According to Chris Wheatley of Football.London, Shkodran Mustafi is hopeful of reaching an agreement with Arsenal to terminate his contract six months early.
Compatriot Mesut Ozil and Greece international Sokratis both reached similar arrangements last week allowing them to sign as free agents for Fenerbahce and Olympiacos respectively.
Brought in from the cold following Unai Emery’s exit, Mustafi was a mainstay of Mikel Arteta’s side in the closing stages of last season until injury robbed him of a place in the FA Cup final starting lineup.
It’s believed the club held talks with the 28-year-old about a contract extension – quite a turnaround given he was told he could leave 12 months prior – but the player made it clear that his future lay elsewhere.
Despite this window being the last chance to get a fee for Mustafi, Arteta said 11 days ago that he expected Mustafi to stay until the end of his contract while the dust settles on other departures.
With Rob Holding, Pablo Mari, Gabriel, David Luiz and Calum Chambers still on the books, it’s possible the boss may be reassessing the situation given the arrival of Martin Odegaard will again tip us over the non-homegrown player limit.
Mustafi won’t be short of suitors should he get his wish to leave. Barcelona were sniffing around and there’s thought to be interest in Italy where he played previously for Sampdoria.
fine with him leaving but why the f can’t we get money for anyone these case?
btw still angry we didn’t sell mkhi for 10m when we could but ended up giving him to roma for free
*days
How much would you pay for Mustafi?
One Sokratis.
About $3.50, but that’s because I hired the goddam Loch Ness monster as my chief negotiator
Three Fiddy!!!
Barca: ‘How much for Mustafi?’
Arsenal: ‘I need about tree fiddy.’
bag of used baseballs
🤣
with a Willian
Ain’t nobody payin for Shkodran Mustafi during Covid…
Ironically, the only team with the potential to sign these players we are releasing is us.
Hindsight is always 20/20. I remember when Roma bid 10m for him, a lot of people were annoyed that the bid was low, and that Arsenal should be getting higher prices for their players. Covid changed all that
i think i remember plenty of people wanting to bite their hands off. maybe i’ll look up the arseblog news post from back then as i’m not entirely sure
It was viewed as derisory at the time – people couldn’t believe we would sell him for less than 20m. Covid changed the game as net player transfers dropped dramatically. This window was bizarre in that a lot of clubs seemed to think the value of any players they wanted to sell was unaffected (um Aour for instance) while believing due to the pandemic they should get to pay bargain prices for anyone they wanted. I suspect that’s partially why we’re going to see a ton of free transfers this year and the next – it’s the only way players… Read more »
Nobody wants to buy him or any of the other players in the same situation. That’s why we’ve had to buy out their contracts. Collectively, they’ve cost us a fortune.
We’ll we also let them get into the last year which has meant the players have been able to be extremely choosey. If you remember Emery told Mustafi he should leave & there was talk of real interest from Italy at the time. BUT he probably would have had to take a wage cut to move on and decided he would rather just train and stay. Fair play to him in that he found his way back into the squad last year.
Yes, there’s that but the main point is that we bought many of these players for inflated fees (our fault, not theirs) and we paid them wages far in excess of their ability/performance whatever you want to call it (again, our fault). That’s what made them virtually unsalable. There may have been some “interest” from the odd club on rare occasions but I suspect that when push came to shove they would have wanted us to subsidise the wages in some form. All in all, these signings (almost all made during the latter stages of AW’s reign) were terrible for… Read more »
We made some major mistakes for sure in terms of who we bought. Just as importantly we were also totally unwilling to sell players as well which meant that in the rare instances we did sell we got virtually nothing for them as they were all in the last year of their contract.
Between Wojo/Sanchez/Ramsey/Mustafi (he was one of the top 10 most expensive defenders in history)/ Miki/Jack – who had real interest at one point, we will have collected a grand total of 15m for them. That’s insane for a self -sustaining club.
Look how much we paid Mhki and Mustafi in wages….Wenger and Gazidis were fucking mugs towards the end.
Well if you make someone one of the most expensive defenders in history it’s safe to assume they’ll want to be paid like one
We’re in a really weak negotiating position We have an oversupply of players, and under supply of squad places Basic economics Other clubs can count Clubs who want our players, are in a strong position to get bargains Players who aren’t registered, are in a strong position to receive payoffs If Mustafi is the player we’re not registering? Our options are: Sit on our high horse, demand a fee, for a player that’s just going to be sitting around the training ground twiddling his thumbs for the next 6 months Come to an agreement with the player, and try to… Read more »
Remember when I used to be sad when Arsenal players left. These days I’m running low on Champers.
