According to Fabrizio Romano, Arsenal continues to be thwarted in their attempts to offload Nicolas Pepe and Nuno Tavares.
Pepe had been talking to Turkish side Besiktas about a permanent move but it is now reported that an agreement over salary and contract length couldn’t be reached. As such, both parties walked away from negotiations.
While the Ivorian is surplus to requirements at Emirates Stadium, it’s thought the club aren’t willing to pay off the final year of his contract and continues to hope a small transfer fee can be generated.
Whatever happens, the Gunners are going to take a massive hit on the £72 million paid for the player in 2019.
Interestingly, Besiktas, are also said to be back in for Rob Holding having already had a paltry offer rejected earlier in the window.
Besiktas a entamé des discussions pour essayer de faire venir Rob Holding (Arsenal) #Mercato
— Loïc Tanzi (@Tanziloic) August 21, 2023
Given certain segments of the Turkish football press have a tiresome habit of making sh*t up, it’s hard to know if such talk has any truth to it. For instance, we had a good chuckle at the weekend when we saw one report claiming Galatasaray were willing to spend €10 million on Thomas Partey.
As for Nuno Tavares, he was on Nottingham Forest’s radar but that deal is off. The 23-year-old is now considering other options, including a move to Aston Villa, who are looking at the left-back as an alternative to Sevilla’s Marcos Acuna.
After deal collapsed with Forest, Aston Villa are exploring conditions of deal to sign Nuno Tavares from Arsenal 🟣🔵
Personal terms not discussed yet — as up to the clubs now.
Nuno, alternative option to Marcos Acuna deal with Sevilla for Villa. pic.twitter.com/NOw77kFJzP
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) August 20, 2023
With 11 days of the transfer window remaining, the futures of Sambi Lokonga, Kieran Tierney, Arthur Okonkwo and Folarin Balogun also need to be resolved. It’s claimed Fulham are interested in the latter having sold Aleksandr Mitrovic to Saudi club Al-Hilal.
Elsewhere, ex-Gunner Konstantinos Mavropanos is set to join West Ham United in a deal that could rise to €25m (£21.4m) with add-ons included.
We sold the Greece international to Stuttgart for an upfront £3 million payment in May last year, so the Germans are making a tidy profit. There has been talk about Arsenal benefitting from a sell-on clause, which is not beyond the realms of possibility.
Given certain segments of the 𝖳̶𝗎̶𝗋̶𝗄̶𝗂̶𝗌̶𝗁̶ 𝖿̶𝗈̶𝗈̶𝗍̶𝖻̶𝖺̶𝗅̶𝗅̶ press have a tiresome habit of making sh*t up
Fixed it!
The King of the transfer window is undoubtedly Chelski. Their spending galvanised in an iconic display from Moses Caicedo. Pleasure to watch.
So you have a dysfunctional squad of random, expensive players. What do you do?
Buy more expensive players! 😂😂😂😂😂😂
More expensive players that all play the same position!
When there is war buy properties…
Not only expensive but also mainly unknown.
Have Chelsea bought any certifiably good players?
The last time I saw him for Brighton, he was really good. Yesterday, he was really bad. If I were Kai Havertz, I would feel really, really, happy to be out of there.
To be fair the jury is still out on Kai. He did a lot of running last night but still yet to see any real end product or craft from him. Hopefully that will come in time. Rice though looks the real deal.
The insanity of what’s going on there is almost hard to believe. It’s like they gave a 10 yr old three energy drinks and a billion dollars and told him to go wild.
It’s the Todd Boehly business model. Keep throwing money at it until good things start to happen. He did the same thing with the LA dodgers, who, in fairness, have been the best team in baseball for years but without winning too many titles. The odd thing is, at Chelsea he’s throwing money at young, up and coming players instead of established veterans and he is instead letting most of his veterans leave. It’s like in baseball when you know you won’t make the playoffs, so you clear out your established players in exchange for prospects. Thing is though you… Read more »
Poch was only saying a few weeks back that their squad was massively bloated & they needed to cut loads more unwanted players & since then Todd has spent like another £300m while managing to still, somehow, retain Lukaku. Mudryk also still looks a waste of £86m, so glad we got outbid & turned our attention to Trossard instead
I was a Mudryk believer and I still am. He’s in a terribly dysfunctional situation and is not being put into a situation to succeed. I don’t think that would have been the case with us. He’s the one player they have who absolutely terrifies me because he could just go nuclear for them with a little time and coaching. But if there’s one club who could move on from him too quickly, sell him for cheap abroad just to have him move back to a rival after he goes off, it’s Chelsea.
