Sky Sports are reporting that Arsenal have made a £40m bid for Wilfried Zaha who Crystal Palace value at £80m.
Our interest in him was revealed last week, and the player’s brother made it clear that he wants to depart Selhurst Park for the Emirates.
“Wilfried will always hold Crystal Palace and their fans in the highest regard and all the support they have given means the world to him,” said Judicael Zaha.
“It’s my brother’s dream though, to play for Arsenal. Given all that Wilfried has given to Crystal Palace to help them remain a Premier League club, I hope Palace will be able to see their way to agreeing a deal with Arsenal that allows Wilfried to realise his dream of playing European Football for the club he’s supported since childhood.”
Which is all lovely, but if Palace want twice as much as we’re offering, the chances of doing a deal are slim. No matter how much the player might want it, his club have no need to him or us any favours.
It is conceivable that we could offer a player in part exchange, and Palace have, in the past, shown concrete interest in Calum Chambers who could fetch around £20m on the open market. There’s also a suggestion that Emile Smith Rowe could be offered on loan for the season.
One to keep an eye on, it seems.
Even if we get him, there is a lot of work to do in the squad. It’s hard to mentally balance the desire for top talent with the cost of obtaining it considering that we ideally need multiple other signings with a limited budget.
We haven’t done anything on defense, so it’s worrying that we might not even improve in that department this summer, especially if we allow Chambers to go in a deal like this where we spend most of our budget.
Nah, bullshit. This squad’s good to go.
Leroy Jenkiiiiiiiinnnnnnsssssss.
Here we go again…40 m + 1 would have seen the deal over the line!
For an opening offer I think £40M is a fair crack for Zaha. What’s really bothered me though is the way the press have tried to put this spin on our offer. That complete chump Ashton is already hammering us for it. Trying to dress up our initial bid as completely amateur and unheard of. When in reality, the vast majority of transfers are completed over the purchased players contractual term. Its standard GAAP protocol which is how every single company purchases assets – not just Football Clubs. So us offering £40M over (I presume) 4/5 years is nothing insulting… Read more »
Haha!Fantastic
“At least we aint chicken.”
Offer that money for ziyech, it’ll be more than enough and we would have a quality CL winger
The 12 downvotes – have they even seen Ziyech play?
Teah I think thats why
How do you know it would only take 40m to sign him? All this newspaper talk about valuation is less than trustworthy.
And people were laughing at us for bidding 6mil under tierneys price.
Dont see us getting near zaha without player sales.
Including Chambers would make sense due to Palace’s sell on fee – they want £80m because 25% has to go back to Man Utd, so if £30m of the value of the sale is in a player going the other way, they avoid paying the sell on fee so get better value.
Keita balde @ 25m + Tierney @20m = 45m transfer budget
Do you even listen to the Arsecast? I highly recommend you listen to the last podcast episode and learn how transfer fee are paid.
Also, the agents and clubs of Saliba, Tierney, Carrasco, Fraser et al, suddenly get to say, “Oh, so you can afford a £40m bid but not a £25-30m bid!?”
Being able to afford something and being willing to pay are two different things.
Yes, but that won’t mean a thing to the club’s we have put low bids in for their players. We’ll have stressed a limited budget, and now with this bid for Zaha we’ve played all our cards.
£40M for a £80M valuation of a player.
So half of what Tierney it Saliva or Carrasco is what Arsenal can afford, makes sense?
Now why would the agents think otherwise 😛
Still very unlikely to happen, of course, but I’m glad to see atleast we still have some capacity to unsettle a player. I also notice Charlie Nicholas has been cutting Celtic down to size, to offset some of the nonsense coming from Chris Sutton re Tierney. I wonder if someone from the club has had a word. The sheer gall of these cannon fodder clubs to demand astronomical sums for half a season of overachievement is starting to grate. If it takes whispering in the ears of brothers, cousins, mothers-in-law et al. to have a sensible discussion, we should be… Read more »
Well, if Andrew Robertson moves out from the Scottish league for £2.85, then I think Celtic asking price is blown out of proportion, even though I believe Tierney will develop into a great player.
