll urge him to stay hungry so every other things fall into place.
since when did we care about making “business sense”??? have I been in a coma for like 15+ years
Sad times TVRL mate .
Imagine backing this clown as some sort of genius and having the nerve to slag off supporters who actually give a couple of fcks about the club .
Business sense rather than a footballing sense ,the new Arsenal way .
Giving a player a new 100k a week contract who they have tried flogging for the last 2 years oozes desperation.
Out of contact which means he could have got a nice signing on bonus somewhere else but there was no takers , another deadwood player (not a fan of the word )on the books once again but fans seem to be rejoicing in this genius manager and his crew .
one of the most interesting aspects of our current regime is the prevailing notion that our manager-in-training has conducted some sort of youth movement…since he’s arrived he hasn’t embedded a single “youth” academy player into our lineup for any significant minutes whatsoever, which seems to be counter-intuitive for a supposed youth-oriented “rebuild”…Saka was introduced before him, Marts likewise, ESR was only used when no other options were available and has been f***ed around ever since, and Eddie was left for dead for the vast majority of Arteta’s time here, then he gets a brief shot because nevergoals Laca shate the bed and somehow gets a 100K per contract…how is it possible that not a single academy player of his own choosing has ever played significant minutes over the last 2+ years
I agree completely with Mills.
They did the same with ESR!!!
He’d have been a great player if Arsene Wenger was the Manager his style of finishing is cool, he just has to take advantage of all the chancing we create from open-play
But Arteta’s ball is very different we are scoring only from set-pieces and nobody is talking about it next season is going to be the worst
I wholeheartedly support giving the young man a new deal – and purely for footballing reasons.
He is home grown; and he has shown flashes of brilliance which proper coaching can develop into stardom.
Let him go on a free and we would be lamenting over another one we goofed in a few years’ time
no we wouldn’t. even if we did, we should make decisions based off of fear, and not what the player has demonstrated to us?
Contracts like that need to be thoroughly earned – what message does this send to the rest of the squad?
Walcott was given 60k+ pw contracts before doing anything of note, and never achieved his potential, denilson was given something similar and stagnated completely. This is one of the key policies (overpaying young players before they’d earned it) that led to the awful culture that arteta is supposedly trying to counteract.
If Eddie can command such a salary when most people understand that he shouldn’t be any more than the no 2 striker in the squad right now, why can’t anybody else?