Hahaha
Rarely our players improve if transferred to other clubs. It makes sense from buyers point of view, buying them cheap.
I recently checked out of curiosity how Jenkinson has been performing. I found out he wasn’t getting any game time to the extent I checked if he had a cruciate but no he never deserved to play for the championship team.
How Jenkinson made it to the championship is a miracle. How he made it here and played in some big premier league games only Wenger knows.
You mean England international Carl Jenkinson? The guy who got a cap for the England team in 2012?
Jenks got more England caps than Paul Davis, who won 2 league titles, two League Cups, one FA Cup, one European Cup Winners’ Cup and one Charity Shield with Arsenal.
And more than Kevin Campbell, who scored 148 goals in 499 games in his career.
And more than Jack Lambert, who scored 98 goals in 143 appearances for Arsenal in the 1920s and 1930s.
That’s criminal.
There’s nothing criminal about that. He was there on merit. However short lived it was! If all careers were judged like athletes, which league would some of us be playing in now? Uefa? Epl? Maybe league one?
Mkhitaryan has done very well at Roma this year. 18 starts in serie A. 8 goals and 8 assists so far this season in the league. Listed at 20 million euro at 32 years of age.
They are all shit…and everyone knows it.
because we are in the middle of a pandemic and most of these guys are on wages other clubs cannot afford even in normal times?
Couldn’t sell as Arteta actually wanted to give this clown a contract extension. Shambles
It’s called squad depth so that you can rotate…but possibly Mustafi overheard Arteta calling him a “big poo” when he asked him to come to his office to talk about a contract extention…
Average Football Manager player has more sense than entire Arsenal adminstration, considering how much we sank in transfers and recouped nothing.
Lol, do you actually believe this? That you know more about transfers from your armchair compared to those who actually run the club and have facts and figures in front of them at all times?
And with all those facts and figures they still managed to make pigs ear of it.
I’d say a trained chimp could probably do a better job
We can’t afford to pay a trained chimp we’ve wasted all the money on ludicrous transfers!
Maybe he doesn’t but neither does the club from what we can see. Liverpool sold a nobody for 20 mil. We can’t sell world cup winners and proven internationals for half that.
Liverpool can sell nobodies because they are perceived as being an elite club and even their second/third tier players are presumed to be good enough quality….surely soon that theory will be torn to shreds as most of the players they sell on are cack.
Some of our players aren’t terrible, they’re just not cut out for the PL…and after we’ve ripped them to shreds on Twitter etc we wonder why we can’t move them on for money!
90% on here said don’t sign Willian before that happened, saving £30m, so I’d say yes. you could randomly pick any armchair fan to have done a better job. I think most said to take the Milo money too.
That’s another £20m saved. And who would have spent £72m on a player with one decent season in France? Anyone…?
It’s not hindsight if u call it in advance.
Almost literally everyone here, including blogs, was buzzing about Pepe and the one guy who I remember being sceptical about the signing had something like 80 downvotes, as I recall.
Miki money- not Milo.
yes.
It’s like all my birthdays and Christmases came at the same time
Yes, only several years and many £millions in a transfer fee and wages late – but…
Yeah it’s best not to think about that
The horror, the horror (or is that Apocalypse Now – possibly the same thing?).
Well, now we know why Arsenal took the loan.
My biggest fear is that we won’t be able to repay it and will have to sell all our good players…can you imagine the Bank of England bailiffs turning up at Colney and carting away Leno?
Yeah sure. Make him pay back last year’s wages and he can walk.
and the money he cost us when he played against Crystal palace and made us lose a champions league spot.
Unfortunately we are clueless when it comes to transfers. Edu doesn’t seem to know.,will 1 garlick be enough? I doubt. Why can’t we be like normal clubs. Buy players for fair $ and,sell players for a fee. We seem to be the only club in epl not able to do it.
Not so sure, add any more Garlicks to our executive team and our past mistakes will be repeating on us.
Garlick helps to ward off Spanish vampires.
That would be the entire dismantling of the Kola, Ozil, Mustafi super friends. Better to clear the decks now and have them gone than having to spend valuable time in the Summer packing their bags!
Mustafi and Ozil Leaving in the space of a week, just need Willian to go now for the hatrick
That’s not happening. Arteta wanted him and has made it clear he’ll persist with him. Besides, unless people have been living as hermits with no access to electronic communications and have no way of knowing how abysmal Willian has been then there is no way any sane person would sign him.