Zaha at £60m is already too much, not to mention £80m. But then again, English player (1/2 in this case), are known to demand extraordinary prices
LOL at you Zaha. You scored against us. Now it’s our time to make you cry. 40 mil + 1 incoming
We are offering 40m for Zaha, 20m for Tierney & 25m for Sadiba. Our transfer budget can’t be 45m
This is the real story behind this latest news…the widespread narrative that Arsenal only have around £40 to £45 Million to spend in this transfer window is clearly false.
The bottom line is, only the decision makers at Arsenal know exactly how much the club has available to spend in this transfer window.
But we would likely pay in installments, so it wouldn’t exceed an outlay of 45m this summer.
But if we’re taking into account our spreading payments over multiple installments, then aren’t we stil paying off previous transfer fees (e.g. Aubameyang, Torreira, Lacazette)?
They are only offers!
Doesn’t mean any of them will be accepted or we will hand over any money.
The management know that the fans are irritated and the squad needs refreshing so they have to make it look like they are doing something!
Yeah, multi-billionaire Stan Kroenke logs into his alt twitter acct every night to read all the comments online
That is not how a transfer budget works. If a player cost 40m we dont pay 40m in one sitting, we pay maybe 10m and also it needs to cover wages. So maybe 5m for that. So thats 15m out of the 45m. The rest will be paid over a few years.
The numbers are hypothetical i dont know how much but we dont ever pay the full sum for a player right away. So we have maybe between 100-150m to buy players for.
The power of Credit. If you go on a splurge because you don’t pay completely today, it’ll come around back bite you in the arse. So you still have to be careful with spending even when payment is protracted
Oh yeah Inspector Gadget! Would that mean we owe a huge chunk of this £45M budget to pay Aubameyang and Lacazette fees yet? That would pretty much wash away our budget already.
Let’s stop pretending that we know how every freaking deal works.
It’s Inspector Norse actually. And think about it would you buy a new house or a car yacht or whatever and pay all of it right away ? Or would u get a bank loan and pay in installments ? And this is a well known fact i dont have to pretend anything. And yes we probably owe some money but were also owed money there is money coming in from other sources. New Adidas deal etc. The fact that we have been doing busniss badly lately means we only have 45m, we should still be able to get a… Read more »
Yep, that’ll definitely get it done. Scratch that, 40 million +1 will undoubtedly secure the deal.
40 Mill + Mustafi?
Nah it says they value Zaha at 80 million, not -20million
Same thing
That surely brings it down! Can’t be the same.
Why is Mustafi not there on our home kit promotion.
Let’s hope this happens..
at least an 8 poo rumor!
Sky Sports is a pretty reliable source
I may be wrong, but without checking. I thought the Poo Ometer was based on any rumours coming to fruition. Not the reliability of the source.
Ornstein is reporting it now as well
Which makes it true
We still don’t know who this “Ornstein” really is though…
Sky Sports don’t lie. Arsenal have made a bid for Zaha.
But Palace can throw it to the bin. It’s a completely different story.
I agree Sky Sports News don’t ‘lie’, they largely source their stories pretty well. But personally I 100% gave up on Sky Sports, as even after several months post Arsene’s departure they were still publishing articles slandering him and dumping all over his earlier achievements. Nasty company.
We find ourselves in an interesting conceptual blockade regarding the poo-o-meter (unless of course it has been clarified before, and I’ve missed it). Is poo-o-meter a measure of the source and therefore the veracity of news items, or is it the measure of how likely it is for a scenario/lead to materialize into an actual transfer. I think I’ve always assumed that the poo-o-meter stands for the latter, which kind of also includes the former in a sense – unreliable sources always come up with the most unlikely transfer news that almost never come to fruition. But this piece of… Read more »
Can’t see it happening. I’m more sure of the Brahimi deal (given the figures involved). We could just adopt the policy of going all out attack and hoping we score more than the other team.
Saying that, it’s not Emery really is it?
Please for the love of all of everything… no.
Surely 50+Chambers will ge it don?
To be fair 40 + chambers
He isn’t worth 80m they’re taking the piss
Yeah I’m thinking it’s 40 + chambers + esr on loan with no fee.
