Arsenal: Take Barcelona’s hint and stay away from Malcom

Arsenal need help on the wings, but that doesn’t mean they should just throw money at the problem. Barcelona are dropping all the hints that we don’t want Malcom.

Arsenal‘s attacking situation is a mess that doesn’t look to be resolved any time soon. They are still bogged down by Mesut Ozil and Henrikh Mkhitaryan and no moves look to be materializing the other way, other than young options like Gabriel Martinelli.

But the Gunners are still in the market, just apparently not for actually good solutions, like Hakim Ziyech, but rather for temporary, easy-to-botch options like Malcom, who has spent the last year wasting away on the bench at the Catalans.

Rumors continue to surface that the Gunners want to sign the 22-year-old Brazilian, but Barcelona are determined to make it more difficult than it needs to be. But more than that, they are dropping some serious hints that should be major red flags for Arsenal.

Apparently, we are only interested in taking Malcom on loan, a-la Denis Suarez, but Barcelona are determined to only sell him, don’t even talk about loans.

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To me, that’s a red flag. Why did Barcelona see fit to loan Suarez and, more than that, to give him a new deal before they loaned him? Because there was potential there for him to return and Barcelona knew it. They ended up getting him back, as we know, and it’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.

But Malcom, they don’t even want to think about the risk of taking him back should his loan not go according to plan. Why is that? He’s only 22, right? There is still a lot of potential to develop there, right?

It should seem obvious enough. Malcom provided very little for the club in his time there. He made the jump to Barcelona way too early in his career, he wasn’t ready for that jump, and he struggled to impress.

Now, there’s always that chance that he has figured it out now, and wants to try his hand at a place like the Emirates, but if Barcelona’s asking price of £50m is true, then, in combination with their unwillingness to loan, it’s looking again like they are the shrewd negotiators they’ve always been. They know he still has potential and are trying to max out his value with the risk of him doing further damage to his value on an unsuccessful loan, at which point they would have to take him back and sell him for less.

It’s a risk, and a big one. And frankly, I don’t see why the Gunners need to take it with the other options that are out there.