Arsenal transfer roundup, lol

Good morning everyone, I hope that this post finds you well ahead of the Usonian holiday feast known as Thanksgiving. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that this holiday is also known as “Thursday” in the UK, because making this joke is my only actual annual tradition.

I don’t do Turkey, I don’t have a specific pie I make, I just kind of make dinner for me and Clyde and that’s it! It’s low-key. I think I’ll make steaks and potatoes this year. I could do steak frites. Lol.

After reading a link sent in by a reader about the new Arsenal wunderkind Chido Obi-Martin, which is a nice article and whatnot so thanks for that, I accidentally looked over at the “might be of interest” bar and saw that Arsenal are being linked to not just one but THREE players in January. And I was reminded why I stopped reading literally all Arsenal news.

It’s true. I read Arseblog occasionally, I listen to the general football pods (none of the Arsenal specific ones), and I watch the actual football matches and that’s it! The reason for this is really simple, it’s boring, incredibly repetitive, almost none of it is true, and it’s entirely out of my control – and even if I had just a tiny amount of control, I’m not sure I would care. Most of the supposed news is about transfers and injuries.

Injuries are completely out of my control. I can complain, for example when we have a player who is constantly injured like Thomas Partey, but I can’t do anything about it apart from complaining. I’m sure that Arsenal FC wants to have all their players healthy so, me complaining actually doesn’t do anything, other than provide you all with something to agree/disagree with.

As for transfers, here’s the reality: Arsenal make transfers. Sometimes those transfers are good (Trossard). Sometimes they are bad (Pepe). Sometimes they take 8 years and a complete overhaul of the player’s playing style and mentality to be ok (Xhaka). This thing here that is important is actually NOT the first two, it’s the last one. That’s the real story. That’s the unusual thing. That’s something that rarely happens in football. That should be the story. How did Arteta do that? But instead the stories are almost entirely transfers. Buying and selling players is utterly boring, repetitive (I said that already but it bears repeating), and completely predictable.

For example, one of the supposed transfers is Dusan Vlahovic and Arsenal are going to spend 70m to get him. LOL. The story says that Arsenal might temp Juve if we add in a player in trade. JFC. Even in the reporting, they have to say that Vlahovic has already “turned Arsenal down” and that what he really wants is to stay in Turin. Yeah. So, what’s happening there is that he wants a better contract and his agent is alerting the shills in the press that he “might be tempted by (uhhh) Arsenal.” I can’t unequivocally say that “Vlahovic won’t come to Arsenal” but I can say that this story smells like a steaming pile of Tottenham.

The other story is that Arsenal are eyeballing Douglas Luiz (Aston Villa). For January? I mean, I feel like he’s only their best player, the guy that they need to bring on whenever they need to win games, and that if they were to sell him in January it would utterly cripple their chances of making it into the Champions League and would turn the fans against the board and management. But yes, other than those small factors, this is totally a go!

Both of these stories remind me of when I first started blogging. Back then there were hundreds of people begging Arsenal to sign Akinfeev, Klaus Jan Huntelaar, and Yann M’vila. M’Vila was the most pernicious of these rumors and was picked up by the press. For what seemed like 5 years, every three months they would gin up some story about “Arsenal eyeballing M’vila” or “preparing to swoop” for this guy who has supposedly been a “long term target”. It never happened. He played for Sunderland for a season while on loan away from Rubin Kazan and was by all accounts very meh.

The point here is that the press often have nothing to offer. They take a single quote from Thierry Henry and run with a news story to fill space. They do this for two reasons: one, it’s easy and we click on it, and two they aren’t allowed to do any investigative journalism or they will lose their access to the clubs. If they were to actually print the truth (that, for example the Vlahovic story is obviously a plant by his agent) they wouldn’t be given any more “tips” by that agent. So, they just print trash instead.

And that’s why I don’t read it. Not that I’ve been super good about reading smart books or anything! I haven’t. I try, but like the rest of you I spend almost all of my free time on social media instead.

Ugh.

Qq