carmeldevil
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Arsenal excellent, Tottenham flawed: When the ‘Big Six’ splash the cash, has it worked?
Philip BuckinghamDec 31, 2022
172
The summer of 2021 brought Arsenal’s new recruitment strategy into sharp focus. Just over £140million ($168.4m) was spent transforming a squad that had staggered to an eighth-place finish in the previous Premier League season and not one new arrival was over the age of 23.
It was all premeditated, all part of a plan. In came Ben White, Aaron Ramsdale, Martin Odegaard, Takehiro Tomiyasu, Albert Sambi Lokonga and Nuno Tavares, each bringing more potential than an obvious pedigree. “That has to be Arsenal,” said Edu, the club’s technical director.
The approach has not always appealed to everyone. “It seems a bit all over the place,” said Gary Neville, the former Manchester United defender turned TV pundit, in the months that followed the marked shift. “Maybe there is [a strategy], but it’s not clear.”
Eighteen months on and it has become crystal clear under Mikel Arteta. An improving young squad has been supplemented by further expensive additions in the summer, including Oleksandr Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus and Fabio Vieira, and most importantly leaves Arsenal seeing in a new year with a five-point lead at the Premier League summit.
A fairytale this is not. Money has been spent to bring Arsenal this far. Lots of it. And more is now being piled up to tempt Shakhtar Donetsk into selling their prized asset Mykhailo Mudryk in the January window.
An opening bid for the 21-year-old winger has already been rejected, but it will not mark the end of this pursuit. Arsenal want Mudryk to help cover the loss of Jesus to injury and ensure this season of immense promise keeps on bubbling to a springtime boil.
It will inevitably cost. Ukrainian giants Shakhtar have no wish to let their prized asset leave cheaply, despite all the troubles in their homeland. Albeit an ambitious one, their asking price is €100million (£88.5m, $107m) for one of European football’s most gifted youngsters.
Supporters might have reservations over the finances required to sign Mudryk. They remember Nicolas Pepe, whose £72million signing from Lille continues to stand as a lamentable club record, and shudder. There is also historical precedent at Arsenal for some of the biggest purchases not working out — going back further than Pepe there was Alexandre Lacazette and Shkodran Mustafi.
Pepe was Edu’s first big deal as technical director, though the Brazilian was still bedding in at the club and the former head of football Raul Sanllehi was a bigger driving force in the deal. The winger now finds himself on loan to French club Nice after barely leaving footprints in the Premier League sand during his three seasons.
Pepe was an expensive mistake but he is also an exception to the encouraging rule under Edu, especially since Arteta was picked to become the permanent replacement to Unai Emery three years ago.
Arsenal have predominantly spent money wisely under the current regime. As well as any rival, in fact. Almost every major deal that has followed Pepe has come to feel like a success. Some immediately, others in time.
Thomas Partey was an outlier when joining at the age of 27 for £45million but has since become an experienced mainstay alongside younger team-mates Gabriel, Ramsdale, Odegaard and White, who were all signed inside a year of each other.
Zinchenko and Jesus, two title winners with Manchester City, have been credited with sharpening mentalities this season within a group that fell short of Champions League qualification in May and perhaps only Vieira, who has so far only started one Premier League game, has struggled to justify the initial £30million outlay that brought him in from Porto this summer.
There are a few niggling concerns over the consistent availability of some of their recent big arrivals given a string of injuries, but that is still seven hits and a maybe without a miss since Pepe. Going back to the summer before Arteta was appointed and you can find William Saliba, a slow burner after loans with Saint Etienne, Nice and Marseille, and Kieran Tierney, two defenders with the ability to elevate Arsenal back into this debate for silverware.
For this piece, we are looking at arrivals in the £20million-plus bracket, so there may be some expensive failures who cost little or nothing when it comes to the initial outlay. David Luiz and Willian’s arrivals from Chelsea did not make as much sense in the same period and did not cost much in fees, but they were expensive in salary terms.
But this is a club that has pragmatically come to know its place in the food chain and embraced it. Arsenal see little value in pursuing ageing players on big money again, such as the club’s one-time club record signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, or challenging Manchester City, Manchester United and Liverpool for European football’s elite players.
Mudryk might represent the first change in that if the chase proves successful, but the overall shift has undeniably paid dividends in bringing them this far. The starting XI that came from behind to beat West Ham United on Boxing Day included eight players signed in the Edu years. Only academy graduates Bukayo Saka and Eddie Nketiah, as well as the long-serving Granit Xhaka, buck the developing trend evident in this new Arsenal.