True, it’s way too early to judge Mudryk, still funny though.
Oh 100% &, despite his Spurs connection, Poch is a solid coach, if they can actually get their squad down to a manageable size then Mudryk might flourish cause he’ll get the actual time put in to him but Todd don’t strike me as the kind to have that sort of patience if an investment ain’t paying off. Them “baseball” contracts his giving out ain’t exactly helping his cause either, if Chelsea were all pulling in the same direction then those contracts would look smart business like they have with Mookie Betts at The Dodgers but instead they’re seemingly gonna… Read more »
Nah – let em drown!
We sell a player for 3mil, one year later he goes back the Premier League for 21mil. If that’s not the most damning evidence of our ability to sell…
Meanwhile Marseille’s manager has apparently said Tavares could play for Barcelona or Man City, and Football365 claims Forest were willing to pay 30mil for him. So it’s not just the Turkish press making sh*t up these days…
Seriously, would you have held out for a big fee for Mavropanos and kept him on until we got one? Would we ever have? He went to Germany a couple of years ago, played pretty well according to all accounts, and meanwhile the market exploded. I saw him play on television recently–can’t even remember if it was club or country–and he was awful; I think he was sent off. He is not as good as Mustafi.
Certainly not the Mavropanos I know and watch in the Bundesliga! He is twice the player Mustafi was at his prime. Strong, good ball carrier and scores goals too.
Gnabry was worse in terms of quality we sold for peanuts.
10% sell on would be quite a silly amount in hindsight. And surely 3m really doesn’t get you much.
So why it wasn’t a lot higher I never understand.
That’s why buyback clauses are better. We can just buy them back and sell them on
With Mavropanos he had serial injuries that prevented his career from taking off at Arsenal or on loan from Arsenal. He had plenty of chances. Just bad luck it came together for him the season after his contract was going to expire and we either had to sell or lose him for nothing.
The difference in the fee Stuttgart paid us for Mavropanos’ and what they are getting be selling him shows how utterly woeful we have been at selling players.
I say we invest in an offer of £34.5mil+add ons to buy Idris Elba’s character from Hijack to help us close these deals.
“Look I don’t care if you take Tavares for £22mil or not, I just wanna get home. I’ll even help you kidnap Rob Holding if it means i can see my son again”
*correct Rob Holding to Cedric Soares. Rob hasn’t really done anything to deserve that…
Since you mentioned Idris Elba, he portrayed an Arsenal player in a hilarious skit on Saturday Night Live a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3b3iP9vuZU
How did I miss that? 😀
That’s pretty good. Does look a bit like Sol Campbell there… though intellectually more Ryan Shawcross
He played 80 games for Stuttgart and 7 for Arsenal. They developed him more than we did. Business is not done that way, I know. However, they deserve more money from his sale than we do, if you ask the player for example.
Did he play all those 80 games for Stuttgart in the past season? No Point is Stuttgart developed him while he was on loan there for 2 years and got rewarded with his performances. That’s what loans are for, then we went ahead and sold him for £3m. I’m reacting this way cos I was really shocked when he was sold for that much last year. For all the love o have for Edu and Arteta, something is not right with our player sales process. In a market where Chelsea can sell Auba and pretty much all their flops. Arsenal… Read more »
How much exposure did he get at Arsenal, compared to Stuttgart
Its surprising that Pepe has apx a 40% goal contribution to his name that puts him in the Top 5% in world football. If he can stay injury free he would be worth the £72 million Arsenal paid for him. Any team would bennefit from his 40 % goal contribution providing they can keep him fit and injury free. Tavares is no stranger to timing his run into the box and scoring goals. I believe he would be better converted to a winger with his crosses and timed runs into the box! Easily worth £30 million.
West Ham were ready to chuck 30 million at a 30 year old Maguire before he rejected them to sit on the Utd bench and be booed by his own fans. Different position, but another player’s who’s value was overinflated and has been underwhelming for the last few years (to be kind). If Pepe played for United, I am convinced they’d be getting offers for him from the PL/SA in the same ball park. Leads me to believe that recruitment managers at most clubs still prefer knee jerk intuition and outdated reputation over data/reality.
