Arsenal: Gabriel Martinelli pads a surplus in the best way possible

No matter what Arsenal are able to accomplish this transfer window, we are getting Gabriel Martinelli, and he carries with him something that we can never have too much of.

Arsenal‘s transfer window is going slow and steady as we await our first major signing, but there are a few hurdles we likely have to jump first – the Adidas deal kicking in on July 1st, for instance, or Edu joining the club as Technical Director. Which, of course, would signal the arrival of our first signing – Gabriel Martinelli.

This combo, and the accompanying philosophy, was covered in-depth by Danny Cannon here at Pain in the Arsenal, so I won’t get into that much, but I did want to talk about perhaps the most exciting thing that I find in purchasing a relatively unknown teenager from Brazil.

And that’s that he is a relatively unknown teenager from Brazil.

Arsene Wenger did not always have the greatest track record of diving into the unknown – particularly in the latter years. He always had a french teenager or two to bring to the Emirates, but very few ever panned out – Yassin Fortune, Jeff Reine-Adelaide, Yaya Sanogo, just to name a few.

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For Wenger, this ‘relative unknown’ was met with eye rolls and understanding that whoever we were getting probably wasn’t going to make it at any point.

But Gabriel Martinelli has something that this club, in the new Unai Emery, has so much of, but can never get enough of – unbounded, unknown potential.

Of course I have to name drop Matteo Guendouzi here, because he is our one and only sparkling example yet, but he was a relative unknown, same as Martinelli, and he thrived in his first year at the club. He made Reine-Adelaide, Sanogo and Fortune look even worse than they already looked. He made it look easy to jump from obscurity in Ligue 2 to relevance around the world.

For a Brazilian attacker, I can’t imagine that the optimism will be any less, especially because Edu looks so determined to ensure the move as his first ever in charge of such things at his former club. That’s a statement signing if there ever was one, which simply expands on the high ceiling we’re already expecting.

It’s not a big name signing, but neither was Guendouzi, and that worked out pretty well, didn’t it? Martinelli is a big signing, just in a much different way.