So the wheels seem to be in motion. Well, they’ve been in motion for a while on the players who are on the verge of exits – Sambi and Nuno – but this will be another sale by the club and I guess ultimately it all adds up. Sambi is off on a loan which will turn in to a purchase based on appearances at £10million, Nuno is off for around £7million, added to Mika Biereth going to Sturm Graz for £4million and Arsenal have themselves over £20million in the coffers right there. Plus each has a sell on fee so if / when those players move on, we get some additional coin done.

This is a good start. We’ve all talked about it for a few years, but Arsenal’s record on selling hasn’t been good and whilst of course these fees are hardly earth-shattering, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If the plan for this summer was to, say, raise £50 – £75million in sales to help fund the first team additions, then those three players netting £20million isn’t too bad. There is also rumoured to be a tribunal fee with Reuell Walters going to Luton. As a reminder, a tribunal fee has to be paid when a player under 24 leaves a club who have invested in that player from the youth set up and said player walks for free. That’s what has happened to Reuell (good explanation of the way it works here) with his move and so we should get some cash from Luton eventually, as well as some kind of sell on should Walters leave Luton at any stage. On the link I shared the example was 16.5% and so if Walters smashes it and is sold for £10million in a year’s time, for example, we could get something over a million quid, although admittedly that’ll be in the next financial year’s coffers. That’s why we receive money for Omari Hutchinson, with us supposedly getting another £3million from that deal.

Let’s say, for ease of my simple maths brain, that we get £2million from Walters, added to that the £3million from Hutchinson and you can see already that the club could have already made £25million by selling players who were basically nowhere near the first team. We have all been talking about Fabio Vieira, Kiwior, Emile Smith Rowe and Eddie Nketiah, but on fringe players alone we are going to be banking £25million and so suddenly a £75million incoming windfall for the club doesn’t seem to be that unrealistic. We could sell Eddie for £22million (rumoured that Marseille want him for €25million), plus ESR to Fulham for £25million, then you’ve already got yourselves the £75million in the bank without having to break much sweat. Arsenal will have the Champions League windfall from last season and they already get £50million having negotiated the Emirates new deal running to 2028 on £50million-a-season (reportedly up from £40million on the previous deal), so it’s easy to see why we might have a wee bit more cash to spend than some may think.

Of course there’s still the Declan Rice money they need to pay off as part of this summer’s transfer coffers, but even by my ‘back of a fag packet’ amateur calculations, it looks like Arteta has some cash to splash this summer.

And now with these moves starting to come to fruition, I suspect that we’ll start to see that movement a bit more too.

One nice little titbit of information with Mikel’s interview from their summer training camp in Spain. It was a nice little preview bit of info, although I will say I think the camera angle made Mikel look a little old. I thought “hang on, he’s the same age as me! What’s going on??” – maybe the stress of managing at a Premier League club is kicking in, although his hair is still amazingly jet black, naturally. As always, he was very articulate, sounded really driven and full of energy and when he was talking about the connection of the fans and people at the club coupled with the energy they want to bring, it did give me a little pang of excitement for the new season, I must admit.

He was also asked at the end of the interview for the last few minutes about this summer and plans with Edu and he did say we were going to look to improve all over the pitch, whichh you’d expect, but I did think the discussion around the squad being broken in to four groups was interesting. The first group have had no international football and he admitted they’ve had five or six week’s to prepare for that new season. When I think about some of those players – White, Odegaard, Timber, Smith Rowe, Fabio Vieira, Gabriel Jesus, Nketiah. I think that given these players will be the freshest I suspect that Arteta might be looking at them and their involvement for the start of the season because these guys could be really important in the context of how we start. Then he also mentioned those that have played friendlies, which I suspect is the likes of Tomiyasu and he’ll be in Marbella, then the US tour is when I think that’s when a few of the players who bowed out of the tournament earlier might join. So I guess you’re looking at Zinchenko, Kiwior, Jorginho, Trossard, maybe Gabriel Martinelli and big Gabby, as well as Havertz perhaps? Then it’ll be the lads who have gone deep in the comp which would be Ramsdale, Saliba, Rice, Saka and Raya, who I suspect will just go back to London for the Leverkusen and Lyon games. That’s cutting it tight for them to be fully on it I suspect but I also suspect that’s why I think we might have stuck an extra game in there for this summer, so that those players playing in the semi’s and the final can get a bit more of a run out. Let’s just hope everyone is fit and ready to go though. What we don’t want is another situation like last summer where Gabby Jesus went down and so did Partey. Having everyone fit and ready will be massive given the context of the games we have.

And so it feels with this Arteta interview, that we’re already transitioning back to the real stuff, the club stuff, The Arsenal. I can’t wait.

Catch you all tomorrow.