White

30 comments

1. White. Saliba.

   Raul performed his role like an insecure, power-mongering hack.
   He’s at center of AFC’s woes these past three years.

   1. +1

2. The galling thing is that we the fans were never given a chance to see and assess Saliba. I can’t remember us buying a player, who then fails to represent us in any game in 3 years. Even Wellington Silva did. Saliba never once suited up for Arsenal, not even in a pre-season friendly, a first round Carabao cup game or as a late sub in the Community Shield last summer. He goes to Nice after wasting half a season at Arsenal, walks into the starting XI, get a POTM or two, and wins selection to a good France olympic team.

   Yet we dont see him play for us — in any game — even once. That’s what rankles. Look it’s Arteta’s call whether he is good or crap, but please, his reflexive defenders, dont come here and tell us that is normal. Even Park Chu-Yong and Igor Stephanovs pulled on the uniform. If Arteta had the effectiveness to go with his cold-bloodedness, none of this would matter. But he brought us Willian and two 8th place finishes (and an FA Cup, to be fair). The point is that his treating players dickishly hasn’t worked.

   1. I really think there’s something in the contract which is preventing him from playing for Arsenal. I think this might even be out of Arteta’s hands. It feels like there are really only two options: either the club are blocking him playing for the first team or Arteta is. I guess it could be both.. like the club could say “ok, you can play him but it’s going to cost you £30m in your transfer budget. If you think it’s worth it then we will approve.” Something. I don’t know, 100% speculation but like you say it’s extremely odd that he suited up for the U21 side, that he’s playing well in France, and that we couldn’t even register him for Europa League competitions.

      I mean, think about the losses we are taking here: not just having to pay David Luiz £15m for that first year but then on top of that, we are paying, £9m a year or so in Saliba’s transfer value to send him on loan to another team.

      And let’s say he comes back to Arsenal next summer – he’s only got 1-2 years left on his deal at that point. How much could we possibly recoup? Why would he sign for us? I’ve seen Arsenal make some crazy transfers but this feels like the worst ever.

      1. Interesting. I guess we’ll know in the fullness of time what the situation really is. It’s not normal, that’s for sure.

         (I posted the below comment before seeing this… two ships passing and all that).

      2. Definitely the worst ever if it just peters out like it’s threatening to do so.

         A few other snippets I recall: Arteta said the failure to register for Europa was because of paper work snafus in the loan deal they were trying to strike. The deadline passed but the deal didn’t get done and Arsenal had screwed it up.

         I also recall an interview by Saliba wherein he said Arteta had judged him on just a few practices. Later, I believe Arteta was quoted as saying he likes Saliba but doesn’t believe he’s ready to play for Arsenal.

         The way I put it together is that Raul was striking some shady deals in France and playing with a carte blanche, greasing palms everywhere he went because Kroenke presumed he would be as fastidious as Wenger. He was wrong. He bought good players for Arsenal but paid way over the odds, essentially bidding against himself. Was there ever a “race” for William Saliba? Was anyone else even interested? How about Pepe? Same story. It was some real shady business.

         At the end of it we have two good players with massively inflated price tags and hence expectations, creating storms where there would normally be none. If Saliba cost 5 M, we wouldn’t be agonizing over all of this. But the valuation he was given, by a crooked or at least very nonchalant dealer, inflates our expectations of him and of how he should be managed. His performances, taken at face value and in absence of cost, peg him as a good young prospect, but a very young man at a position that demands maturity and a position in which he already had strong competition.

         If anyone should be aggrieved by this signing, it’s Rob Holding. He is at a point in his career where he should expect to be first choice and this is a clear signal to him that that is not the case.

         1. Doctor, Im guessing that Raul is too busy to read 7amkickoff and he won’t jump on here in indignation at outright being called a crook, but IMHO, slanderous, unsupported conjecture is not the way to go. We don’t know what we don’t know. I dont even like Raul. I agree with Shard on his erosion of the club’s values. What we can fairly conclude based on what’s in the public domain, is that the treatment of the player is highly unusual, whatever the unknown, extenuating circumstances. Look, Arteta’s not 100% correct, or wrong, in all instances. The HC carries the can, and is not who we are as a club.

            And gooners shouldn’t view Ben White’s arrival through the prism of the club’s treatment of Saliba. None of that is Ben’s fault. 2 years from now, I hope we’re saying that 50m was low.

