The Guardian are reporting that Wojciech Szczesny is on the verge of joining Juventus for a fee believed to be around £10m.
The Polish international spent the last two seasons on loan with Roma, and with less than 12 months left on his current deal, Arsenal appear to be ready to cash in on the 27 year old who left the club under a cloud in the summer of 2015.
Although he played in the 4-0 FA Cup final win over Aston Villa, his mid-season indiscretion at St Mary’s appears to have ended his career in North London, as Arsene Wenger went out that summer and bought Petr Cech.
Szczesny spoke earlier this summer to Amy Lawrence about his time in Italy, and looks to have really matured.
However, with Cech still at the club and David Ospina seemingly going nowhere, it seems as if it’s time to szay goodbye to Wojciech.
It’s a bit of a shame, he does love the club, and we’d like to have seen him get another go but it’s not to be.
What is wrong with us??!?
It’s not ‘us’ that’s wrong it’s Arsene Wenger, he is the problem and has been for a number of years. The problem we have now is that a large part of the fan base don’t really remember any manager but him so they have an obsession with him and have this ridiculous notion that without him the club would self destruct, which is utter nonsense. Add to that an owner who is in it for the money and that’s where we are. Wenger has done wonderful wonderful things & we’ll all be eternally grateful but he should have gone at… Read more »
The very fact that we have such an inept owner is what makes holding onto Wenger a necessity. It’s too big a job for one man and Wenger will remain until those issues are addressed.
Wenger won’t relinquish power or delegate, he’s a dictator just like Silent Stan, that’s why they get on so well.
Dictators aren’t known for getting along with dictators…
Really you have the right to stop being Arsenal fan there is hundreds of teams in England you can be a fan who does what you are talking about its a free world we don’t impose our belief on others if not happy you just switch teams, its only football ,it’s entertainment not government rule, you are taking this entertainment thing very dangerously, football is a sport you can go watch even a non league game and enjoy it , those fans there are not there because they didn’t make CL that season their there for the game , you… Read more »
These comments are getting old now.
We get it, you hate Wenger and he is the major problem in your life, you won’t be happy till he’s dead.have a day off
Pretty sad to see Szczesny go. He could have been great for us. Here I am typing this message while smoking in the shower!
Now that’s multitasking
Doesn’t the cig get wet?
Not if you have a long nose
This is superb. You win.
10million is way to low for a guy only half way through his career and already with a lot of experience and quality. Really not happy with this sale especially when Pickford sold for 30mil
£10m is an absolute joke.
We shouldnt be selling him anyway, but that fee is simply derisory.
When it comes to selling players our negotiations team is an utter embarrassment.
isn’t he in his last year of his contract? I can’t remember any clubs knocking on Arsenals door last summer for his services. I think he’s going to be good goalie but he’s not going to the prem he’s staying in Italy to be a backup. How much should Juventus pay for a goalie of WS level?
Do you even realize he can legally talk to other clubs in less than 180 days! 10 F*ckin million is nothing to complain about,get over it!! (Even if we get 50 million, there is no guarantee we will sign Mbappe or Lemar but it would just be money in the bank) Talk about not letting such a talent leave and I am behind that, but not when someone who’s not ready to play second fiddle for the season ahead for us and has his head turned to a bigger club, paying good wages and in the CL and the chance… Read more »
Thankyou! On point!
I would rather have Szczesny for a season than £10 million.
We still get to call the shots for 180 days. I say we ask for £30 million.
If they think he’s elite, they’ll pay it. They don’t – we lose £10 million – boo-fucking-hoo.
Only clubs paying those prices are in the Prem. who in the Prem need a goalie and is willing to pay that amount? I don’t think WS is a Pep type of goalie.
He is going to play second fiddle for a year at Juve!!!!! Plus, whose fault is it that he only has a year left on his contract????????
You can’t force people to sign contracts.
How on earth can his fee be 10m in today’s market?!
When none of the top Prem clubs need his services lol
Absolutely gutted about this. Was really looking forward to him maturing and growing at Roma, before returning to the club which stood by him in his youth and becoming no.1
It definitely raises a question about how we communicate with players on loan. We’ve heard about a lot of players feeling isolated from the club with no contact whatsoever.
There definitely needs to be some sort of change there. A new role at the club perhaps for someone to regularly check in and update players personally?
Yep.
