Arsene Wenger has revealed he has a whole team working 24 hours a day to make some signings but is ‘not confident’ any business will be done before the window closes in 5 days.
Wenger finally spoke out on the transfer situation in his pre-Newcastle press conference: “I cannot say I am very confident because we are not close to signing anybody at the moment but the transfer market is always moving in the last five days. We work very hard. We have a team that works day and night to find good solutions. At the moment we are not close.”
He added: “We are not close [to signing anyone].” and suggested he was “not confident” of any new additions arriving before the window shuts.
“You have specific targets and then another becomes available because of something else,” he said.
So what that tells us is that Arsenal really have no idea who they want, it sounds like we’ve dreamt about signing Karim Benzema all summer and now he’s not available, the board is lost.
If nobody else is signed it leaves Arsenal with Petr Cech as the only signing this summer. That’s a pretty dismal effort from the scouting team and negotiators. The likes of Morgan Schneiderlin and Jackson Martinez moved earlier in the window for a combined £50million – an amount Arsenal could easily shell out.
So Wenger claims he has had a whole team working 24 hours all summer to get us signings and all we’ve got back is Cech? Maybe he needs to look into bringing in a new team.
I’m hoping Arsenal are actually deep in negotiations and that Wenger did not want to seem confident publicly as it could push the price up in a deal or leave Arsenal fans extremely angry if nothing came to fruition.
For now we will have to wait and see, but make sure you follow us on deadline day at fresharsenal.com, because it could be interesting.