            1. I’m confused. My post had to do with inflated expectations based on inflated valuation by a chief executive with suspect motives. Crooked or not, the facts are that he was rather quickly dismissed after a 3rd party investigation into his dealings, prominently including the Saliba deal. I’m not sure how that can be seen as less of a factor in this mess than the manager’s subsequent actions. I think his record with young players speaks for itself, and if he didn’t feel Saliba was ready, whose fault is that? Neither Saliba nor Arteta decided he was worth an obscene amount of pounds before he was ready to play in our first team.

            2. Not being “ready” (whatever that is) and not being given a single chance to suit up in ANY game for Arsenal in three years are different things. Was Tom Cruise “ready?” Is Arthur Okwonko? Runarsson? Wellington Silva? Junichi Inamoto? They all played for Arsenal.

               Doc, if you stopped staking out “Arteta is alway right ” as your baseline, you may see the oddness of the situation that’s in plain sight. We can conclude that a player isn’t up to the mark we expect, and still reasonably expect to at least see him in a friendly in 3 years of being a player. He was match fit enough for the French cup final in 2020, but he didn’t let him play, and subsequently said that he wasn’t match fit. Why did he not play EVEN a pre-season for us that summer? Everyone else can plainly see an odd situation (Tim does and carefully hedges on the causes). Criminality is pure conjecture. Devlin, below, nails it for me.

            3. Hilarious how everyone keeps saying Saliba was ‘not ready’ in defence of his treatment, without ever seeing him play.
               What does it even mean to ‘be ready’ ? No one knows

            4. My point exactly, PRVHC. Two examples…
               1. St. E wanted him to play in a French Cup final he helped get them to. We said no, come now. I dont have a problem with that. We may have saved ourselves money. Once he got here, Arteta said he wasnt ready. Deemed ready by his club in France; not ready by us.
               2. After playing no football for Arsenal between July 2000 pre-season start and Jan 2021 while still fit, he goes to Nice, gets first team football right away, plays well enough for MOTMs, and gets selected to the France olympic squad. Comes back, Arteta says publicly he’ll be given a chance in the pre-season, the player cancels his olympic involvement, then boom… he’s NOT given a chance in the pre-season, contrary to what was publicly said. We dont know the circumstances. The least we can say — based on what we do know — is that he’s been poorly treated, the situation defies footballing logic, and something’s off.

            5. Well at a bare minimum, he wouldn’t have been immediately loaned back to St. Etienne after signing with us. I’d say that consititutes not being ready. How many 18 year old CB’s do you see running around at Europe’s major clubs? How many are even less than 22? Saliba is still just 20. The furore over this is just mad.

            6. The loan back wasn’t because of his age, it was part of the transfer package. But I do agree that it’s extremely unusual to play an u21 CB, for any club. Which again, makes the transfer the problem more so than the fact that we didn’t play him.

               Somehow I wasn’t clear in my article: I blame this all on Arsenal. i think Arsenal messed this up, they wasted money, time, and even potentially a young man’s career.

            7. The whole “but we never even got to see him” thing is also absurd. There’s a whole season’s worth of footage of him playing for St. Etienne and another playing for Nice. Do you really need to see him in an Arsenal shirt to decide something fundamental about him?

            8. None of this is Ben’s fault, my point is that the club spent 100m to get Ben White, not 50m.

   2. Tim, fans look to blame Arteta because he’s the head coach, and final decisions on the deployment of a player rests with him. He doesn’t like Kolasinac (as a player) and wants to permanently offload him. Yet he plays him in pre-season friendlies. I think that his treatment of Saliba has been heartless, and possibly long term harmful to the the young man. We know he’s not irredeemably crap, because he keeps getting into the starting XI of French Ligue 1 teams and playing well. Well enough to get called up to a France national team. I dont blame Sanllehi for Arteta’s puzzling treatment of the player. Every coach coming into a new environment sees players that he doesn’t like. They call people like Mikel managers fora reason.

      I dont hold any of this against Ben White, whom I like asa player. Sure I never heard of him, but YouTube never misled us, innit? 🙂 I think he’ll play some RB — both in a back 3 and a back 4. He looks one of the fittest players in the premier, and I think that Mikel will demand a lot of up and down of him.

      1. The club hierarchy got fans to agree that Mesut Ozil had no place in the Arsenal squad on footballing merit. What chance does a 19 yo Saliba have when they say he’s not ready?

