Mikel Arteta just exposed the real complication behind Arsenal's lack of sales

Arsenal have been criticised in the past for not being a selling club, and Mikel Arteta was asked about that in his press conference before the match against Coventry City on Friday.

Obviously, there are many reasons as to why they are not able to sell some of these players, at least in this day and age, and the issues that prevent them from having huge amounts of money coming through sales.

He said: "It's not bad or good. It depends on what you have relative to the options you have to sell. Maybe we've been extraordinary, depending on the level of the players that we have, the ability and their contracts and their will to go.

"A possible issue that you can face is that maybe you want to make certain decisions with certain players, but they are happy and want to stay as well. There are a lot of factors that have to be right when you have to sell a player, but it's not that simple, in my opinion."

Some players, due to one reason or the other, just don't want to leave Arsenal

Arteta makes a decent point. If a team consistently wants to become much, much better than what they are, instead of cashing in on their talent and selling them off for whatever fee, and then going into rebuild mode once again, that is difficult.

That is something that teams which may not have the financial backing of Arsenal would probably go for. Arsenal, on the other hand, have had to literally build the entire team from the ground up.

There were many players who were bad investments a few years ago, which is fully their fault. But selling them on is also just as difficult.

After that, Arsenal slowly signed some players, had some brilliant prospects coming through the academy, and just slowly but surely invested a good amount of money into the squad to have the team that they have right now.

And when the project reaches its pinnacle, where the team becomes what everyone wants them to be and the investments pay off, that comes when the club actually starts doing well in the league.

They start winning trophies and competing for the biggest titles in the world. That is what's currently happening with Arsenal. And when you are at the pinnacle, players will probably not want to leave, especially those on good contracts.

It is not like they don't have sellable assets. Some of the players that they have are the biggest in the world in their position. If Arsenal decide to sell William Saliba, for example, they will surely want a huge amount of money for him.

That's the thing. They wouldn't want to sell something that is one of the cornerstones of the team, and there are so many now that there is just no reason for them to sell.

Arsenal are no longer a selling club. They are winning titles. They are getting a lot of money from their sponsors, and they are also building a team that is really difficult to beat.

There will be some players that will inevitably leave in the future, but until that happens, Arsenal are in no rush to sell because they've got one of the deepest squads in all of Europe.

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