Arsenal: Reasons why Ousmane Dembele was never a transfer target

Arsenal are apparently “no longer” pursuing the services of Ousmane Dembele, but I’m here to tell you why he was never a transfer target to begin with.

It’s been a slow couple of weeks in the Arsenal news sphere. We’re too far from the summer transfer window to be conclusively talking about any potential moves, and we’re too far removed from the January one to still be talking much about the winter moves. Although… what else can be said of Denis Suarez? (I’m sure I could think of something.)

And, for the first in as long as I can remember, we’ve had two straight weeks off thanks to the FA Cup and an International Break that I’ve hated even more than I normally hate.

So when headlines pop up like “Reason why Ousmane Dembele is no longer a transfer target,” I have to pick at it like a vulture picking at the bones of a starved-to-death phasmatodea. Yeah, go ahead and Google that.

It always made sense why Ousmane Dembele was linked to Arsenal, and I’ll admit, I fell into the usual trap of getting hopes for the move. We didn’t have any wingers, we have his former mate Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and we have the man who signed him – Raul Sanllehi.

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It all made sense on that end. No one was ever saying that the links didn’t make sense. I bet Dembele would like to come to the Emirates, seeing as how he can’t really catch on at Barcelona after making an all-too-early jump from Borussia Dortmund.

Go figure.

But no matter how strongly he was linked to a move, it wasn’t any secret that his near-£100m price tag just wasn’t going to happen. Even if you started improbably taking off huge chunks of that price tag, you still ended up at sums of money that the Gunners would never spend on one guy, especially considering that this one due was a winger, and thus his viability was no where near as valuable as it would be to spread those funds between two wingers and solve the problem altogether.

Dembele is the kind of player that you’d think belongs at Arsenal, he has all the traits and he just seems like the sort, but the price tag rules all, and it’s not like Barcelona owe us any favors.

So there you have it. Dembele was never seriously linked to a move to the Emirates. It was just never going to happen.