Up For Grabs Now

Good morning and welcome to yet another instalment of tedious speculation about Andrei Arshavin. Nope, scrap that. As far as I’m concerned the last word on the matter has come from the Arseblogger with his astute owl comparison. We will not be mentioning the Arsh-word until something actually happens apart from his agent sitting in London hotels claiming that “ten, fifteen, twenty-five” top clubs all want to buy his boy. Now, there’s quite a big difference between having 10 clubs interested and twenty-five, isn’t there. It’s also curious in that case that they only ever mention Arsenal as even vaguely interested (and Sp*rs, but let’s be realistic here). Anyway, I’ll draw  a line under the whole sorry affair until Arsene says otherwise:

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That feels better, doesn’t it? In place of the Arsh-word I’d like to suggest a player who I would love to see Arsene bring in this January. I’ve hinted at it before, but I really do think that Juan Sebastian Veron would be worth a shot.

In his favour is that he’s experienced at the very highest level of European football, can still pass like no-one else in the world apart from possibly Cesc, is being seriously considered for captaincy of the Argentinian national team and was last week awarded the South American Footballer of the Year award for his superb performances for Estudiantes, suggesting there is a lot of skill and influence in the old dog yet.

I also think he’d be very cheap and could be interested in a loan deal. I’ve seen him making noises about going to Lazio, but Lazio don’t seem to keen, probably still annoyed at his departure in 2001. Still, the fact that he’s interested show’s he’s got the appetite to get back in the big time.

 He’d bring us exactly the kind of guile and experience that we need so badlyfor our midfield in the short term. He’s obviously eligible for the Champions’ League, where he was never short of superb for United and I certainly don’t see how he could do any harm to our season.

Clearly, people will point to his failure at United and Chelsea. Of course he never produced as everyone expected him to, but I always felt the extent of his “failure” was overblown by the then unheard of transfer fee shelled out for him and the media’s desire to pillory Fergie as we stormed to the title in 2002. Arsenal play their football in a very different way to Chelsea and United and his sheer passing ability might see him fit into our style surprisingly well.

He is a player of rare class and natural ability. Might it not be worth having a Bischoffian “gamble” on him?

Very interested to hear your thoughts on the idea of Veron coming to Arsenal.

On to other stuff, and I always enjoy reading TribalFootball if only to laugh at their always bizarre angle on footballing developments. Yesterday they ran the headline: “FABIANSKI REVEALS ARSENAL KEEPER DREAM!” What a revelation. Who could ever have guessed that all this time he was hoping to get a game. Someone better tell Arsene, pronto.

The crowning glory, though, was this little jewel of an analysis of Sp*rs purchasing of Jermaine Defoe:

Tottenham have got the 26-year-old England star on the cheap. They will only pay around £6million for him as Portsmouth still owe them £7m from the original deal and on their other Spurs signings Younes Kaboul and Pedro Mendes.

It is an incredible piece of business by Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy.

They’re right to use the word “incredible”. As in, incredibly foolish, incredibly profligate, incredibly expensive. However much you try and make the deal look “on the cheap”, it quite simply wasn’t. That £7 million which Tottenham “saved” was money they were owed, y’know, like it was going to belong to them pretty soon. You can’t just pretend it never existed.

 Apparently Jermaine was charming enough to request £700,000 from Portsmouth as a “loyalty bonus”, which Tottenham kindly paid for them. Snivelling. Little. Gits.

We’ve languished five whole days in the transfer window. Five. Seemed like longer than that, didn’t it? Arsene has ducked and dived and the many Arsenal fans who have been holding out for a hero to arrive on whom they can pin all their hopes are still waiting for that man. Some are becoming desperate, pleading for Arsene to spend many millions on players like Stewart Downing. Any signing, they cry, is better than no signing at all.

Arsene says he wants “super-class” talent or nothing. That was the approach in the summer and that got us Nasri and a cavernous hole in central midfield. By the way, could people please stop saying that we “didn’t sign anybody” last summer? Nasri was quite clearly a signing, as was Ramsey. What you mean is that we didn’t sign the right players or that we didn’t sign enough players or that we didn’t sign players for the right positions. But we definitely signed players, so don’t pretend otherwise.

Yesterday saw us tie down Young Jack Wilshere to a reported 8 year contract. Wish they’d give me one of those. He’s the sort of talent that is very very hard to find, and it’s interesting that almost exactly ten years on from Arsene saying it would take ten years for Arsenal to start producing young players of adequate technical ability, along comes Young Jack. Shows you he has a fair idea what he’s talking about. Hopefully there’s more coming too – I hear Ashley Young’s kid brother Kyle is pretty useful.

Speaking at Jack’s signing, Arsene said (not for the first time) that he thinks Jack has “tremendous penetrative power“. Crumbs, and only just turned 17! Along with the importance of defending set-pieces assertively, Arsene has never really grasped the British obsession with innuendo, has he? Perhaps someone should have sent him Carry On for his Christmas in order to school him against pulling out such cracking gags in public.

One team who has been very active in the transfer window is Sp*rs, who look like wrapping up Defoe for £15 million. That’s a real bargain when you consider that Bent was £16.5 million, but when you remember that Bent is amongst the worst footballers on the planet and that Defoe is very, very average, and that Sp*rs only sold him the other day for much less than that, the whole thing actually appears to be a scandalously poor piece of business. Why do they keep trying to re-buy players they only just sold? Or sell players cheaply that they only just bought expensively? It’s like they’re short-selling in reverse, seeing how much of a loss they can make. Kaboul is another classic example. Hell, if we really want Luka Modric why not make a cheeky £2 million bid for him right now? At Tottenham it’s instant impact or you’re out the door and they don’t care how stupid that makes them look as judges of footballing ability or how perenially shite it has made their football team. Those Gooners getting antsy about Wenger’s apparently inexhaustible patience with players like Bendtner should thank their stars he at least has some pride and some stubbornness about him and that we’re not as hilarious or as crap as Tottenham with their insistence on massive player turnover year after year.

