Arsenal Finding It Tough To Buy New Players

Kermit once sang ‘It’s not easy being green’ and Arsenal are finding that it’s not easy having green. Our swollen bank balance, improved commercial partnerships and transfer dealings of recent years has set an expectation of ‘no excuse improvement’.

Arsenal has money so why aren’t they strengthening with a new striker/defensive midfielder/centre-back/lead guitarist (delete as appropriate)? Surely there can no longer be any excuses for ‘penny pinching’ and ‘dithering’?

This is an example of ‘no excuse improvement’, or impatient grumbling as I like to call it. People look at other clubs making signings and cannot fathom why we aren’t making the same strides to keep up. Certainly there are players out there we could sign and most players would jump at the chance of joining Arsenal but recruitment is a completely different prospect for us than it was a few years ago.

You could be forgiven for thinking this squad just popped up out of nowhere but Arsène Wenger has been quietly and steadily growing and cultivating this squad. It’s been like furnishing your first property. We’ve been forced to sell off our best furniture and spent the first few years in our new home with a cobbled together collection but in the last few years we’ve been selective.

Wenger has been fastidiously buying expensive high-end items to add to his painstakingly cultured existing decor and now we’re just a few finishing touches away from being best in show.

I find it strange that people are so impatient for additions they are happy for us to buy Argos flat-packs that look good in the catalogue but would look tacky, cheap and totally clash with everything in our classily decorated apartment. Or pine for us to purchase showroom display models from Homesense – they look decent enough but when you get them home you realise how overpriced they are and notice all their little bumps and scrapes from the manhandling of prospective owners.

Purchasing the finishing touches we need isn’t always as simple as going to a high-end department store and throwing cash around. The sorts of items we are after – or should be after – aren’t always in the shops. They’re with private collectors and convincing them to buy isn’t always a matter of cash. More often than not these collectors don’t need the cash. For them it’s more about space and they want to be sure they can fill the space with something new themselves.

Transfers aren’t overly complicated but neither are they simple. Some transfers can be quite convoluted but most are quite straightforward – that’s not to say they aren’t protracted. The deals that really get you salivating tend to happen much later in the transfer window unless their is a desire for the club to sell (Barca with Alexis and Fabregas) or a buyout clause is met (Costa, Aguero et al). If neither of these things exist then they must be created. A steaming pile of cash might increase the desire of the selling club but if they are well funded like most of the clubs we would be approaching are they’ll want to have a replacement lined up and even then might delay the transfer to increase the price through our urgency.

Our response to such negotiation tactics is to cool off a bit to ensure we aren’t held over a barrel, sending a message to future sellers that we can easily be coerced into spending more than is necessary.

Wenger isn’t blowing smoke when he says you need three agreements to secure a transfer – both clubs and the player. Sometimes one of those negotiations takes much longer than anticipated. Sometimes you have an agreement with the player (Cech) but are still waiting to agree a price with the club and vice versa.

Sometimes there are external influences outside of the three parties holding things up. If the speculation surrounding Özil is correct then that deal was delayed by Tottenham who tried and failed to convince Mesut to be part of the Bale deal and then dragged it out as long as possible in an attempt to thwart us signing the German playmaker.

It is a myth that Wenger only signs players late in the window but he certainly is willing to wait it out until the last day to get the player he wants rather than settling for a make do or upcycling project.

There will be those who disagree with that and that’s fine, we all have our own ideas of how the team should progress and be improved on but we all have to realise that buying players isn’t as simple as adding zeros until the selling club says yes. There is an element of that but that’s when you end up paying £20-30 million for a player who wouldn’t be a starter in a full strength squad.

There are many ways of improving your team and one of them is ensuring you keep as many of your existing squad fit for as long as possible. The “easy” way is to buy new players but it’s not as easy in application as it is in conception.

Arsenal are shopping in a completely different market to a few years ago and it’s a much smaller market with begrudging sellers and plenty of equally flush competition. More often than not it’s a battle of patience and desire. If you hang on long enough others will fold. There is a risk you will end up empty handed but big players take big risks.

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