Well this came out of nowhere!!!
I have been hoping for a late deal to come in, as we do seem to be light on attackers with four players departing and only one (Christos Tzolis) coming in so far. It seemed a bit far fetched, but I was still hoping for a last minute update on Julian Alvarez to say he’s come to his sense and of course, he’ll join Arsenal and we’d all live happily ever after…
Hey, until that guy says he’s staying, I think there’s still life in that deal, but that’s not what this post is about.
I came home today and check the usual twitter accounts to see if there had been any developments and one name came up across all of them – Malick Fofana. This is not a player that I know a lot about, but I knew that he had turned Hull City down earlier in the window as he was holding out for a ‘bigger’ club and to be honest, I did hope that might be us. I don’t know a lot about Fofana, but I remember seeing him being talked about as an ideal project signing for us last summer and I know he’s a pacy left winger (something that we’ve recently become short on!) so I thought it seemed to be a decent enough last minute deal.
After reports overnight had suggested we were going after Iliman Ndiaye, I was coming round to that sort of thinking. I’ll be honest, the main reason was it would be another hijack from them down the road, which I thought would be absolutely hilarious!! I do like the player as well, but I know he’s not the pacey in behind winger that we probably need, to round off our attacking options with Gabriel Martinelli leaving the club, so I wasn’t 100% behind it.
This Fofana deal though, definitely sounds more like our kind of deal. At the time of writing, the talk is a deal at around 40m euros, which I think is a really good price for a 21 year old project player. Even if it doesn’t work out, we should be able to recoup a big slice of that, so from a numbers point of view, that’s a big tick for me.
Is he a level raiser signing? No, absolutely not. We tried for two of those (Vinicius Junior and Julian Alvarez) and they didn’t pan out, so there’s not much else we could do on that front. I don’t think there are many players out there who we could get that fit that description, so we were left with two options – no one or a project signing.
I was open to no one and I do agree that bringing in a player just for the sake of it would have been a really bad idea, but I don’t necessarily think that this deal is that. It feels like a bit of a measured punt, with quite a lot of upside and very little downside.
The Arsenal Calling Verdict
This one seems to be moving quite quickly with the ‘Orn-bomb’ having already been dropped and Fabrizio Romano invovled as well, so I’m fairly confident this one will get over the line now. I’m therefore going to stick my neck out and say Arsenal Calling is behind this signing. As I said above, there’s more upside to downside to this deal and I haven’t seen enough from Eberechi Eze in a wide forward role to feel confident that he’s sufficient back up for Christos Tzolis, so we definitely needed another body, so I don’t see what’s not to like about this as a deadline day deal. Let’s hope Malick Fofana can reach his potential here and go on to right his own chapter in Arsenal’s history. The stage is set, Malick…