Good morning, a quick summary of Saturday for you.
Arsenal made their first signing of the January window, securing the arrival of Leandro Trossard from Brighton for a £21m fee that could potentially go as high as £27m. As I wrote yesterday, there are many reasons why this is a smart signing, so there’s no need to go over them again, but clearly one of the most important is how quickly he can adapt and make an impact.
Mikel Arteta spoke about it in his press conference yesterday, saying:
“|We are very happy to have him. He is a player we have been following for a long time. The opportunity came: we needed to have a player on the front line who was versatile enough to play in different positions.
“He knows the league, he has a lot of experience here and I think he can have an immediate impact on the team. We have to think in the short term, but also in the medium and long term. He gives us all of that. He is a very smart player. When you look at his career and what he’s done in recent years, he’s a player that fits our way of playing.”
While the player himself said:
Arsenal has a lot of history and I want to be part of that story that continues. That’s why I joined this project. I am very excited to be here. I want to show myself to all the fans and on the biggest stage.
I am very excited to see the fans in the stadium. I hope I can give you my all. I want to try to create as many magical moments as possible, and I hope that we can celebrate it together.
The club was sure to say that the paperwork was completed before yesterday’s midday deadline for him to be available for Sunday’s game against Man Utd and hopefully he can be part of the squad for that. We have a lot of football to play in the second half of this season, so the sooner you get involved, the better.
For more on Trossard, Phil Costa’s profile is here, and for Patreon members, we do our regular new signings podcast which you can check out here. A Tross-cast, if you will.
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The transfer news didn’t start and end there, as I had hoped, at least yesterday. We had barely heard the whole Trossard thing was over when we were heavily linked with Polish center midfielder Jakub Kiwior. He currently plays for Spezia in Serie A, and reports say a £20m fee has been agreed between the clubs and he will travel to London this weekend to complete the deal formalities. He might even be at the stadium to watch the United game.
He’s a left-footed central midfielder who can also play midfield (sounds a bit familiar, huh?), and makes a lot of sense when you consider we don’t have a ‘natural’ cover for Gabriel. We have players who can play there, but Mikel Arteta likes a lefty in that position, and we don’t have that. Gabriel has started 53 consecutive Premier League games, which is a real measure of his consistency and durability, but also illustrates that he is one of the positions on the pitch where we are a bit light.
The clip below clocks in at a very interesting 90 seconds on Kiwior, a player many of us will be doing our homework on over the weekend.
Jakub Kiwior info: @FMAnalysis spoke in detail about the Polish defender, his great ability to play with the ball, his versatility and his potential in our World Cup Standouts podcast. A fragment. pic.twitter.com/3gelDHoz3p
– Scouted Soccer (@scoutedftbl) January 20, 2023
From my brief glimpse so far, he’s good on the ball, he’s 6’2, so he gives us more of a physical presence, and the unexpectedness of this one is also interesting. This is when we need to buy players. Let’s be honest, Mudryk was one we should have done last summer before he went crazy. I’m not saying this scenario is the same, but this price is much more proportional to a 22-year-old who just made his national team in the last 12 months. He has a lot more experience than Mudryk, but attackers have the special sauce that sends the price soaring. Anyway, this also seems like smart business.
There is also talk of signing Valladolid right-back Iván Fresneda, with the suggestion that he will play his last game for the Spanish team today before moving to London. We’ll wait for details on that, but we’re not short of options in that position, so it could be a case where he signs and ends up on loan. Unless we want to get him in and indoctrinate him the Arsenal way as soon as possible. He’s 18 and getting a lot of interest, so like the one above, maybe we’ve decided to get in quick before the fee gets out of hand.
Finally, and quite excitingly, there is a link to Real Madrid’s French international Eduardo Camavinga. In The Standard, Simon Collings reports that Arsenal are interested in a loan deal for the 20-year-old who is somewhat out at the Bernebeu. He has only started five games in La Liga, and this would be a very exciting signing, even just on loan, because we all have those concerns in midfield. Personally, I think Real Madrid would be crazy to let him go, but we all know that football clubs can be a bit angry at times. There are shades of Martin Odegaard in January 2021, so let’s see what happens.
What we can say is that after a couple of weeks where things didn’t go well on the market, Arsenal seem to have moved quickly to fix it. Whether we’re going in a completely different direction, or laying out some plans we have for the summer, or a little bit of both, I don’t know exactly, but it really looks like we’re building quite a bit of momentum for the second half of a bigger season in almost 20 years.
See you tomorrow.