Go through that team and you would be howling at the moon not to find value in Arsenal’s recruitment. White, Ramsdale, Tierney, Saliba, Gabriel, Odegaard, Zinchenko…
Partey, who turns 30 next summer, might turn out to be the only starter (excluding the long-serving Xhaka) that Arsenal would struggle to claw back their initial outlay. Some, like Saliba (£27million from Lille) and White (£50million from Brighton), have begun to look like steals in a market that took Wesley Fofana from Leicester City to Chelsea in a £69.5million transfer.
Mudryk would have to do extraordinary things to bring the same sense of value if the investment turns out to be north of £70million. Arsenal, too, will have a number they will not go beyond to make it happen.
January, therefore, brings no guarantees a deal can be done, but Mudryk slots into a model that has not reinvented the wheel. “We don’t sign superstars, we make them,” said Arsene Wenger in 2007. Edu and Arteta, who both played under the Frenchman, continue to see the merits in that strategy, even if it means significant investments are required to set development in motion.
The recruitment is arguably working very well under Edu. Now the next challenge for him is nailing the other two parts of his job — retention and selling. In those two areas, he still has something to prove.
It is when you pitch Arsenal’s spending of more than £20million on individual players up against their traditional top-six rivals that real endorsement can be found. Others have committed similar amounts in the past three years to either chase or cement aspirations of the top four but have lived to regret their profligacy.
Like Tottenham, their nearest neighbours. Mistakes have been commonplace in the transfer market during a period that has lacked clarity amid a churn of managers.
Cristian Romero and Richarlison have been smart additions but others quickly began to look flawed. None more so than Tanguy Ndombele, a £55million signing in 2019 now on loan to Napoli, but Steven Bergwijn, Giovani Lo Celso and Sergio Reguilon complete a quartet that have since been moved out of Tottenham in moves to suit all parties. Bryan Gil, another failure to this point, might not be far behind.
Chelsea are another cursed by their business. The jury is out on the merits of their summer splurge, including Wesley Fofana, Marc Cucurella and Raheem Sterling, but even those from past regimes who sanctioned deals for Romelu Lukaku, Timo Werner and Hakim Ziyech cannot find value in an approximate outlay of £200million.
Then there is Manchester United, a club without an obvious recruitment thread and uncomfortable with its mistakes. This summer might have been a relative success thanks to the starts made by Casemiro and Lisandro Martinez but others have been lost in the club’s fogged malaise.
Jadon Sancho might yet come good but heavy losses are unavoidable on the likes of Donny van de Beek and Aaron Wan-Bissaka. Cristiano Ronaldo, albeit at lower financial levels, eventually proved another disastrous addition.
Perhaps only Manchester City and Liverpool, clubs that have found stability and cohesion to win the past five Premier League titles together, can claim to have enjoyed greater success than Arsenal since 2019.
Manchester City do not tend to make many errors of judgment. Rodri, Joao Cancelo, Ruben Dias and Erling Haaland are all obvious hits irrespective of the outlays needed to sign them, while Jack Grealish and Kalvin Phillips might benefit from additional time before judgements are cast in stone. Only Ferran Torres flattered to deceive during his time at Manchester City but even that £21million transfer was made good when Barcelona opted to buy the Spaniard for £55million last year.
Liverpool, too, have been savvy in the main. Thiago, Diogo Jota and Luis Diaz have all been sound investments, while Cody Gakpo, the Netherlands’ attacking star at the World Cup, also has value at an initial outlay of £37million ahead of his move from Ajax.
Darwin Nunez was the big summer gamble that has the potential to go south when potentially worth up to £85million, but 11 Premier League starts, including five goals, does not offer a sample size big enough to draw conclusions. Liverpool, all the same, are rarely considered dumb with their recruitment. Limited up against Manchester City and the other big fish in Europe, maybe, but seldom wasteful.
Arsenal, through accident or design, have aligned themselves as closely to Liverpool as any other rival. There are parallels between the two in what they hope to achieve on a healthy but not unlimited budget. Sign players (relatively) young, develop and grow together.
There will be mistakes, like Pepe. It is football’s way, forever unable to navigate the intangibles. But a sensible, unambiguous strategy, driven by talented individuals, will always give clubs a fighting chance.
That has led Arsenal to this point, where a title challenge no longer feels fanciful. They might not have enough, with or without Mudryk, when the all-conquering Manchester City are still around, but recruitment as sharp as any rival since 2019 has helped make up all that lost ground.