         Tim suspects a contractual issue and that would make it logical. It makes sense. Well about as much sense as paying Ozil to not play and then to leave. Or withdrawing Ramsey’s contract offer only to have spent two years and some 100m in trying to replace him without success. I just think we’re running the club based on personal egos and interests than on footballing reasons or any duty of care towards either the club or the players.

3. Right, so that’s RCB1 sorted and with reliable alternate options in Holding and Chambers. It’s gone from a position of uncertainty with a multitude of semi-palatable options (Luiz, Sokratis, Mustafi!) to one of great strength and depth.

   It feels to me that the biggest remaining hole in the squad is a possession oriented CM to play alongside Partey in a 4-2-3-1 and provide the control element that Arteta covets. Seems like the club is attempting to address that given links with Neves, Locatelli and Guimaeres. I’d argue we need two players in this position. Although you can make a case for Sambi starting alongside Partey (and I think he’d do well; probably our best pairing at this moment in time) I think the club sees him as more of an alternate for and eventual successor to Thomas and would prefer to partner both of them with a different sort of player. One to keep an eye on.

   1. It’s going to be Xhaka.

4. You want a possession-based CM? I know him a bit through someone, six degrees and all that. He has a good musical sense. Nice kid, too.

   https://www.just-football.com/2020/03/matheus-henrique-the-brazilian-technician-who-could-succeed-arthur-at-fc-barcelona/

5. Raul Sanhelli came to us from Barcelona. If you look at their history of transfers it’s a disaster and it’s no wonder they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

   Going off Swiss Ramble and other sources, I thought we were losing money. When you have four, arguably 5 if you include Chambers, CBs on the roster and only have to play once a week because there’s no Europe, £50m on a good but speculative 23 year old is not a good use of limited resources. What is the opportunity cost? Is this outlay precluding a move for Odegaard?

   I don’t get it. So it smells to me of some kind of shenanigans by agents and Sanhelli that we don’t know about.

6. I may be doing my usual thing of trying to protect players, but I do fear the price tag that we paid for White could burden him in a similar way to Mustafi.

   I heard that White was wanted by several clubs and they even made enquiries on his price tag. The top sides were told that he would cost 35 million and they wanted to negotiate from that point. arsenal, as the 8th best club in the EPL wanted White as well, but how could they get the player ahead of the better clubs? put up a number that would make him a bad buy for the other clubs. We went above the cost of his actual valuation and made him worth more than the market demanded for him.

   The money we paid for the boy, to me is that high because we are paying the costs of our own mediocrity in performances. We have to pay over the odds to attain players of high quality or potential. We now have to pay better wages as well to convince players to tie themselves down for a significant period in the short career of football.

   So I get the price, which is a lot, but I would like to see the fanbase not declare that he is or will be the player to take us from 8th to a higher position. the same has happened with Xhaka and the insistence that he failed because we never qualified for the Champions League in his time here. Ben White isn’t Arsenal’s savior, he is only one man in a team sport. So many variables could dictate his success or failure as a player, and context will be important in judging him. I hope we allow his performances tell us where his level actually is and what he brings, of value, to a team. Then we can set our expectations from there.

   For me? I cant wait to watch him play for us because it means I get to start the process of analyzing a brand new player and how he fits in our side, how the manager sees him and how he will help improve our performances. His importance to a side that seems to be going for athletes and how his playmaking could help our midfield’s control of games. I would like to see how he deals with counters for Arsenal and our plans to offset his lack of height at set pieces.

   I am excited and still understand that what we did with Saliba is a travesty. it is poor squad planning, poor squad management, poor man management, poor financial resources management and a very big lack of understanding of the time we are taking up in a young footballer’s life. The 50 million is where we are as a side when we have to compete for quality players with better sides, its understandable to me.

   1. Price tags are definitely a huge burden. For me the difference between this deal and Mustafi is the recruitment strategy. The Mustafi deal was one of a series where the club tried to find value wherever it could, and identified him as someone who could potentially punch above his weight. That was my understanding. Then they plugged him into a system for which he was ill suited and confidence was destroyed by a freewheeling Arsenal attack that left him exposed time and time again. That Arsenal team needed a Laurent Koscielny/Kolo Toure type and instead got a series of Djourou/Senderos types. Musti is good in the air, he’s average to above average on the ball, but his first step is slow and he is prone to panic. That’s exactly what you don’t want in a system that asks so much of its defenders in space. There was little to no thought as to the mental aspects, the fit in the team, or how he was going to mesh with his partner, or even who that partner was going to be. It’s no wonder he was a failure, but really the club failed him with its willy-nilly recruitment. The same could be said for Kolasinac and many others.

