Morning folks and may I say happy Friday to you and yours. It’s Wolves away this weekend and Arteta will have a few words to say about them today at some stage, so I’ll do a bit of that today to, but before then some other news that crept out in to the ether yesterday that is worth taking note of.

Firstly, it looks like KT is set to re-join Celtic six years after signing for us from them, in what now looks like a pretty expensive and probably the world’s longest ever loan deal that has ever existed. You can’t blame him to be fair. He’s a free agent, he spoke in the All or Nothing documentary about feeling a little homesick and it’s clear as a guy who is close to his family, he wants to get back up to Scotland and re-join his boyhood club. His issue has only ever been twofold: he can’t stay fit for any period of time (11 separate injuries in five seasons causing him to miss a total of 94 football matches during that time) and he hasn’t been able to adapt to Arteta’s inverted fullback style. When Arteta signed him it’s said he loved him, his work rate, his personality, his effort and I think it’s probably testimony to the fact he’s even getting any minutes at the moment that Arteta is considering him, because to me it does feel like he’s a bit of a square peg in an Arsenal round hole.

He’ll get his move in the summer, Arsenal and Arsenal fans will wish him well, say thanks for the memories (and the iconic Tesco bag boots moment) and we hope he has a good career north of the border. Until then, let’s see if we can give him some minutes in an Arsenal shirt at some times and use him if we need him. Heck, it’s not as if we haven’t experienced full back problems this season, eh?

On that note Arteta will also tell us about fitness today and I hope he gives us news that Calafiori is fit and can start. When you look at his injury history, it looks similar to Tierney’s and already this season he’s missed 14 games for us across four different injury spells. I said it in the summer, I’m saying it again, I worry that we’ve brought another Tomiyasu / Tierney in the Italian. We all love KT and Tomi, but they can’t stay fit and that means you need to be ruthless at times. I really hope Calafiori can shake off what has already been a consistent thing with him so far in his career but I’m just saying my spider senses have been tingling ever since we signed him. But I’ll park that for now for fear of being accused of being too overly negative  on a guy so early in to his Arsenal career.

The answer will certainly not be to dip in to the left back market once again this January, or this summer I suspect, with even Josh and Stan Kroenke probably saying “enough is enough” if Arteta wants another centre half or left back. The focus should – and will – be on attacking players for the next couple of windows I suspect, with Wolves fans on the forums already talking about how Cunha is doing a dress rehearsal this weekend when we play them. For obvious reasons you and I hope not, but we do still need to do something in the next eight or so days. The need is there, we just have to move and with Arsenal seeing record growth and revenues according to the Deloitte Money League announcement yesterday, the narrative of the Arsenal fanbase has just been given another nudge as Arsenal struggle to find value and the player they want this window.

I can see the gutter press red top media headlines now “Arsenal have all this money and STILL won’t buy a striker!” will be their approach and yes, the Money League revenues show we’ve had a 35% growth in total for our revenues, we’ve hit a new PB on revenue generated to about £605million for last season compared to around £450millon this time last year. But as we all know revenue only shows part of the story. It doesn’t show all of Arsenal’s costs, only wages and whilst revenues have gone up, so have our wages with 53% of our revenue going on wages this time around, compared to 51% last season. That’s to be expected; we’re shopping in more expensive supermarkets and paying higher fees on players; you don’t sign somebody for £35million and get to out them on £20k-per-week. There’s also the new deals that come in when you reward players already at the club, so you’d expect there to be an increase. Liverpool’s are 63% of what they earn and Chelsea’s are 72% of what they earn. Compared to most other clubs who are around the 50s in terms of percentages, it seems like we’re on trend with other clubs. But when an announcement like this comes out (handily timed each year to coincide with the end of the January transfer window, I might add) there’s always going to be a few who immediately shout “why aren’t we spending that money!”. As always you need somebody like Swiss Ramble to point out in detail the reality of Arsenal’s financial situation.

That’s not to say I don’t think we have the money and shouldn’t spend it, by the way, because I absolutely think we should be going in to the market this window and definitely going again in the summer. But the complexities of football finance don’t start and end in how much money you bring in and I don’t think a 35% growth in revenue of £155million will mean that we can suddenly drop all of that extra cash this window on that attacking player we all crave. And I don’t think there’s any Arsenal fan out there who thinks we will.

And so for now we have to wait and hope. In the meantime there will be an Arteta press conference about Wolves and that has to be our focus in the immediate future – overcoming a team who have got good results against us in the past on their own turf. So we have to be ready and up for it.

Catch you all tomorrow.