I’d prefer 40 + mustafi
Sounds fair
There is NO FCKN WAY Zaha is worth 80M….. ESP when VVD was only 75….
I said that tk my palace supporting mate and he made the very good point that if a 21 yo wan bissaka on his 1st breakout season is worth 50m then zaha is worrth every penny of the 80. I had no comeback to that this is how ubsurd the market is now
Maybe in Man Utd’s desperation, they got fucked
Of course they did…they are worse than us at getting mugged off for players. AWB appears to be a good defender but offers little going forward…he’s the opposite of Kola who can get forward but is ridiculously poor in defence.
Wan bissaka wasn’t worth 50m. United are loaded.
We got Auba and Laca for 50-60m
We’ll no doubt banter them tomorrow with an improved offer of £40,000,001…. Hopefully we’ll get it done for £50-£55million, I certainly wouldn’t expect us to go any further than that though. Get shot of Mkhitaryan+Ozil permanently, and buy a player for the right side of our attack as well. With the two strikers we’ve got, and Nelson coming back into the fold, I think that 2 wide players with pace, power and stamina, who can press from the front, would transform us. I’d be happy for Willock to take Rambo’s place in the squad, he’s looked pretty useful when given… Read more »
who exactly is lining up for Mkhitaryan or Ozil, let alone both?
At this point I honestly think letting them go for free AND with us paying half their wages the remainder of their contract. That might be enough to get clubs interested and still frees up enough wages for one solid first team player in case we end up getting someone on a free or player exchange
Yikes, that’s bad business. Neither was great last year, but giving them away and paying their wages is absurd. People have become obsessed with our wage bill and “freeing up wages,” but you have to remember that players and their agents have all the power, especially when the contract is signed. Ozil isn’t going anywhere, and I doubt we’ll have any takers on Mkhi, so Emery has his work cut out for him — get them playing to their best and we’ve got two seriously good footballers on our hands.
This would be pretty awesome
When was the last time a player so openly agitated for a move to Arsenal? It’s great. Lowers the asking price and Palace are put in a trickier position.
I’d love Zaha. He’d make watching Arsenal 2x more exciting just like that.
I also heard Cahill is a free agent. Can we sign him up please? He ticks so many boxes. We are openly broke so we have to try pick up scraps and Gary seems a very healthy scrap at this point
Certainly beats Mustafi
Then again so does playing with 10 men
I can understand why we’re after a left winger, as for me it’s by far the weakest area of our team but i’m not sure Zaha is the answer especially for £80m.
Although that said the quality in just about every position has dropped to such a low that they all need an upgrade. Hopefully we can start to see some departures soon as that should create the churn we need and proceed to some arrivals.
You watch Arsenal and left wing is the weakest area in our team?
Ok….
??
By far, and i can’t be the only one that thinks it considering how many left wingers we’ve linked too
I agree with him, our biggest problem is keeping the ball well in the oppositions half, this is what makes the defence look bad, most goals we concede are on the break, that is down to poor possession in mid and attack, as good as aubas stats are, he is pretty bad at helping keep possession, I’m not saying sell auba, but I’d rather have 2 great wingers and laca than auba and laca.
This is nothing to do with emery BTW, he inhereted this possession issue, for a long time wengerball faded, we were once the most unpredictable aswell as fastest passing and possession dominating team in the prem. That is long in the past, specifically shown in wengers final season where we kept fuck all possession and ended up playing 3 at the back out of desperation. We have a great new keeper, sokratis had a solid 1st season, kozza came back with great form, holding is gonna be solid, Hector is a about to become a man, i can think of… Read more »
If you want better possession, get more technically gifted midfielders out there (like City do, and we once did). Most wingers are charged with breaking into space or taking on a defender and that often results in a loss of possession, except where Hazard is concerned. We had a very productive wide player in Sanchez, and we all know about his possession stats.
We have both Auba and Laca and, my goodness, we should be counting our blessings everyday that we do.
Well exactly, you either have to be extremely good in possession or extremely productive, we have no one who fits in either category
I don’t really understand why we are focusing on the left…
Iwobi, Nelson, Auba, Laca and even Mikhy are all right footed attackers.