Good news if agreement can be reached. I wish him well of course, but his was a disastrous signing for the club. Overall, simply not good enough on any consistent basis for the PL.
Don’t quite see the logic of the negative votes in this case. Why are we negotiating to pay him to leave – which is what the polite phrase “terminating his contract early” means in case there’s any doubt? Hardly a sign of his value to the club, or am I missing something?
Always seemed like a nice enough fella to me
If Arsenal were an investment company. They’d b bankrupt by now. Buy average players with high wages only to realize they really sux and no suitors want them.. not even for a small sum. In the end, we hv to let them go for free…. Utter madness.
Wenger had an economics degree.
I studied Law at Uni, but Judge Judy I ain’t!
22 years of brilliance at Arsenal shows he’s so competent at it. He isn’t called Professor for nothing. None, not even Fergie would have built the stadium and remained consistently in the champions league. Kids jump on a blog and talk sheer trash.
I think it’s better for him to go. We can a clearer picture of what Arsenal’s central defense will look like. Holding, Gabriel, Mari, Chambers, and Luiz for now. Saliba will replace Luiz next season.
This might be a little critical of Arteta but why buy another left-back when we have a highly rated Joel Lopez in our academy? Bellerin was thrown into the game at Dortmund. He struggled that day but he’s a better player today. This is already a discovery season for us. Why not play him? We can’t always rely on the market.
What will probably happen is we buy a replacement for £10m, realize our replacement is shit then use him instead!
We may have paid well over the odds for Mustafi and co – but the market was way different back then and the management team was too.
So what if we’re giving these guys away for free now? We don’t want them and can immediately save on their wages. It’s called ‘cut your losses’.
This is not Edu and Arteta’s fault, it’s the previous regime(s) that cocked up.
Even if we don’t loan out Runasson can’t we just unregister him?
Or use him as a substitute left back?
When we were talking about releasing deadwood, realistic pessimism dictated we wouldn’t expect this much. Well…
I know we wanted/needed to clear the decks but I wasn’t expecting all this for January…
Frustrating financially but looking beyond that I think these are great moves with a fresh start.
Aren’t we taking massive losses here? Doesn’t sound like there will be any money left or a squad for that matter.
We’re saving huge sums in wages, Mustafi and Sokratis were both on 90k a week. Basically we’re trimming the squad to a manageable size, and righting past wrongs as far as possible.
Assuming that their pay off isn’t 100% of the remaining contract?!
It almost certainly won’t be, as they can now be paid by a new club and so they can make more money overall by taking a lesser total up front. Both sides have incentive to agree to a fee of less than the remaining wages.
Grief!! We were going to extend his contract!!!
Not only that – he actually turned us down! Turned down by Mustafi: that would be a low point the anyone…..
*for
Lol. Ditched by Mustafi. Ouch!
Thank god this clown is finally leaving
Wenger’s worst signing by a country mile. If anyone has been the catalyst for this club’s decline in the past few years, it’s this guy. We were ECL regulars and then we signed him. We dropped out of the top four and to date, we haven’t even had a sniff of returning. His total lack of awareness and inability to read the game are there for all to see in the online compilations. These yet might have been forgiven, but for his unsportsmanlike penchant of trying to absolve himself of his own idiotic mistakes by shamelessly attempting to apportion the… Read more »
I’d say xhaka has had a fair bit to do with our decline as well. Maybe Wengers 2 worst signings in the same window. He identified the problem positions then signed those 2 and somehow spent 70 million and made the team worse at the same time.
Add a completely useless Perez and it was the ultimate summer transfer haul from Hell.
AW didn’t get many things wrong during his tenure, but that summer he practically shot himself in both feet, up his backside and through his head.
I thought Perez did ok.. We got what we paid for with him at least. We spent 70 mil on Xhaxa and Mustafi.
I think Fabregas mentioned in the arseblog interview, Arsene Wenger did not have as much control over transfers in the latter stages as we think. Don’t forget how much he was being advocated against internally by that Teflon joke lawyer we had for a chief executive, Gazidis.
Ultimately i think its what got him fired in the end.
Sylvestre? Squilacci?
Mustafi…..Got Wenger fired…Then Emery
Neither of those two cost us £35m.
This This This….On a human level fuck him too, odious cunt. Always remember a game with him fucking up and then turning around to scream at a youth player who had nothing to do with it. Fuck off. Notice this is only happening cos his buddy Ozil is gone. The most popular kid is gone so this fucking sideman is finally ready to go when he was finished under Emery.
