Howdy peeps, how y’all getting on?

I drank far too much yesterday and now feel like Mick Fleetwood is doing a solo in my brain. Eugh.

I’ve switched on Sky Sports News this morning and see that Demarai Gray is the latest player linked with a move to the Saudi Arabian League. Blimey, they’re going for it, aren’t they? It seems that every Premier League club is looking to cash in on the money flooding out from the Middle East and it makes you wonder whether Arsenal are touting out some of the players who obviously have no future at the club. I don’t suspect that Cedric will be able to get much interest because he’s hardly a marquee name, but a player like Nicolas Pepe would, you’d expect, be the type of player who they might look at seriously as the type of name that would be of interest.

He clearly has no future at the club, he’s a guy who just didn’t fit and after the loan he had last season which didn’t really go that well for Nice, he finds himself in a position where he probably needs a complete reset on his career. He’s 28-year’s-old, he’s got one year left on his Arsenal deal I think and I suspect Arsenal would be happy for any club to take him for any fee. If the Saudi’s came in I don’t even think Arsenal would be asking for too much money. Given his wages he’s on (a reported £140,000-per-week) I think Arsenal would probably be happy to take anything to get that off the books. Had the Saudi money not suddenly exploded this summer with all of the moves they are making, I suspect Arsenal might have even been happy to do a ‘mutual consent’ jobbie. But with this Middle East money sloshing around, I suspect Arsenal might at least be dropping an email or two to the right people to see if they’ve got any interest. They’d probably take any money at this stage for the guy who cost us £72million. Even £10million would be seen as a positive return I would suspect, because selling him based on 26 appearances and eight goals with no assists is hardly an amazing haul.

But who else could we get some cash for? Who else might we be able to tempt some of that sportwashed Saudi money?

Maybe Sambi Lokonga? Perhaps, but I suspect that he’s of an age where he doesn’t really want to be heading out there in his career. So far what we’ve seen is older and established players make the move. I can’t really see a young player do it.

We’re going to have to raise some capital somehow though, if this rumours £200million of spend is to be believed then you’d expect that we’d need to raise some cash to offset the outlay. We all know about Granit Xhaka and that is going to be around £15million, but anywhere else? Maybe if they get something for Pepe that’s another £10million, then perhaps you’ve got Nuno Tavares for another £10million. Trusty might fetch us another £10million and one of Flo or Eddie should get us a minimum of £30million. If we get that then you’d think we’ve got ourselves £75million accumulated. I can’t quite see us getting to £100million on those outlines so that means the club need to fund the other £100million+ through their own resources. Champions League and finishing second will help that, but you do think that KSE might be called upon too. They won’t dip in to their own pockets without getting anything back and of course Arsenal are a self-sustaining entity, but perhaps KSE will give over some cash up front to get the Declan Rice deal over the line with West Ham wanting a bigger payment up front. It’s not like we don’t have an example of that happening before; we signed Thomas Partey with a big up front payment when we triggered to release clause of Partey from Atletico Madrid with La Liga receiving all cash on transfer deadline day a few years back. Could we do the same again this summer with KSE giving the cash to the club so they can give West Ham the higher up front payment, with the club then paying back KSE over time? It wouldn’t surprise me.

So what else is going on in the Arsenal world? Not a lot. There’s still rumblings about Havertz, Rice and Timber but there isn’t really anything new so i don’t think I’ll bother saying anything different on that. We’re just on the waiting news from the club and I suspect we’ll get that next week at some stage with Havertz first through the door.

So with all of that done, I’ll finish up for the day. You stay awesome and I’ll be back tomorrow.