It’s about cost and about environments. Why were Harry Maguire and Nicolas Pepe so highly rated when they made their big money moves? Because they had a perfect situation for their skillsets. Maguire won every duel in the air in a compact Leicester block, then could step out and play his big diagonals to Vardy and Mahrez. At United he’s being asked to step out into midfield and play rondos around a press, or get isolated 1 v 1 against a tricky forward. It’s no wonder he looks ill suited. Same thing with Pepe. Give him green grass to run… Read more »
Forget the price tag and what he’s worth. We tried with Pepe! We played the guy out wide and even up front. He didn’t do a great deal up front and absolutely nothing on the back foot.
We need to get some good sales person.
“Given certain segments of the Turkish football press have a tiresome habit of making sh*t up, it’s hard to know if such talk has any truth to it.“
Couldn’t that be said for the British press in general these days!?
Or just press, in general
Pepe needs to be very careful. He won’t play one minute for Arsenal this season in any competition, or even be allowed to train with the first team. His stock is low. Arsenal won’t buy out his contract (which is only one year). If he has any concern for his own career, now is not the time for him to be picky. He has just turned 28, and is supposedly in the prime of his career. A few years ago he was one of the brightest talents in Europe. It baffles me how a club even in the PL doesn’t… Read more »
But the situation waiting for him at Arsenal if he doesn’t go as you have described it is clearly buying out his last year of contract.
He’ll go out on loan, probably on the last day of the window to somewhere obscure. Even if Arsenal pay part of his wages it’s preferable to paying him in full to leave the club. What annoys me the most is that I can’t shake the feeling that if he played for Chelsea, United or Liverpool, someone, either in the PL or Saudi, would have chucked €30 million at him already.
Wages. His wages are the problem
Right-O! Capology has him at 140,000 per week. For context, Lille (his former club) lists Adam Ounas as their top earner, at 52,000.
Apart from the £72m lost on Pepe, I wonder what might have been if Unai Emery got the Zaha he wanted instead. Would he have helped push us over the line last season? We’ll never know.
Meanwhile, Chelsea seem to have bailed us out of another potential waste of funds in Mykhalo Mudryk. That guy appears completely out of his depth in the EPL!
Zaha certainly would have helped us drop Ozil much earlier in that final.
Mudryk and Pepe, so similar. They were bought during market inflation after one great season. Started with a manager who got sacked and not mentally tough.
Still too early to make a final judgment on Mudryk, especially watching Chelsea develop him, which is like watching a turd try to develop well sourced raw ingredients into a gourmet dish. If at your core you are poop, everything you touch will turn into it. I hope for him he gets out of there.
If we had a prolific striker, Pepe could be the replacement if Saka gets injured. Arteta relies a lot on Saka, Odegaard and Martinelli for the goals. The team cannot take replacing Saka with a winger who scores less.
I’ve seen some buzz that Pepe is back at the cub and is being looked at as Saka’s alternate for the coming season. I don’t mind the idea of giving him one more crack at it. He has a proven track record of scoring goals and that left foot really is special. We have nothing to lose by letting him have a go. Let’s hope his focus and attention to detail have improved with his time away from Arsenal.
His time away was wasted (injuries and himself not particularly sharp when available). He said in an interview that to the contrary of what people were saying, it was his decision to go on loan and Arteta even tried to convince him to stay. Said he had a decent relationship with the manager.
He was never a bad player tbf it’s difficult to understand how he ended up worthless
This can happen with any player when they change their environments so drastically. The Pepe deal has been done to death, but my view of it is threefold: He was a poor system fit for Arsenal. He made his name in France by being an explosive outlet, but at Arsenal he was facing deep blocks and double teams. Breaking that down was never his game. Then in bigger games where there was more space to be had, he wasn’t switched on mentally and teams exploited that. So you couldn’t play him against the minnows or the big boys. He never… Read more »
Funny because arseblog said he was training in afternoon sessions away from the main squad. He arrived back late from holidays and hasn’t made any pre-season or matchday squad.
Where do you find / come up with this nonsense? He’s not being looked at as Saka backup in any way.
It’s being reported that he has been reintegrated into first team training. Arteta wouldn’t do that with no intention to potentially use him.
Reported where? By whom?
Tavares is a type of player Emery makes good use of, chuck him on at half time to stir things up. I can see that being a good move for him.