Arsenal: Patience may actually pay off with Yannick Carrasco

Arsenal are not known for rashly overspending, and they didn’t with Yannick Carrasco. But that may come back to help them in the end.

Arsenal have had their troubles in the transfer market in recent years, mostly in terms of landing big-name candidates. I’ll always think back to Alexandre Lacazette, who finally arrived at the Emirates after three years of bartering on the cost, that ended up being slightly lower than what it would have originally been had we just signed him at first interest.

There is such an allergy to overpaying here at the Emirates that it’s almost guaranteed that anyone who is remotely overpriced won’t be bought. You look at Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and the fees they fetched and, for what was being bought, they were perfectly feasible transfer fees where it might have been grossly inflated.

Yannick Carrasco is quite similar. When he was 23 and hitting the main stage with Atletico Madrid, the transfer price being bantered about was anywhere between £50m and £75m, which is also known as being grossly inflated.

The Gunners were linked, but they ended up passing, because again, they don’t pay more than they believe a player is worth.

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Carrasco instead went to China, where he is making a healthy salary, but his transfer value took a big hit as he got a year older and, well, he’s playing in China.

Now, the Gunners are back in on him, with transfer fees being mentioned in the range of £25m. That’s half the price that he was going to go for just a year earlier.  And the only difference is that he drove his own price down in the process of seeking new frontiers.

It was completely unintentional, but Arsenal’s patience may be paying off, for one of those very rare situations. It doesn’t happen often, in fact, it rarely happens at all, but if the Gunners can land Carrasco, who is just 25-years-old and has a tremendous amount of talent yet, for half the price (or less) that he was going to fetch had we bought him before, then cheers. Cheers to patience.

Of course, the hang-up now is that he is making £170,000 in China, but reports are that Carrasco is willing to take a pay cut to come back to relevant football.

If he can take a cut down to Mkhitaryan levels (£120,000), then we should be in business. Maybe this can actually happen.