Mikel Arteta
Mikel Arteta
A teenager who cannot move until he is 18 still has a season to play. The club that holds him on loan usually wants the extra six months.
Parent clubs in a relegation fight are a worse classroom than a side near the top and in Europe. The paperwork can wait. The matches cannot.
July is the arrival. January is only a decision about where he spends the spring.
Andria Bartishvili is expected to extend his loan at Iberia 1999 by six months before he joins Arsenal in July 2027, The Sun reports. The Georgian winger is 17. Arsenal agreed a £3.9million fee with Kolkheti 1913 and a pre-contract that brings him to north London once he turns 18. He cannot complete the switch before then.
His current loan at Iberia runs until the end of this calendar year. The Georgian season runs from February to December. Kolkheti are in the second tier and at risk of going down, which would leave him in the third tier for the first half of 2027 if he went back. Iberia are near the top of the top flight and in the Conference League. The growing expectation is that he stays there. He is settled. Iberia want to keep him as long as they can.
Arsenal announced the deal on 11 September. He can play as a winger or an attacking midfielder. He made his Erovnuli Liga debut with Kolkheti in 2025 and was named the division’s best under-17. This year he scored the winner in a 1-0 win over Gagra. He has moved through Georgia’s under-16s, under-17s, under-18s and under-21s, scoring on his under-17 debut against Slovenia.
The comparison with Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the lazy one. The useful detail is that Kvaratskhelia was scouted for Napoli by Maurizio Micheli, now part of Andrea Berta’s recruitment group. Liverpool were also credited with interest before Arsenal moved early. None of that makes a 17-year-old a first-team winger in 2027.
Max Dowman turns 17 on 31 December and cannot be loaned out before then. Bartishvili is the other way round. He is already out, and the plan is to leave him out until the summer. No new contract has been announced by Iberia. Until it is, the file is an expectation: six more months in Tbilisi, then London Colney in July, with a Conference League run still to finish.