Absolutely right that his transfer as well as Xhaxa is a massive factor why we are here. We were already drifting into mediocrity this guy and Xhaxa hastened that tenfold.
You seem to have forgotten Oleg Luzhny
There were a lot of really bad Wenger signings: Kaba Diawara, Francis Jeffers, Granit Xhaka, Julio Baptista, Igors Stepanovs, Lucas Perez, Joel Campbell, Richard Wright, Sebastian Squillaci, Mikael Silvestre, Chu-Young Park, Junichi Inamoto, Manuel Almunia, Emiliano Viviano, Pascal Cygan, Luis Boa Morte, Ryo Miyaichi, Tomas Danilevicius, Stefan Malz, Kim Kallstrom, Amaury Bischoff, Alberto Mendez, Marouane Chamakh, Yaya Sanogo, Christopher Wreh… But I suppose when it comes to price Mustafi is right up there with Francis Jeffers (who was extremely expensive at the time). A lot of these other players I’ve listed where just supplementary to some unbelievably good first team… Read more »
Some of those signings cost almost nothing and were well worth the upside with minimal risk. It’s pretty strange to criticise cheap upside signings such as Joel Campbell and Yaya Sanogo.
Arsenal getting as good at canceling players contracts as Chelsea at firing managers…
I still can’t quite comprehend Arsenal offering him a new contract. It wasn’t even on April 1st. What were they thinking?!
I know it’s terrifying.
I thought Chris Wheatley was busy with the covid 19 pandemic
Yet he finds time to bring us arsenal transfer news as well.
What a man.
I’m so so happy to hear this .
The guy is the epitome of everything wrong with arsenal , and needs to go for us to embed the and grow the new culture .
I really sympathise with a lot of players , but this guy’s cowardice and blaming everyone but himself is infuriating.
Even when he came out about the abuse he had received, he seemed to group legitimate criticism in with the abuse.
Wishing him all the best for future , shitting the bed at important moments for his new team.
The bigger issue here and with most of our ‘release’ from contract is we are not generating income. Sure you save some money on the salaries and we need to cut the fat anyway but we are also in need of income and in that we are failing to get any joy. Mustafi and Sokratis are not the problem at arsenal defensively. we still see us making silly mistakes with Gabriel and Holding. The issue is holistically we are not performing as a team and regardless of personel at the back, when we drop in out put up front, we… Read more »
Our recent defensive record suggests differently 5 clean sheets in a row before the southampton game and the 4th best defensive record in the league.
When both Cech and Scezny won golden gloves with Arsenal for most clean sheets, no one said the defence was good. Arsenal were always in the top 5 for clean sheets and goals conceded, yet the narrative was Arsenal’s defence was bad. Today, the narrative is different. Agenda must agend.
Fucking idiot.
less of the name calling bro
Watch out for this title again in the summer, only this time it will begin with Willian.
Fuck this prick. Shit player with no redeeming qualities. Along with Xhaxa, was one of the worst summers ever and has hastened are fall into mediocrity.
I wish him the best. He carried the shirt with bravery and vigor. But what could Barca or Sampdoria see in him?
So that’s three WTFs in one news item:
Arsenal wanted to offer him a new contract – WTF?
He actually turned us down – WTF?
Barcelona are interested in signing him – WTF?
Do we have two Mustafis and I’m thinking of the wrong one….?!
We’d have bad breath but at least it will keep the witches away
Excellent. Time to move on.
Only Xhaka and Willian left now.
Rubbing my hands.
How about cancelling Willian’s contract as well
Another overpaid player we can’t shift. I am a little surprised as to how we’ve pretty much not seen him at all this season given he was clearly in Arteta’s good books last season. His stock hadn’t been as high for a couple of years before last summer. Shame we couldn’t shift him then for actual money.
I don’t see why we should keep him until the end of the season given we have enough cover at CB with Holding, Luiz, Mari and Chambers and he’s taking up a squad place we may need to free up.
I’d be pretty ironic if we canceled Mustafi’s contract and other teams responded like he did at Crystal Palace – by being kinda konfused and doing nothing.
that’s it. we should start offering players $10k per week, with an appearance fee of $50k instead.
looking at all the free transfers recently (Sokratis… Kola on loan.. Ozil..) and now Mustafi, it just got me thinking, and as i thought longer, i realize that Ozil’s left the club. so, …. who’s paying our beloved Dino now?
Has Arsenal fallen into the “cancel culture” I keep hearing so much about?