At Arsenal, the person who makes the contact is Arsene. Now factor in everything else he does PLUS managing a bloody squad, how is that possible?
This is where someone who manages the daily football operations comes into play.
I’m hearing Chambers to Palace for £20m is a done deal too. That’s a big chunk of the Lacazette fee paid off if true.
shut up lol
By hearing do you man reading on your toilet paper** I mean in the daily mail?
10 million?!?!? If Pickford is worth 30, then we should be getting something similar to that, no?
Why are we even selling him? Madness…
How long did Pickford have left on contract?
Was Pickford first choice for his team?
Was Pickford farmed out on loan for two years?
Did anyone else offer more money for Scez?
If no one else offered more, how can he be “world class”?
I can agree with the “why are we selling him?” though. The problem is that if we don’t sell him or make him first choice, he goes at end of season for nothing.
How the eff is David Ospjna still at the club? I suppose other teams have plenty of dead weight too, but Arsenal has so many expensive non contributors or no future players – Gibbs, Wilshere, Jenkinson, Ospina, Debuchy, Perez off the top of my head
Ospina is a decent keeper. A very good number two. That’s how. But Szcz is better and I think that is the issue here.
Such a waste. Far better than Ospina, in height for a start.
Loves Arsenal, mocks Sp*rs, potential great keeper (if Juve are buying him to take over from Buffon).
Hope this isn’t true.
I don’t know why, but this one hurts more than most. 🙁
It really does.
I think it’s a combination of his clear love for the club, the fact that he’s actually really good and arguably better than what we have and is seemingly going on to greater things, and the fact Arsenal ballsed it up big time by sending him out on loan twice with either no intention to keep him or to sell him. We just ran his contract down so we could sell him for cheap.
It’s just a f*cked up situation all round.
The fee is 10M bcos he has less than a year on his contract and with wenger seemingly decided he doesn’t want him back, it’s that or nothing when his contract expires. IMHO wenger is right in this case, we’re the arsenal, we set our standards a little higher than most other clubs and his behaviour disrespected our famous club, no second chances.
So we let a world class keeper leave for an incident that happened 2 years ago and wasn’t the worst sin in the world. Total lunacy.
World class? Yea f’king right. Was he world class when he played for us? Joker
Well he is now. Still won Golden Gloves with us.
Maybe he’s not world class, but Juve want him, he’s a better keeper than he was when he left, and he’s considerably better than Ospina and (at least currently) Martinez.
Who cares if Juve wants him. Did they want him last summer? Did anyone? Even Roma bought another goalie last summer instead of buying WS.
If he loved the club he’d sign a new contract and then leave for a higher fee.
Weird point.
It’s like saying if the club cares for Sanchez, we should let him go for free so he can be happy.
What world are you living in and is there room for one more?
He’s not world class. Don’t let emotion cloud your judgement.
Yes he is and proved it at Roma. Better than aging Cech and in a different class to Ospina and error prone Martinez.
De Gea was in the epl when he won the golden glove. He is world class, if he’s not then who is.
So winning the golden glove makes you automatically world class, yea that makes sense
Didn’t Cech just win the Golden gloves last year?
So why not sell him two years ago if he wasn’t welcome back. Higher fee then with three years still on his contract and we’ve probably been subsidising his wages for two years.
No one was interested in him?
Meanwhile, I bet you’re hoping Sanchez stays right, even though he causes friction within the club.
Bloody hypocrite.
10 million pounds? In today’s market, Charlie Adam would cost 10 million pounds! This is ridiculous!
What market? lol Only clubs overpaying are the clubs in the Prem.
ffs
Not liking this. Far too cheap. Not that he should’ve been sold anyway. Were Ospina to move on also I would not be convinced by Martinez as back up. Liable to make mistakes as he did at weekend. With Cech likely retiring in a season or so we’re leaving our options very short.
We could just buy another keeper, just saying. The way a lot of arsenal fans relate to some of our players seems like battered wife syndrome. “He’ll change, I know he can be better, let’s give him another chance”. The boys that have been there years and haven’t cut the mustard already aren’t gonna start cutting it now. We should be ruthless, cut out the dead wood and free up wages to use on new players that might actually help us win titles.
We wouldn’t have to sign another goalkeeper for a couple of seasons if Szcezsney was kept
perhaps he doesn’t want to be number 2 for a year or so. Who knows, how cares, he’s not even that good.
