Shrewsbury Town have confirmed that goalkeeper Deyan Iliev has joined on loan from Arsenal until January.
The 25-year-old joined the Gunners eight years ago but is yet to make a senior appearance for the club.
In fact, he’s only made the bench on a handful of occasions, the last being the Europa League final in Azerbaijan where he was the third choice behind Bernd Leno and Petr Cech.
Weirdly, just yesterday he was included in the squad list submitted to Uefa for this season’s Europa League. We presume he’ll now be removed even though we have nobody eligible to replace him.
Iliev has been out on loan before. He split last season between SKF Sered of Slovakia and Jagiellonia of Poland.
Shrewsbury boss Sam Ricketts said of the deal: “Deyan has been at Arsenal for a number of years. He’s also made his way up the age groups with Macedonia as well – he’s got good pedigree.
“He’s been out on loan in Poland and Slovakia so he is someone we are delighted to get. He brings more competition for the goalkeeping spaces. With Matty getting injured, it left us light.
“We were keen to get another goalkeeper in and we are looking forward to working with him and working together.”
Best of luck to Deyan at New Meadow.
A good little club where loan players often do well. Dean Henderson of Manchester United had his breakout season there a few years ago when they reached the League 1 playoff final. Iliev might get some game time too as current No 1 keeper is injured.
Do it for Derek Smalls, Iliev
Excuse me, but how will Arsenal do now with only 4 GK in Europa league? Terrible choice!!
Seriously, so the club has presented a list of 25 players today without knowing that today one of them would leave on loan and then wouldn’t be able to play in the European competition? So now the list has 24 players? Oh, yes, but Özil is out… ouf… thanks God!
I imagine given how long he’s been at the club he will be listed as ‘home grown’. No impact on the Ozil situation.
I’d rather Sok than Ozil
Well he’s 25 so if he joined 8 years ago he would have been 17, so yeah home grown, it makes no difference.
The problem is that we have too many non-homegrown players. On the good side, we have a lot of young homegrown players
Arsenal will name a further 3 goalkeepers on the b list, when they need to submit that prior to October 20th.
If there was any suprise name on the Europa A list I would have thought it was the other goalkeeper James Hillson. His place could have gone to Dinzeyi or Akinola surely? Considering we will end up with 7 goalkeepers once the b list is submitted.
So there was space for Sok
Here’s hoping he’d do a Martinez and we’d sell for him megabucks someday.
Sell him for megabucks someday
25? Shouldn’t he really move on a permanent at this point?
Do remember that Martinez had a breakthrough season at 28! So there’s a possibility we could still profit from this keeper if in case he turns out to be anything close to Mrtinez
I said the same last summer about Martinez. I was wrong