Arsenal: Everything is a mess

Arsenal are in dire straits. They have signed one player, cannot sell their overpaid stars, and have a striking club captain to deal with. It is a mess, and it is all their own doing.

There is no sugar-coating it. At this stage, Arsenal have had a woeful transfer window.

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Let’s start with the lack of recruitment. It was laughable that the board thought that £45 million was enough to secure the main targets this transfer window. So it has proved. So far this summer, the only incoming transfer is Gabriel Martinelli, a Brazilian teenager you could at best earmark as one for the future.

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Second to Martinelli, Arsenal have spent the best part of the transfer window chasing William Saliba, full in the knowledge that he won’t be available next season. It is an exciting signing when you consider his potential, but if the club continues its downward trajectory, who’s to say that Saliba won’t look at moving to a bigger club in a couple of years if he lives up to the hype?

Meanwhile, bids for players have fallen woefully short of the mark in the case of Wilfred Zaha and Kieran Tierney, to the point now that it looks like no deal is going to be done, especially for the former. There also seems to be no reasonable plan B.

As it stands, the Gunners are staring at the reality of starting next season with pretty much the same starting 11 they finished the last, and it’s a significantly weaker squad too when you consider Petr Cech, Aaron Ramsey, and Danny Welbeck have moved on.

Players who fans are desperate to see moved on for the good of the club are still here due to the transfer fees and ridiculous wages that they have become accustomed to, while the club captain is refusing to travel on the U.S. pre-season tour in a bid to engineer an exit.

For some weird reason, Carl Jenkinson, whose contract was up at the end of the season, has been retained and is now on the list of players travelling to America this pre-season and could be in Unai Emery’s plans next season despite him not be good enough since 2011, while the likes of Shkodran Mustafi, Mohamed Elneny and Henrikh Mkhitaryan still seemingly remain key squad players.

For the first time in a long time, last summer, I was excited for the season ahead. Now I am dreading what is to come. And what is the most painful element of all this is that the mess is the club’s own doing.

A dinosaur board who refuse to move with modern football and are happy to keep at the self-sustainability model. A management team that was first assembled, slowly disintegrated, and now has no clue how to handle a transfer window. A squad that is lacking in almost every position, overpaid and underproducing. Arsenal brought this on themselves, and it really is a mess.