And at Juve with Buffon?
Why should he be no.2? Why is Cech the de-facto first choice?
Good analogy, wrong target. If you’re talking about Walcott, Gibbs, Wislhere, probably Ramsey as well, then sure, I don’t expect them to suddenly light the world on fire. But Szczesny HAS improved and by all accounts he has changed. Honestly, I don’t really give a flying fuck about footballers’ personalities. So he lit a smoke in the shower after a bad performance in a loss. So he disrespected the coaching staff (who were part of the reason for said loss). Big deal. What I care about is if he can stop balls from going into the goal. It seems like… Read more »
If we were talking about the best keeper in the world you might have a point, but he’s hardly that. He wouldn’t even be our first choice so no idea why the big fuss. As for the wenger comment, that’s just a bit silly tbh
He has become a world class keeper and now better than Cech and in a different class to the other two
He’s better than Cech.
You have no basis, either anecdotally or evidence via stats to prove otherwise.
If you have, feel free to post them.
Why is it hard to accept that Manager and players aren’t all going to get along. Sometimes the relationship can’t be repaired. Life goes on.
Cech was clearly better then Woj 2 seasons ago. No one was knocking on Arsenals door wanting to buy Woj from us for any kind of decent fee with 2 years remaining. I love the guy but life goes on.
Look a Bonucci at Juve. Manager and player can’t get along, life goes on.
Given how good Ramsey was at one point, and that he always seems to turn up in the cup finals I would leave him out of that comment. I think he could still turn out to be a great player, in the right system.
I’m aware of that, that’s why he’s the only one I qualified.
As far as I’m concerned, he was pretty mediocre last season (and the season before that), but he looked far better with the back three.
We haven’t seen enough of the new formation to make a definitive statement on Ramsey.
So far, it looks like he might turn it around, but the same was said about Walcott before his wife got him the goddamn coffee-maker.
well put! How many years of would be , could be world class , are we going to take? The guy is going to Juve to be subsitute. And let’s be honest Juve could not get Donnaruma that’s why they went for Scz but to think he will walk in as number one once Buffon retires is not knowing the level of competitiveness in a club like Juve. For me he had a better chance to be number after Cech than after Buffon.
He was the undisputed first choice at Roma for two years and one of the best keepers in the league.
Roma are the Italian equivalent of a club like Everton or Sp*rs. To quite elite, but not too far.
Now if you heard that peak Tim Howard signed with ManU to be Van Der Saar’s understudy for one year, you would assume he was the next in line.
Also, this Lacazette guy apparently thinks he will start regularly at Arsenal. The nerve! Does he not now “the level of competitiveness” that we have here?
Any keeper we buy who’s good enough to replace Cech in the near future will cost double or triple what we’re getting for Chesney.
Well except that he was the best keeper in serie a last year with no hint of any problems. So we’re going to sell the best keeper in a top 5 league for a very low fee and buy someone else? Yeah, that makes sense…
Yes we should buy someone else and if they behave as he did, they will be on their way too. Have some pride in your club man, guy behaves like a dick and disrespects his staff and the manager and just bcos he has a couple good seasons elsewhere, we should bring him back in. Arsenal have more class than that, be proud of that fact.
If it goes through should be one of the most ridiculous transfers. What was the point of loaning him last year then , if the idea was to always sell him. I like him as a keeper and cant see anyone in our ranks better than him even cech is aging it showed in his performance last year.
Again if you had to sell him for that price why loan him last year then , surely it was for him to gain experience and become a better keeper which he is now. This one’s a bizzare one.
You do realise this is Arsenal. Why does this surprise you?
We put buy back clause for Wellington Silva and sell on clause for Lassana Diarra but let Gnabry go to Bayern via Bremen.
Our transfer team is not good at negotiations
If it was an African at the helm, I would have said they have been bribed on the Gnabry deal.
Wtf?
Nope, he was loaned because he was on a starter’s salary but he was never going to start for us after Cech was signed! It is as simple as that. He was always pencilled in to leave after that Southampton incident and the Cech signing was the final nail in hindsight. Roma must have paid a loan fee, but baulked at the cost of signing him permanently leaving Arsenal with the headache of holding a player into his last 12 months who refuses to sign an extension well aware of the fact that he could sign on for a humongous… Read more »
Absolutely right, I think a lot of people just like to whine about stuff. Reading some of the comments you’d think we’d just let neymar or messi go for 10M. He’s a good GK, no more than that and no major loss to the club.
