Arsenal: Let’s not “Lacazette” this Malcom transfer

Arsenal were put off the Malcom transfer chase a bit, but that doesn’t mean all is lost, it just means that they have to try harder.

No transfer was ever easy. There are too many parties involved that all have to be pleased. Agents, players, managers, sporting directors, presidents – they all have to get what they want. Which is hard to achieve. This is doubly so with Arsenal, who have a recent penchant of making things more difficult than they need to be.

Malcom has just crossed into the difficult zone. Up until this point, it looked far too easy. Everything was going swimmingly and it looked set to be wrapped up. But there was a niggling memory hanging around, this reminder that Bordeaux wanted him loaned back for the rest of the year.

This has come back to the limelight.

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According to Bordeaux president Stephane Martin, the Gunners are going to have a “hard time” prying Malcom away from the French club. He also said that there had been no talks up until this point.

As an Arsenal fan, the impulse is to immediately rule it out. We’ve been here before. When the going gets tough, the Gunners get going. As in, they leave it be and look down other roads.

That cannot be the case here. The most important thing for Arsenal is to avoid “Lacazette-ing” this. Alexandre Lacazette was linked to the Gunners for three years. But it was hard at the beginning and Wenger didn’t like the price, so he essentially convinced himself that Lacazette wasn’t the right guy, tried some other things and ended up realizing, actually, Lacazette, was the right guy.

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Then, he spent exactly the same price as he would have spent years earlier. Only this time he was a couple years late, so he missed out on a few years of acclimation.

The same can’t happen with Malcom. If they think he is the right guy, and he is a massively talented lad, it’s plenty clear why the Gunners would be interested, then stick with it. Don’t try to convince yourself that someone else can do the job that you pegged Malcom to do.

Clearly this brain trust thinks highly of Malcom, as they pegged him from the off as a guy capable of replacing Alexis Sanchez. So stick with it. Surely Wenger has dealt with Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas enough to know that there are swindlers out there (Wenger is one such swindler).

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Being told it will be difficult is far different from being told to bugger off. In the transfer window, neither is a brick wall. A little burst of cash goes a long way.