Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta is looking to rebuild his squad after transfer listing four of his players ahead of the summer transfer window, according to reports.
The Gunners are having a decent season in the Premier League but are once again likely to finish as runners-up for a third season in a row.
Arsenal, who have a game in hand, are currently 15 points adrift of Premier League leaders Liverpool with only 10 matches to play after being held to a 1-1 draw against Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday.
It would take a minor miracle for the Reds to collapse in a fashion that would allow the Gunners back into the title race, having lost just one Premier League match all season.
Arsenal have lost a number of key attacking players to injury in recent weeks and have turned to midfielder Mikel Merino to fill the role of a makeshift striker.
And Arteta is now looking to revamp his squad with the Daily Mirror claiming that Arsenal are ‘ready to offload four current first-team stars in a bid to fund a major transfer splurge in the summer’.
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There are ‘murmurs of a major squad overhaul on the cards’ with the Gunners’ ‘need for a centre forward is no secret, and it’s understood they’re also in the market for wingers and centre midfielders’.
And now Arsenal have put Oleksandr Zinchenko, Jorginho, Thomas Partey and Kieran Tierney ‘on the transfer list’ as the Gunners look to fund a ‘transfer war chest’ for Arteta.
Arsenal are ‘unlikely to fetch’ with three of the four players out of contract in the summer transfer window anyway – but they are expected to save lots of money on wages, with Partey on around £200,000 a week.
After their match against Man Utd on Sunday, Arteta thought his side deserved more from the game, he told a post-match press conference: “It’s frustrating not to win the game with everything we did, especially in the first half, the first 43-44 minutes, how we dominated every aspect of the game, full control.
“We lacked a little bit in the final 15-20 metres, to have more shots, more purpose, more direction, the last pass, the last action, but the game is clearly for us and in the direction that we wanted.
“Unfortunately, one long ball and we didn’t manage that ball well, we give it away, created a foul in a really dangerous area where you have to rely on them not take advantage of the individual quality and that’s a really bad bet against Manchester United.
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“They capitalised on that and in the second half, we tried to generate the momentum, we scored a goal and my feeling was that they were really struggling. They couldn’t get out and I feel like they didn’t have the legs to do that, we opened the door for them to maybe win the game.
“We gave some very unusual balls away and very basic things were done really poorly. Even thought we had three big chances, the reality is that David saved us and at the end, we could have lost the game.”
When asked about dropping points in their last three Premier League matches, Arteta added: “Today the efficiency we had in the last 20 metres, it wasn’t good enough, we know that. Those are big parts of a lot of things that the game demands when you come to Old Trafford and what we did was superb, but at the end, you have to capitalise on that when the team is so dominant and much better than the opposition and today we didn’t.
“Then you have to overturn a result, which we know is very difficult to do here. You have to expose yourself a little bit more because you have to take more risks and then the game could have gone their way in the last few minutes.”
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