There’s a week left of the transfer market and Arsenal are stepping up their attempts to shift Ainsley Maitland-Niles.
In the last few days, it’s been reported that West Ham United, Bournemouth and Southampton have all been “offered the chance” to sign the England international as we look to bank some cash before he becomes a free agent next year. Fulham have also been mentioned in passing.
In the last two summers, the likes of Wolves and Everton have also shown interest in the versatile midfielder but we rejected the approaches only to loan out the player (by that point a bit miffed) when January rolled around.
Ainsley enjoyed a solid six months at West Brom under Sam Allardyce but his half-season stint at AS Roma was pretty underwhelming. After a run of six consecutive matches in Serie A, he was confined to the bench for 10 of the remaining 12 games of the season.
Is there any concrete interest in the 24-year-old? It doesn’t seem so at this point. In fact, it looks like we’re trying to hawk him to anyone who’ll listen.
If reports are to be believed, West Ham are about to drop £40 million on Lyon’s Lucas Paqueta and are being linked with another Brazilian, Lazaro, who plays for Flamengo. You’d imagine that might rule out the Hammers.
Judging by their performance against us at the weekend, Bournemouth could do with strengthening. As for Southampton, who knows? Since they stopped selling all their players to Liverpool we’ve not really paid much attention to their business.
Something will have to give. We can’t see Ainsley being happy to sit on the bench again until January.
Sad saga. I had really high hopes for him. Hopefully he finds a club and gets playing. We’ll always have his boss penalties.
Cool as cucumber when it comes to spot kicks- nobody does it better than Niles.😄
Interesting that in the part of All or Nothing where Edu is talking about squad planning, AMN is the top of all the Right Back options. I’ve never seen a player so deliberately throw a top career away.
He was very good for us as RB when Arteta joined us that first season, playing as almost a wingback in back five, locking down opponents. But he wanted to be a midfielder and after that he was loaned out to West Brom and Roma. Even after his loan stint with West Brom, Big Sam told AMN that when he goes back to Arsenal, he should try and stick as RB. Well, I think Arteta didn’t want to force that on him and at that point, I think Arteta moved onto other players to fill that need. Just a missed… Read more »
Good enough for West Brom? So he must be better than Gnabry.
“We can’t see Ainsley being happy to sit on the bench again until January.”
We can’t see Ainsley being happy to sit UNDER the bench again until January.
Fixed it for you
That 20 or was it 30 million from Wolves seems like an excellent bit of business now
We’d be happy to get £5 million for him now knowing these clubs when it comes to negotiating for Arsenal players- cheap skates all of them.😄
We rejected it for good reason at the time, he had just played well for us against Liverpool at RB in community shield, earned an England call up because of it. We rejected the bid and I remember fans being pleased we didn’t ship off a hale end graduate at the time. Then he kicked up a fuss and said he wanted to be a midfielder for us ffs, he made his own bed.
Shame he didn’t stay at RB, he could have been a RB Ashley Cole. Better to be excellent in a limited position than be limited in the midfield.
If only Wolves suddenly had a load of cash and were seriously short in midfield….(!)
They never offered that much money. A total package of £17m was offered, which we rejected as we wanted 20-30.
Joe Willock remains in the starting 11 for an upwardly-mobile Newcastle and it’s pretty clear he could play for all but the best Premier League teams. I don’t think Maitland-Niles is an inferior player to Willock and I think he would strengthen most teams. I assume the transfer fee is reasonable (obviously much lower than Willock’s), and it seems crazy that one of those dozen teams doesn’t want him.
Could it be a question of “do they know something that we don’t”? Arsenal’s on-going difficulty has been moving players out and there’s often a disconnect between how we rate the players (market-wise) and what potential buyers think. This results in either selling them for a lot less than the original asking price (Leno for example – a 33% discount to Fulham) or not at all and we resort to loans. Too high wages are still a factor and we’re paying (literally) for that long-running problem which started back in Wenger’s time. However, some/many just don’t seem to be as… Read more »
AMN would suit many PL teams just fine as a player.
Nobody– wants his Mum nearby.
I must admit that I hadn’t thought of that.
Big Mick McCarthy agrees.
Think we should discard that part of the conversation immediately because you hardly hear of family relations being used to judge a players value when their not black.
This baffles me. Young, decently solid player, and that homegrown thing too with numbers of premier league games under his belt… yet no mid-table or bottom table club interested him at all?! He must have pissed wrong deities 🙁
I hope he finds a club where he can be an important player and have a decent career.
How much was Gibbs-White sold for again?