In my view it would make much more sense to buy a left footed winger, who possess not only pace but goalscoring threat either.
I would rather offer 70m EUR for Pepe than 40-50m GBP + Chambers for Zaha.
Exchange xhaka and mustafi ans bid 40million + 1£
thing is, he’s not really worth anywhere near £80m
the guy hasn’t broken 10 PL goals a season, and he’s had YEARS to do so
his true value is a lot closer to our valuation than theirs…they’re asking for Lukaku money for someone with Welbeck stats
But Lukaku is a striker. Zaha is a tricky winger. There’s a difference and as such is reflected in the stats.
And should be reflected in the price too
By “tricky winger”, I take it you mean diving fooking queen who’s finishing skills rival Gervinho’s. (do you even remember him.)
Good lord….
“the guy hasn’t broken 10 PL goals a season, and he’s had YEARS to do so
his true value is a lot closer to our valuation than theirs”
Just so. He fits at Palace. But he’s not what we want. We need to start at the back and build from there. Blowing what we have on someone as overpriced as this – is nuts.
Which probably means we will.
“We need to start at the back and build from there”
We did start at the back though. The first serious bids we made this summer were for defenders – Saliba and Tierney.
In fairness, that’s what he’s done for Palace. What he’d do in a better side is an open question, Man Utd spell under Moyes aside.
Well that would be an exciting signing for sure as I would absolutely love it if we had a proper winger who can take on players again BUT – and this is very concerning when you take Swiss Ramble’s twitter thread into account – what is our mgmt thinking?
Zaha seems just way out of budget right now, this isn’t even the most pressing position when we have to strenghten (imo) and I’m worried if there’s any potential resale value in him.
Confused.
It is starting to look like the £45m figure was a bit of a fib, or there are definite sales happening.
Either way it confuses the issue and make give us an edge.
Or it could be true and we are absolutely fucked, but I’m going with the former for now.
It’s just so the mgmt can say ‘hey we tried’. At least as much as I can say I tried do bale a pie and only managed to turn the oven on.
So the rumour of selling Aubameyang is true?
Don’t get me wrong. I like Zaha. But this move is unrealistic. Palace won’t let him leave for this price.
No it’s ass
If we were selling Auba he wouldn’t have featured so heavily in our new kit launch
We were definately trying to sell Ozil.
But the point is there is no club can pay for his ridiculous wage bill.
There was rumours that Inter Milan were eyeing on Ozil in the winter but Beppe Morrata wouldn’t pay more than 20 mil.
I’d take 20 mill for Ozil in a heartbeat
Thing is, I think that’s just about the right price for him.
Anything think 40m is close to what we should be paying for Zaha? Good player and be delighted if he signed but for once I dnt think its pennypinching, I know Palace value him at 80m but that’s way more than he is realistically worth…
Is it bad I would rather have Chambers in the side? Player of the year for a PL side last season (alright they went down but not seen anyone attach any blame for that to Chambers), got some substantial PL minutes and plays in two positions where we need reinforcements. Surely deserves to be given a chance next season?
I would rather give them 40mil + özil than give up chambers…we need help in defense/midfield while needing to at least balance our attack and we could do away with at least some of the money we pay özil…maybe we could do a loanish type deal where we share the terrible wage package we have in place for him?
this will never happen by the way
Personally I’d rather sign the guy from Ajax but maybe if we do somehow get Zaha he might be a decent signing. The thing with Ozil is he can thread in those incredible balls, but needs players around him to do it. Maybe this could work. And maybe being an Arsenal fan he’ll inject some passion back in the squad.
Instead of Chambers, how about £40 M + a different player M…..hki. So, Palace gets a ready made replacement.
However, Mhki salary means this option is a non starter. I don’t bloody understand how we agreed to increase Mhki’s salary when we signed him!
Low fee and players swap would make sense, if there is a sell on fee due to Manure.
I’d take him over a signing from any other league, due to his knowledge and familiarity of the league.
I just hope the use of VAR to review simulation does not trip him up.