The point isn’t whether he’s a big loss or not. The point is 10m for him is terrible business.
Has anyone come forward at any time and offered more? No, that’s a fact. The 10M is bcos of circumstances, my god it’s not that difficult a concept to grasp
The Man City comment is just irrelevant. We could have given him a new contract a year ago, or even last fall, and assured him he would eventually replace Cech.
Manchester City’s recent judgement concerning goalkeepers may be a possible reason!
“If he was that good anyway, why wasn’t Manchester City willing to take a punt.”
“If Lemar is so good, why aren’t Barcelona willing to take a punt?”
See how faulty the logic is?
Because Man City are rich and in need of a goalkeeper and Barcelona is poor now and can’t afford or not in need of a winger/playmaker? See how your comparison goes wrong?
You think Woj is a Pep type goalie? please, he has a certain style he likes and Woj isn’t that style. So to compare what City paid for their goalie this summer is irrelevant.
what was the rumor last summer for him? were there clubs offering to buy him last summer? Roma bought another goalie last summer then buy Woj.
He’s going Juve to be Buffon’s understudy?
This makes me sad
Not good news, the other players shipped out thus far have made sense this summer, but this one certainly does not!!!
Maybe, if we get £10m and add 2x£5m loan fees + wages 2x£6m from Roma, we will have got £26m in all. This does look a whole lot better now in comparison to £30m Pickford.
That is £6m saving on wages.
Great point!
But we lose a great keeper
You only get this sort of fee when a relationship has totally broken down. Right or wrong, he was gone the moment he lit up in the showers. Not a sentence I thought I’d ever say about a professional footballer!
£10m is mental for the keeper with the most clean sheets in Serie A last season.
Also, why is no-one else in for him? I get that no Italian club want to piss of Juve given their power and influence, but why aren’t we sounding out PSG and Dortmund? Or even Real and Barca – neither of who have outstanding keepers. I’m sure the latter two will happily pay and £15-17m just to have one over the Old Lady.
With the vast scouting networks of top clubs, do you think we need to call them to make them aware of the situation? Of course, they obviously don’t fancy him which probably tells you something about how good he actually is. As many have said, he is going to Juve to be an understudy
According to your logic, why didn’t anyone else go in for Cech when he was available? Maybe it says something about how good he actually is.
FYI, whatever counter you have for this, be aware that it probably applies in some way to Chez too.
wasn’t the story he wanted to stay in London?
I know my comment reeks of arrogance but it seems some of the comments about transfers, prices and all the business come from experts in FIFA 2014 negotiations. It´s a little more complicated.
Not wearing any coat thank you none the less…
10 mil and first dibs on Dybala? That’s the only way I’d be remotely ‘happy’ about this news…
This is a player who mocked us on Twitter when we lost 0-2 to West Ham in the league opener in 2015. It was Cech’s first league game for us and he made the mistakes that cost us the goal.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CL-LrumWgAAVZRU.jpg)
I know vindication is sweet, particularly after your replacement fucks up that bad that soon. But why gloat in public?
Bye-bye, Chezny. You were unbelievable at times, but you must make your name elsewhere.
Ahh, it seems that I am severely mistaken because the linked picture is from our FA Cup victory against Tottenham on 4 January 2014.
Apologies to anyone incensed!
because Pilkford was young and never smoke in the shower. Moreover having a year to run. We cant always be happy to every decisions made by the club. COYG…
£10 million for Szcz is nothing. Should be much more. There had better be a performances based clause in the move to bump up the fee because I’m certain this guy’s going to be one of the rare players that will come back to haunt us one day. That Juventus want him says it all really. He should really be staying to compete with Cech though, not just to be number two but to really see if he can knock him off his perch. I know that’s a tough ask but he’s got to get in ahead of Buffon at… Read more »
lets be honest here we all new Szczesny’s arsenal career was over after his antics in 2015, I don’t think he is as good as people make out.
Good luck to him though.
Peanuts
Silly fee and he will be great plus he’s an old servant so will be sad but seasons go by and players go let’s hope the keepers we have are secure guardians of our goal posts. Please. P.s 2nd polish international keeper we’very sold (pending) should we get buruc?