Arsenal add Mattias Svanberg to midfield transfer list

What happens when there is a lull in Premier League football? Transfer news is what happens, of course, and with AFCON fast approaching for Arsenal it is the midfield that is taking centre stage.

Plenty of discussion surrounding a new striker has taken place, much of which has already been quashed, but with January coming around there will inevitably be plenty more links to get our teeth sunk into that aren’t just Dusan Vlahovic.

With Mikel Arteta and part of his squad hopefully enjoying some deserved time off before the daunting trip to Anfield on November 20, that doesn’t mean the phones won’t be ringing.

Edu has gone from zero to hero over the summer with his family barbecues clearly all just a ruse while he was secretly securing exciting young talent to bolster the first team. The fact nobody is talking about him is positive. No news is good news, and all that.

Arsenal add Bologna’s Mattias Svanberg to midfield transfer list as Mikel Arteta eyes reinforcements over coming windows

He won’t be taking it all too easy though, and recent links to Tyler Adams, someone Arsenal tracked over the summer, suggest that work is underway to try and bolster a key area of the pitch either in January or the coming summer.

The latest name to be linked with a move to north London is one that won’t be overly familiar to most, apart from Takehiro Tomiyasu. How so? Well, the man in question plays for the defender’s former club, Bologna, where they were teammates for two seasons.

And that player is Mattias Svanberg, who local newspaper Il Resto del Carlino list as a wanted man. Some of Serie A’s big hitters are mentioned as holding an interest, including Inter, Napoli and AC Milan, with Arsenal also thrown into the mix.

A key figure in the heart of Siniša Mihajlović’s midfield, the Swede has a contract that expires in 2023, although he has agreed to renew that deal until 2024. That extension puts the Italian side in a strong position to accrue as much of a fee as they can, which for them would ideally be until he end of the season.

Come that time, if ‘important offers’ arrive it would be down to Svanberg to decide what he would like to do, in the same vein of Tomiyasu where he was given the choice if an acceptable offer arrived, which it did.

So who is Svanberg? What sort of profile is he and will be fit what Arsenal are trying to build? Let’s take a look.

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