I don’t get it. If the other 2 major rumours( Saliba and that lad from Celtic) are true, then why don’t we get those over the line before we start on this?
Left wing is not really a priority area imo, we scored goals. It’s our defence and central mid that are a bit poo. Let’s fix those, get back to champs league, get Zaha next season.
This club is becoming perplexing.
Well, to be fair, its highly unlikely that the club gives a ratt’s arse about whether keyboard warriors of the world are “on board” with its transfer dealings.
Just saying.
Not being a keyboard warrior, just saying I do not get this transfer. You are right, the board doesn’t care about my opinion – or yours for that matter.
And you are okay with it because our board has proven to be excellent decision makers in the recent past.
Given your earlier comments above on Zaha, you sound like the exact definition of a keyboard warrior yourself Homer. Just saying.
I like Zaha but at 80 million you could get an equivalent player for a lot less, maybe even two.
Add to that we need a right back, left back, centre back, right winger & probably a centre midfielder I don’t see any why we are devoting time to this unless we are contemplating big sales or think we are going to shift a load of shirts.
Bizarre offer really when you think about it.
just a thought . . . What would you all think if we offered iwobi for him? Would that make more sense than Chambers? Wondering what you all think
Get it done, Raul.
Haha, always trust the Arsenal to keep you entertained with their bids. Most fun story all day.
On a more serious note; Just get some good players in and start stopping to be so shite.
Judiceal and Wilfried Zaha. Now those are parents with naming skills.
Kiera balde for 25m and Tierney for 20m is far better than zaha @80m
Am I the only one beginning to question the validity of our reported 45million transfer budget?
It depends who we might be close to selling…
It’s either Arsenal are very clever or they are very dumb. My rough estimation if we are to complete deals for Zaha, Saliba and Tierney is £100+ million. That is before we even start talking about central midfield.
One might think that we put a deal in place where we pay the fee for Saliba next season if we have to loan him back to the club.
I’m searching for the missing poo meter as well.
Aside from that , he’s a fucking good player
Far too much money for a player who isn’t going to add enough to the squad whilst blocking the progress of younger players.
Plus his wages will be in line with the top earners
Any chance this is related to the rumour that we could talk Palace into taking a lower offer as we would be able to get ManU to drop their 25% sell-on clause as part of the Abua deal??
Fuck the “Auba deal”. If we sell another top striker to those cunts there will be uproar.
50M + Jenko + ESR or Nketiah on loan?
If the rumor about Saliba is true (sign and loan back) and we don’t sign new CB, I’d rather have Chambers than Mustafi in our squad.
You have to start low and maybe two years ago it might have been seen as an acceptable offer but Zaha is now in his prime, their best players by a long way and one of the best direct attackers in the league. i think it will probably take £60m plus a player
… or a straight swap for Mustafi who is definitely worth £80m. Who’s with me?
Thumbs up for the optimism
Now we’re getting somewhere! rubbing my hands. Zaha is an exciting player.
I am very excited by this…. ?
Just seen an interesting take on this lowball offer on football.london who I don’t normally rate but they’ve made an interesting point in that Raul Sanllehi used to play the “Barca DNA” card a lot, particularly with the Cesc saga. He now may be doing it with Zaha. His family are already speaking out on this which does give that feeling to it.
Not sure this will work but would be impressive if we got him for around, say, £50 million because they’ve got fed up of the situation and just want us to fuck off
Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it . Do it.?
I suspect we might have more money than we are letting on kids.
Its a done deal. Do you want to know how many Z’s they’ve ordered in?!
I’d be pissed if we bought zaha and then not buy a CM or CB. We’d be like trying to paper over our issues and hope again. Also wont be pleased if we bought zaha and didnt give nielson a chance.
Probably shouldn’t have signed a new contract last summer…
If we were planning to attempt to sign him, why did we not try to do it before Man Utd signed Wan-Bissaka??
That would have required an actual strategy and/or plan for the summer.
Ah yes, good point.
Give them Mustafi for free as an act of goodwill
Actually if money is not involved (direct swap), do Palace still need to pay United money? If not, Palace should just consider taking Mustafi for Zaha. Mustafi can be a world class defender for them!