Redknobb has done a fine job at his recent clubs – Southampton, Portsmouth, West Ham – but it’s interesting, isn’t it, that they are now languishing financially and having to sell (or having already sold) the very players who brought them their success under Harry. Hopefully the Levy-factor will limit his success at Sp*rs and when he is sacked 7 games into next season he will leave his traditional legacy of financial meltdown and relegation struggling, something I think we’d all like to see more of at Sp*rs, if only to provide an amusing side-show to fretting about our own problems.

A cursory round-up of today’s transfer guff, with the tabloid hacks already wearying of their task.

Man City to buy Yaya Toure for £24 million! Folly, sheer folly.

Arshavin to buy out his own contract! Ok, go on then son.

Kranjcar to Arse! Fine. Probably won’t happen but wouldn’t mind if it did. A vanilla-flavoured gobbet of gossip if ever I licked one.

Bendtner + £5m = Matthew Upson. If this is anything to go by, The Sun’s journalists obviously weren’t any use at algebra when they were at school, which is possibly why they ended up writing Arsenal fetish erotic fantasies with no basis in reality and publishing them in that foetid abcess of a newspaper. The might as well have written 1 + 5 = 16, which as we all know, simply isn’t true.

As the hour’s tick down towards the January transfer window (the start of which is celebrated around the world with fireworks and dancing, though I may have misunderstood this) and with no matches until Plymouth on Saturday, I thought I’d take a broad look at the transfer market and Arsenal’s position going into it.

I can’t remember a stranger market, nor one where a player’s value was so randomly ascribed. In a good deal, both parties should feel slightly uncomfortable – the buyer that he might have overpaid, and the seller that he might have undersold. What we’ve got right now is a seller’s market where nobody’s quite sure where all that money is coming from. And with Arsenal very much a buying club this January, that’s not good news. It means we’ll have to be pretty cunning to come out in February with a significantly improved squad.

Some good games for Portsmouth won Lassana Diarra a whopping £22million move to Real Madrid. Now, if you believe the Independent, Portsmouth are talking about £24 million for Jermaine Defoe, who moved in the opposite direction for £9 million not that long ago. Somehow if you throw in a goals record at Pompey which was essentially a continuation of his Spurs form when he was getting a game and add in the financial crisis, the player is valued nearly 3 times higher!

If that’s the going rate, what on earth would we need to pay for someone in the class of Ribery, or Aguero? This is only a few months after City bought Robinho for £30 million. How does Defoe plus £6million sound as a fair deal for him?

Klaas Jan-Huntelaar, a top class international striker covetted by all the major clubs in Europe and with Champions’ League experience, moves to Madrid in an initial £17m deal which could rise as high as £23million depending on performance. This seems like a fair price for such a talented player. What’s odd is that the second tier of Premiership clubs are expecting each other to outspend Real Madrid in exchange for inferior quality.

These are the sort of fees Arsene has never spent. In the past only players with international pedigree and good records at top clubs have been able to command these kinds of numbers. Now everyone’s doing it. Defoe’s a good player, but at best you’re probably signing 20 goals a season, for which you must now pay top dollar.

In one sense, I suspect the financial crisis is perversely responsible for this. You might have expected to see good players available for bargain bucks, but that simply hasn’t happened. Taking Defoe as an example, Portsmouth could flog one of their assets and they’d have a bit more money. In the past you’d just bring in a cheaper replacement and trouser the rest. The thing is that once they’ve flogged Defoe they’ve probably increased the risk of relegation quite considerably, and this is where the rub really comes. Mediocre Premiership clubs are now less interested in good deals than they are in avoiding the ruin of relegation at all costs. They are asking for such high prices exactly because they are so risk-averse right now.

This has a curious effect on the valuation of players from clubs like Everton or Villa. Say we tried to sign Arteta. You’d think about £10-£12 million would do the job, but Everton will naturally look for a replacement from a lower club, say Morten Gamst Pedersen. But when they enquire they’ll find Blackburn are charging a much higher premium than they are. So they won’t sell for anything less than a grossly inflated fee.

So where does this leave Arsenal, so evidently in need of ready-made reinforcements?

Exactly where we’ve always been with Arsene, that’s where. The best solution to such a market is simply to scout far and wide and well and early. If we get involved in rat races over average Premiership players we’re just going to end up throwing away money we don’t have, especially if we’re up against Man City (and who aren’t they interested in exactly?)

Sagna, Eduardo, Adebayor, Van Persie. All well-below £10 million and all right out of the top drawer. In the first 3 cases they came with enough experience to make a pretty immediate impact. It’s these sort of off-the-radar players that we need to be bringing in if we are to outperform the market this January and have a realistic tilt at the Champions’ League. What do I want Arsene to find up his magic sleeve? Ideally, another Vidic or Skrtel, relative unknowns bought cheaply who were ready to perform at the highest level at the heart of the defence. What price Vidic now?

Arsene’s said he wants experience and he also said he would look at loan moves. If he follows his established transfer strategy he might need to combine the two and loan in the experience. We may have to settle for someone like Olivier Dacourt. Yesterday I suggested we give Juan Sebastian Veron a six month loan contract, just in case he’s still got it in him (with apologies for all the United stuff on that clip, it made me feel sick too). I know he disappointed at United and Chelsea but they’re very different teams and he could be due a Larsson-esque swansong. Just an idea.

Intrigued, as ever, to know your thoughts on all this.