      White on the other hand is coming into a system that suits his unique abilities and will play alongside a partner (Gabriel >> Mari) who can help offset his main weakness, which is aerial duels. Yeah it’s a lot of money but the reason we paid at or above market value is because of this specific fit. I hope it works out as planned.

      1. I like your point on Kolasunac. He too was being chased by other bigger sides and their ability to limit his defensive actions would have probably suited him more than we did.

         I do think the judgement of Mustafi’s on the ball ability is kind of in isolation and misses what he actually did on the ball. I have always considered him one of the best on the ball defenders around. Not in a David Luiz type, but how Per used to be for us. A player who handled bulk passing and could locate our deep midfielders and the forward players who would drop into holes behind/on the side of the opposition midfield. They played shorter, instead of playing long raking passes to the flanks. The same way that Per would find our players in the half spaces just outside the half way line/center circle.

         These center backs usually come out with very high pass completion rates along with high pass numbers. It’s not because they only play safe, but they are good to keep the ball moving and circulating possession. They can also step into midfield, but they stick to the basics when the do.

         They are also not very good at beating players or a press, they would prefer to pass out and only hold on to the ball when they have time and space to make penetrative decisions.

         I learned of this when Monreal had to spend some time at centerback, I forgot if it was Hughes or allerdyce who said any of our centerback options could play midfield for him because they were all capable in their own way. So Per, Laurent and Nacho were ball playing center backs in for us, but all did it differently.

         On Ben White, I am waiting to see if the team really does fit/suit his abilities. We could be horrible for him and still succeed, or he could be great for us and we finish 9th. Only the perfromances of the side as a unit could tell us, but it’s going to be interesting. I just hope we let our eyes and the stats tell us what he is and what to expect (development and performance wise ), instead of letting the price tag tell us.

         1. This just came to me….

            I would say Mustafi and Per’s passing is “smart and reliable”.

            Not extravagant, creative or very penetrative. Just “smart and reliable”.

            That soundsabout right.

            1. Mustafi’s passing was excellent. Not sure about this revisionist history there.

7. I am almost always pro-incumbent, but I’ve had it with this Arsenal administration! Sanllehi out!!!

8. If our objective is to find a way to score more goals then a ball playing CB seems like it should have been a much lower priority then finding more creativity and another goal scorer or 2. A ball playing CB seems like icing on the cake for a team that is otherwise very well stocked in creativity and goal scoring. From 2013-16 we had Kos, Mert, Nacho who were all good ball playing defenders. We also had arguably the most talented creative midfield in the world with Ozil, Cazorla and we had Giroud who many of us believe was one of the better CF in terms of facilitating the attack and all of those players were in the prime of their career. Yet despite all of that creative and passing and ball playing talent we only averaged 68 goals per season. If Arsene could only find 68 goals/season with those players against a less strong PL then to expect Arteta or any manager to find a way to get more then 50-60 goals out the current squad and somehow compete for the top 4 is completely unrealistic.

9. I’m not sure Arsenal needed to pay St Etienne more money. I thought Arsenal argued that since the loan payment was till June 30 (the end of a normal season), St Etienne needed to pay a further 2m or whatever if they wanted to play Saliba in the final. Also, I’m fairly sure it was Raul still in charge at that point making that call.

   What followed, regardless of any contractual issues, is not down to Raul, but the current hierarchy, and Arteta as manager deserves part of, if not the entire, blame.

   I doubted Saliba would get a chance in pre-season because Arteta distanced himself from the loan assessment at Nice by saying some other guy is watching him and Arteta will rely on his report. Giving Ben White the number 4 which had been assigned to Saliba when he joined is just reinforcing the fact that Saliba is not seen as a part of the future. He will be sold unless Arteta is gone before next season.

   Anyway, Ben White. I’m ok with the player, not ok with the signing and the cost, but that’s not a big deal. I’m just not excited by this signing. That might be more to do with the fact that I’m not excited by this team and how we play. Still hoping they will prove me wrong, but I see us playing below our talent level and that’s on the manager.

   A couple of additions to our coaching team and a scout (a SCOUT!) from Fulham. The club is really investing into Arteta and his vision. I just hope that is not the reason for the club to stick with it if it doesn’t work out. Last season was a total failure. We need better this time around.

10. If we start the season with Xhaka and Elneny in midfield, that would be simply unforgivable, considering all the rhetoric we’ve heard.

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