Despite suffering the kind of meltdown in August usually reserved for the month of March, Arsenal may well have dodged a bullet on deadline day.
After receiving a bid for Alexis Sanchez from Manchester City, who probably left it too late to do anything about, it looked earlier in the day as though Arsenal might sanction a transfer. All was dependent on the Gunners finding a suitable replacement. And it looked like Monaco’s Thomas Lemar was it.
But a reported £92m bid broke down, and that was that. Not only was Lemar staying at Monaco, but Sanchez was staying at Arsenal.
And yet, doesn’t this all smack a little bit of desperation. In the end, Arsenal were willing to pay double the price for a player they bid for at the start of the summer and were rebuffed. This bid, though, would have knocked all other bids out of the water and would have made Lemar one of the most expensive players in history.
But that might be why Arsenal have, in fact dodged a bullet.
The suggestion that Lemar is a fabulous player is not off the mark. He’s a brilliant, creative player who would certainly have done well in the Premier League. But the problem, as with any big transfer, is whether or not he could live up to the fee. So much money would have put huge pressure on his young shoulders. Delivering would have been difficult under any circumstances, but in a struggling Arsenal team, living up to that fee would have been nigh-on impossible.
There are plenty of reasons the deal might have broken down. For one thing, Lemar is part of the France squad who face the Netherlands in a crucial World Cup qualifier tonight. That would have meant no time for a medical and personal terms were still to be negotiated. It’s also debatable whether the player would have wanted to join Arsenal anyway, given their current crisis and lack of Champions League football.
But there is one thing about the fee which is interesting. Back in June, when it was first reported that Arsenal were interested in Lemar, the figure quoted was £31m. Today, that fee is three times higher, which sounds incredibly reckless from the Gunners, but probably makes a lot of sense. Were they simply tabling exactly the same offer they were trying to make in June and just adding the £60m they thought they could get from Manchester City in exchange for Alexis Sanchez?
If so, that doesn’t seem very ambitious at all. In fact, it seems like a backwards step. Given they were willing to pay £31m in June, that means they must have been adamant about keeping Sanchez. Lemar, therefore, would not have been a Sanchez replacement but a further addition to the squad. Now they’re in a position where they were happy to have one or the other, whereas two months ago they wanted both.
Above all else, that shows how desperate Arsenal have become since the season started. Since then, they’ve been beaten in games away to Stoke and Liverpool in scenes depressingly reminiscent of seasons gone by, with failure in a tricky away fixture and an utter capitulation against a top six rival. A game in which they didn’t even start with their new £50m striker.
This season hasn’t started well, and given the Gunners are only slightly stronger than they were last year, but if they’d splashed out £90m for Thomas Lemar, you get the feeling it wouldn’t have solved anything anyway.
In the end, given the Sanchez money, the fee wouldn’t have been as big as it looked. But because of the optics, the pressure on the new player, the fact that Arsenal wouldn’t have been any stronger and the terrible start to the season, it’s probably a bullet dodged.
