Arsenal: No Mislintat, no Monchi, no Overmars – now what?

Arsenal are heading into one of their most important transfer windows in recent memory, but what happens if they have no one to manage it?

Arsenal frustrates me sometimes. Just last January, when Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez were winding down their contracts, I said, “They won’t make this mistake again.” They made the same mistake with Jack Wilshere, at which point I said, “They won’t make this mistake again.” And now Aaron Ramsey is the same mistake.

Now we have a new “They won’t make that mistake again” situation emerging off the pitch. Because as of right now, there is no one to engineer the upcoming transfer window. And I keep telling myself, “Arsenal won’t let this mistake happen,” but won’t they?

When Sven Mislintat was appointed as the chief scout, I think we were pretty unanimously in love with the idea. He brought us Mavropanos and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and a little Henrikh Mkhitaryan too.

Over the summer, last summer, he gave us arguably the best summer we’ve had in quite some time, bringing in Lucas Torreira, Matteo Guendouzi and Sokratis (and Stephan Lichtsteiner).

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When he left the club after being denied a promotion of sorts to Technical Director, there were candidates swarming. Many said Monchi would reunite with Unai Emery and handle transfer dealings for the club, but former Invincible Marc Overmars was also on the radar due to his connection with the club and his fine work at Ajax.

Both guys were swept off the table in quick succession, leaving the Gunners, well, scratching their heads a bit. Here it is, nearing the last two months of the season, and we have no one at the club to handle this crucial transfer period, a period where we will have the new Adidas deal swooping in, as well as any pending Champions League qualification bonuses.

What happens then? Who takes the reigns? There are talks of internal solutions, but are those more just desperation solutions? And if they are really solutions, why aren’t they already in the mix, because there is a lot of work to be done this summer and the fact that we don’t have anyone in the seat is a bit disturbing. Sure, you can trust Raul Sanllehi to do some of it, and Unai Emery has a good mind for this, but the point of all of this was to get a capable mind whose sole job was to identify transfer targets and land them.

I don’t like how this is shaping up, because if we go internal, it’s going to look like a desperation move, yet no other names have been linked to the role. You can’t go idly into this summer, you just can’t.