Far too much, like Gordon at Everton, £60m for a bloke with less then 65 Premier League games under his belt, it’s insane how much “English tax” is forcing up average players values nowadays & remember, neither Gordon or MGW have an England cap between them outside U21 level
Or maybe managers don’t want his irate mum invading the training ground because he hasn’t got off the bench that weekend
similarly to torreira, he’s either incredibly immature/getting bad advice and really needs to move on. unlikely that he’ll get many minutes given that he’s not even making the bench at present
Fingers crossed that he gets a new club. We really do need to move him on in this window if possible. Hopefully, Pepe can also be offloaded, but probably only on loan, as well.
Might it be difficult to move some of these players because we’ve established a precedent of terminating contracts so players can move on a free transfer? I’m not saying those moves weren’t warranted, but if a club knows we might cave and let someone leave for free, why even offer to pay a fee at all?
Given you could probably get him for £7-8m + a sell on he should be an absolute no-brainer for any of the bottom half teams and probably a fair few in the top half. It’s such a shame he didn’t get his head right and knuckle down to earn the right back spot when he had the chance, he could have owned it for a decade with his ability, pace and composure.
I don’t think we’ll see him on the bench that often, maybe EL
Shame it hasn’t worked out for him, I do wonder if he regrets not accepting the full/wingback role when it could have been his permanently.
Leicester haven’t signed anyone, he’d knock another few quid off Tielemans price
He NEVER said that he doesn’t accept this role. Not at all. He was asked what he sees as his best position and said midfielder. Nothing wrong with that as he‘s played well enough in midfield whenever he got a chance there.
I‘d love to know how many of the people downvoting this have actually seen that interview. He said he‘s playing wherever the boss wants him to play but he finds it unfair that he gets such an amount of abuse when he makes mistakes, as full back is not the position he was playing growing up and he‘s just learning this position, so mistakes are absolutely normal.
The media made a ”he refuses to play full back“ story out of it and people who never saw that interview still acting as if that‘s what he said.
Yeah. Niles and 10 million.
I don’t get how these teams do business. I think, given the chance now, he’ll knuckle down and do whatever job is demanded of him. He’d be great for Leicester. Competition in at least, three positions as they tend to play with actual right midfielders.
I do hope we get Tielemans and a Neto in. I don’t understand why we stopped our interest in Gakpo? The club knows best but Gakpo ticks so many boxes. Even the “need a tall forward” box
Seems a long time ago he put in THAT performance v Chelsea in FA cup final, for some reason his career has slipped south ever since, you can never know what goes through the mindset of a young player on the cusp of making it or not, the pressure of being a professional player in a squad of many talented players, his private life, he has always appeared to be a quiet type of lad, the type who keeps his head down in changing room at half time when manager is giving it when 1-0 down, hopefully he finds a… Read more »
A terrible shame he wouldn’t play where we wanted him to.
seems now, we can’t give him away.
My God, we accumulated bad eggs during the last 5 years. Hope we resolve all of it by the end of the window.
“Hope we resolve all of it by the end of the window.” is a pretty big ask. You’re right, in my opinion, about the accumulation of “eggs” over several years that weren’t, to be polite, quite what we thought at the time although it would be very harsh to include AMN in that. Strides have definitely been made by Arteta/Edu, but completing the job in this window is probably too much to expect. By the end of next season should see it done though. What it will have cost the club in fees/wages, goodness only knows, but it will be… Read more »
*By the end of this season…
Arteta likes versatile players, we were desperately short last January, but Mikel loaned him out. It has to be something involving one of those “non negotiables.” We probably would have been top four had we kept him. Xhaka would not have been playing left back, anyway.
Allardyce played him in midfield as that’s where he wanted to play but I’m sure Big Sam commented at the time that he felt he was best suited to playing FB/WB. Mourinho played him as a FB/WB in a league that you’d imagine would suit his style and then dropped him, which to me isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
He’s what, 24 now and his future is still in flux. I wonder if he’ll look back on his career one day and regret not making more of the chances he had at Arsenal?
Was going to refer to Fat Sam’s comment too.
Something along the lines of ‘…he should just stick to RB’.
Tbf Maureen dropped him cause he had an awful game against someone like Spezia or Verona from RB & they ended up blowing a 2-0 lead to lose 3-2 in the minute because of it I think it was & anyway, his always been one of these managers that if you let him down then that’s you done
Need a cab?
Such a versatile utility player, can play in multiple positions, for multiple teams at once.
Being home grown should enable us to get a fee,