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Arsenal dropped a little Friday evening special by announcing the purchase of Noni Madueke from Chelsea. The powerful winger has signed a five-year deal with the club, and one would assume he’ll join up with the team after a break following the Club World Cup.
The club has gone to great lengths to make sure everyone knows this: they actually spent **£48.5m** on his services, and they did it because of underlying numbers, age, and Chelsea having the player tied into a 55-year contract.
This will be the last time I hang on this topic because I want it to be known that I am actually **very** excited about the talent we’ve purchased here, and that we finally have a viable option to compete with Bukayo Saka.
Madueke would be the largest down payment on a player this summer. The rest of the deals have been painstakingly structured over the long term. Here's some additional context on our summer, taken from high-info sources on Arsenal (journos etc):
**Arsenal transfer behavior:**
* We paid over the asking price for Zubimendi so we could pay for him over three installments.
* We screwed Valencia down from £20m to £15m.
* Arsenal went from Joan Garcia at £28m to Kepa for £5m.
* The story on Eze is we’re pushing to lower the release clause from £67m, and there have been suggestions we want to wait until later in the window to get a better deal. We also need to sell to buy.
* The Gyökeres deal now looks like it won’t go through before wheels-up on the preseason tour tomorrow because Sporting are digging their heels in over the split of the £7m in add-ons. Arsenal want them to be moonshots (Ballon d'Or winner); Sporting want them to be easy (20 game appearances).
* Gyökeres is rumored to have foregone a Sporting bonus of £2m.
* To get the fee to a place Berta liked, his agent waived £6m.
* Arsenal have taken their sweet time on all their deals—even the Zubi deal took a year—but we’re expected to believe the only one they wanted to go fast on is **Madueke**?
**Now to the Chelsea deal in particular:**
* Chelsea are under pressure to hit certain numbers that would allow them to register players for their Champions League squad. It was rumored to be £60m, but I actually think it might be more (read: under pressure to sell).
* They had already signed replacement players (read: bloated squad).
* They only finished their season this week. That means their players need three weeks off to prepare for next season (read: Arsenal are signing a player whose wages they’ll be paying while he takes a holiday. This runs counter to Gary Jacob’s leaks that Arsenal don’t like to pay player wages for unavailable talent).
* He won’t take part in preseason. Best case, he’s on the bench for the Emirates Cup.
* The player had agreed terms with Arsenal (read: he only wanted one club. Remember the low Cesc fee? Same thing).
* The player was up for sale last season, so Chelsea have been trying for two summers to get rid of him (read: there wasn’t a big market).
* The player had public discipline issues, and the manager criticised his work rate last year (read: this is a rehab project).
* The player might have great underlying numbers, but his output isn’t great.
Yet despite all of the above… player factors, Chelsea’s situation, and the way Arsenal have acted all summer, we just said, _fuck it_, let’s give them £48.5m in a lump.
Arteta LOVED Kudus. Could have got him for £7m more.
Arsenal could have taken some of that lump money and had the Gyökeres deal done and dusted.
Arsenal could have **combined** the Madueke and Gyökeres fees and had a crack at Alex Isak.
If that did in fact happen, then I am shocked. But I haven’t seen the fax. Chelsea are one of the most creative clubs when it comes to deals. This deal stinks for Arsenal on the face of it. It only works for Chelsea. I cannot for the life of me understand how a club that is quibbling over a £3m add-on fee was so ready to drop a monster cheque on a back-up right winger. Even if he was going to be our first-choice left-winger, why would that impact Arsenal’s ability to negotiate the exact same way they have with every other club… and why wouldn’t they walk away from a deal they thought too expensive, like they did with Šeško?
We’ll never know… but price-wise, this is one of the most out-of-character moves Arsenal have made since the days of Don Raul. My gut still says that common sense reasoning here is the deal is not what the media have been fed.
Ok, no more toxic vibes from me. The fee is the fee, and sometimes you overpay because you get overly emotional. Maybe Madueke is like a rare art piece and he captivated the whole club in ways we’ll never know.
The presser was pretty clear about what the club **likes** about this player. He’s versatile, ready to rock in a league he knows, he’s fast, powerful, and has great availability numbers.
It seems like Arteta loves that he knows the England boys, and one of the trigger points for the move seems to be “he’s always really good against us.” Arteta also had a similar liking for Ramsdale and Rashford for those reasons. Probably not my finest examples.
The deal makes sense to me. We have someone young who wants to have a pop at Saka’s starting berth. This is a guy who has undervalued stats from normie fans. This is like a Billy Beane move—except we identified a rare artifact in the antique shop, but instead of paying the yellow sticker price, we paid the price of the real valuation.
**Best-case scenario** for Arsenal: he’s like Adebayor, and Chelsea have taken the two bad years before the explosion.
**Worst case**: we’re overinvesting in someone with Gervinho-like output.
My gut says he’s a nice player, he’ll give us great options, and he’ll get 12+ goals in his first season—and we’ll never talk about that fee again.
Another job done. It’s expensive. But I don’t believe we did a bad deal. So I’m making this work.
Tin hat Pedro they’ll call me, and I’ll take that. The boys are also buying me a Madueke shirt with 48 on it. x
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