Arsenal: Wilfried Zaha the first reminder of how it used to be

Arsenal are still linked to Wilfried Zah, but suffice to say he stands as little more than a reminder of how transfer windows used to go for us.

It’s amazing what one year and one managerial change can do. Arsenal had gone through a familiar act every single transfer window with Arsene Wenger in charge. With so little actual links to realistic options, the Gunners would be tied to Edinson Cavani. Karim Benzema.

Maybe those links were true. Maybe Wenger set the bar so high and would expect nothing less than the perfect player, that these links were truly in the works, but were never going to work out, because of price, obviously.

With Unai Emery, the transfer windows have looked completely different. They’ve been linked to realistic players, with a lot of potential to be something special, and realistic price tags.

Looks at last transfer window. Arsenal solved four major issues at the club – at least temporarily – without spending more than £25m on a single player.

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That is a huge success, and it’s something I don’t think we ever got with Wenger. Wenger went for big time, specialized players as a solution to bigger problems. It was exciting, and thrilling, but when you realized it was never going to happen, it faded. We began to go numb to these rumors because they just never happened.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang being the exception.

Look at the upcoming transfer window. The links are all relatively cheap, but still just as exciting. Hakim Ziyech, William Saliba – these are guys that you can get seriously excited about, as well as guys that are right in line with what we have seen happening in the past. The past, as in last summer.

Maybe we aren’t competing with Bayern Munich or Real Madrid in transfer windows, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work towards competing with them on the pitch. Not all great players cost a lot of money. Sometimes you just have to get them before they hit that level.

Wilfried Zaha is a hearkening back to how things used to be – top tier players, or so his price tag tells us, but well outside of the realistic spectrum. Yet it’s being bantered about like it’s something within our capabilities.

It’s not. But it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need it to be. And the Emery regime is starting to prove that better than Wenger did.