Arsenal: No One Wants To Talk About Yaya Sanogo

Arsenal made no qualms about how excited they were to land Yaya Sanogo, but he is 24 now and nearing a rather undesirable status.

When Arsenal landed Yaya Sanogo, there were groans. Here was Arsene Wenger trying to be slick again with a signing no one has ever heard of. Plus he was French. But there was such palpable excitement that you had to have at least the smallest tinge of belief that maybe Le Prof was onto something.

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It wouldn’t be the first time.

However, after seeing the Frenchman bumble all over himself in the starting XI that he was forced into, it became clear that this Sanogo character… he had a long way to go.

And then he disappeared. Sanogo turned 24 on Friday. 24 years old! That is pretty old for someone who has literally fallen off the face of the earth. I don’t recall ever seeing someone plummet so hard, so quickly.

He went from being an Arsenal started, to being told he had no qualities at all in the Netherlands and then coming back to Charlton Athletic where he scored a hat trick, dropped an atomic elbow in an MK Dons’ defender’s face and re-disappeared after never having reappeared.

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So Sanogo is now double disappeared, but he is still on the Arsenal roster and he was spotted at the club dinner outing this past week. It’s like he pops up every so often to remind us that he still exists and then fades away.

I just want to know what we are doing with him. Is this a Bendtner situation where he is just going to chill out until he leaves? But then, he’s not even with the first team. He hasn’t made any appearances at any level this year and I don’t see why he would. Arsenal has some promising young strikers in Donyell Malen and Stephy Mavididi and they are younger and already proven more than Sanogo.

He is the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to talk about. In fact, I think we should change the saying to being the Sanogo in the room, because that’s how it felt seeing him with the first team at their dinner outing. What’s he doing there? What’s he doing here at all?

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I think by now we have all forfeited hope that he will turn into anything, so it’s mainly just inconveniencing him to hold onto him like this. He did, after all, have a pretty solid French career building up before he jumped over the English Channel.