Arsenal: Torreira plus Leno plus Sokratis equals who’s being sold?

Arsenal’s summer budget was a tiny little thing, according to reports, but if that is the case, then someone has to be sold, like, yesterday.

I’m not one to pretend that I know anything about finances. Both in general and in specificity (obviously). That includes the enigmatic Arsenal finances, where Stan Kroenke supposedly holds the wallet and it’s everyone else’s job to decide how to use what he allows.

But I do know enough about mathematics to know that the Gunners are significantly over budget as it stands.

Of course, all this is hinging on that the Gunners only had £50m to spend this summer, which was the early reports. There is always a high probability that those reports were just dead wrong, but assuming that they were right, then yes, we are over budget.

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With the announcement of Bernd Leno (reportedly £19m) along with the pending and supposedly already-accepted but yet-to-be-announced deals for Sokratis (reportedly £16m) and Lucas Torreira (reportedly £26m), the total fees exceeds the rumored budget.

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It’s only by £11m at this point, but factor in the new deals for Granit Xhaka, Ainsley Maitland-Niles and, ideally, Aaron Ramsey, and that deficit is rising by the day. And if Caglar Soyuncu is as close as they would have us believe, then that is about to rise to nearly twice what they said we had in the first place.

It only stands to reason, then, that someone is being sold. Maybe more than one, who knows. So let’s talk. Who could the Gunners stand to lose to make up the deficit and get the club’s transfer fees back to the measly goal they started with?

Well, that’s the tough part. Because there aren’t really any players who could fetch a big fee that we just can’t get rid of fast enough. I have to imagine Shkodran Mustafi is on the chopping block, not even considering the rumors saying that he is. He hasn’t caught on and he is still young enough to fetch a pretty nice transfer value.

Beyond that, there really aren’t many options to repair the deficit that are going to be too highly viewed. I would lost my mind if Calum Chambers were sold and Rob Holding won’t exactly fetch too much of a fee.

David Ospina could fetch a couple million, but not much more.

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The finances are always a cause for concern, and it’s a concern unique to Arsenal’s situation. No other top club has this problem. Someone has to be sold if the budget is to be believed. And I am really baffled as to who.