Wenger: “The prices for young talent are the prices you’d pay for established players.”
56 comments July 27th, 2006
Arsene is right: whilst it’s vital we strengthen, we musn’t pay over-the-odds for anybody: the £10m fees being banded around for Curtis Davies and Yossi Benayoun (interest in whom is probably entirely rumoured) demonstrate just how high the prices for domestic talent are.
As Arsene says:
“We did it for Theo Walcott, for example, but we cannot do it always.”
The need for a central defender who can also play at left-back is the most pressing area, but Arsene is unworried:
“We have Toure, Djourou, Senderos and Cygan. Remember these defenders went 10 games in the Champions League without conceding a goal so I cannot say they are bad.”
Perhaps selling Ashley Cole for an inflated fee might free up AW’s transfer spending somewhat. Don’t forget, we made about £1.6m yesterday due to a 25% sell-on clause for Jermaine Pennant.
Crock-happy Freddie Ljungberg will miss the first few games of the season, which isn’t a surprise to anyone. Fortunately with Alex Hleb and the new addition of Tomas Rosicky he is no longer indispensable to this squad.
My transfer wishes have diminished to the point where I see a defender and a central midfielder as an absolute priority. Somehow, though, I don’t think we’ll get both of those for the £1.6m mentioned above.
And however small our squad might get, we still did the right thing in letting go of this guy.
