Arsenal: Well, at least we aren’t selling Matteo Guendouzi

Arsenal are linked with selling a hell of a lot of players, but at least we can count ourselves fortunate that Matteo Guendouz isn’t one of them.

If you buy into transfer rumors, which you should always be cautious about doing, then Arsenal are apparently on board with selling quite a few players this year, many of whom we thought were integral to the structure of this club as a whole.

You see names like Lucas Torreira, Alexandre Lacazette, Granit Xhaka, Hector Bellerin, and they’re all being chatted about as potential exits for the club. Not the kind of exits that we need, but breaking into the simplest terms, starting over is not a bad strategy, and that requires making money.

Then you have guys like Matteo Guendouzi. Guendouzi was prematurely tossed into the rumor mill in the winter, just half a season after we acquired him on the cheap, and the fee had gone up exponentially – fetching a £60m fee. Now that’s a healthy chunk of money that could go a long way towards rebuilding.

But the fact that we’re not selling Matteo Guendouzi (at least not yet) makes me thrilled to no end, because it means that we are well on our way towards building a new foundation for the club, of which he will be a part.

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It also means that we aren’t throwing the baby out with the bath water (I hate cliches, but pardon this one). If we sold Guendouzi too, it would show that nothing that we did this past year stuck. Everything was disposable. It was a wasted experiment.

Seeing Guendouzi’s name nowhere near the rumors should settle a lot of minds. What we have in that young man is a budding superstar that won’t know what it’s like to have that festering epidemic of the mind that seems to afflict most of the Wenger guys and involves such systems as capitulation, sluggishness, and a lack of passion.

Guendouzi has never had those problems, and it makes me happy that we struck gold to the point that we want to reinvest that gold, and not sell it off right away just because the value has multiplied to such a degree.

So that’s something to hang out hats on. All these other players are being bantered about the rumor mill, but Guendouzi, future legend, looks as though he is completely off limits for everyone.