When Arsenal signed Dennis Bergkamp in the summer of 1995, my next door neighbour, also an Arsenal fan, knocked on my door one Sunday morning. I opened and he didn’t say anything. He was just holding a tabloid newspaper with the back page showing and a huge smile on his face. I will always remember it.
When Arsenal signed Sol Campbell in the summer of 2001, the news felt so seismic that I went to the pub with a couple of Arsenal supporting friends (Wetherspoons in Bromley if you must know) just to talk about it, to surface the enormity of it and to celebrate. Endorphins were flowing and we just needed to decompress.
When Arsenal signed Mesut Ozil in the summer of 2013, I was working at an office in Central London and living in Balham in Southwest London. It was a relatively short tube hop home from Charing Cross but as news began to percolate of a potential deal for Ozil, I eschewed London Underground and took the bus home.
That doubled my journey time in the fug of rush hour traffic, but I didn’t want to go underground and lose my phone signal. I sat on the upper deck of the bus just scrolling my Twitter timeline. In 1995, the tabloid media controlled the flow of information and you had to buy a paper to become aware of a big new signing.
By 2001, we had text messaging, which my friends and I used to physically meet up and talk about one of the most seismic and- let’s face it- funny transfers in the club’s history. Of course, we had no means of drinking in the reaction, the fallout and the plump, juicy tears of the Tottenham fan base other than by texting Spurs fans that we knew (no replies were forthcoming).
When the Ozil signing was confirmed in 2013, it was largely a digital experience but that gave it a far grander scale. Yet it still culminated in a physical converging upon the stadium. Local Arsenal fans literally made the pilgrimage to the stadium, presumably to expend some of that energy and excitement in the vain hope that other fans will have had the same idea. At that point, Sky Sports News reporters gathering outside stadiums and training grounds to report on transfers was a big cultural phenomena.
[The moment Arsenal signed Mesut Ozil from Real Madrid – YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnyVChkmm4A)
That’s the thing about transfers, though the big and unexpected ones are capable of producing that rush of dopamine, they do not always offer the same avenue for expressing joy like a big goal does. As well as this, nowadays, transfers are very telegraphed. We tend to know about them a long time before they happen- unlike a big goal.
Martin Zubimendi is one of the best players to move during this transfer window but there was a lack of fanfare when his signing was confirmed. The fact that he is a ball playing midfielder probably contributes to this. It is a bit like buying a new boiler, quite expensive, not truly exciting but very necessary. However, the excitement over his arrival was largely quelled by the fact that we knew about his signing months before he actually arrived.
One of the reasons that the signing of Ozil was so feted was not just because of the quality of the player himself, but the context that surrounded it. After several years of selling our best players and operating on a relatively tight budget, Arsenal heavily briefed that the summer of 2013 was when the pinata was going to break.
Then for three months and more, Arsenal’s only signing was Yaya Sanogo on a free transfer, a player who literally contemplated retirement to become a postman. I didn’t necessarily agree with Chris Hudson’s now legendary Arsenal Fan TV rant from that summer, a frustrated lament that really helped launch the channel to fame. But there is no questioning that what Chris felt was widely felt across the fan base (and there was no questioning his genuineness either).
[Most Famous Ever Football Fan Rant | Either the Board or Wenger Must Go!! – YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSFEaI4HdA)
The Ozil signing was a damn burst, both because of the immediacy of the transfer window it occurred in, but also because of the years that preceded it. One year previously, Arsenal sold Robin van Persie to Manchester United. Two summers previously they sold Fabregas and Nasri and endured a summer so cataclysmic it deserves its own West End play.
So while it did seem slightly absurd that Arsenal fans literally gathered around the stadium to dance in the street when Ozil signed, the moment had the feel of Andy Dusfrane emerging from the sewer in the rain at the end of Shawshank Redemption. It marked the passing of a parsimonious era into something more prosperous. (The ensuing years didn’t entirely turn out that way, of course, the future makes fools of us all).
One of the other reasons it produced so much jubilation too was because it all happened so quickly. In 1995 with Bergkamp and 2001 with Campbell, there was transfer speculation, but most of it was the stuff of the newspaper sidebar or £1.99 a minute premium telephone lines.
In the social media age, spearheaded by reporters like David Ornstein, transfer information was now at our fingertips every minute of every day. There was little to no speculation about Ozil until the day the signing was completed. By 2013, that was already pretty rare. In 2025, such an occurrence is almost extinct.
Which brings me on to Eberechi Eze. In fairness, there had been a lot of reporting this summer that he was a player Arsenal held some interest in. The nature of the signing, however, in pure transfer soap opera terms, has all the ingredients of something that produces genuine euphoria.
He is a really fun, attacking player and Arsenal are a team who felt a little bit short back and sides in the attacking department last season. He is a former academy player and an Arsenal fan and, most importantly of all, he was about to join Tottenham before pulling the plug and moving towards the light. On top of this, it all happened in the space of a few hours.
The journey from Trossard pay rise to Havertz injury to hijacking Spurs’ signing of Eze on Wednesday was a real rollercoaster in an age when transfers have become hugely important to our shared experience as fans, but also where information is so telegraphed that there are so few surprises.
A few years ago, I wrote about how Kieran Tierney signing from Celtic had a certain old school appeal for fans who remember the signing of Charlie Nicholas (before my time). Signing Eze from Crystal Palace has that same retro appeal to those of us who recall the signing of Ian Wright (especially for those, like me, who grew up in South London). It’s break out the bruised banana and the Tribe Called Quest cassette time.
There are debates to be had, of course, about which position(s) Eze fits into but there is no denying that his qualities are needed in this Arsenal team. It reminds me a little of Arsenal Women signing Mariona from Barcelona last summer. Arsenal were a team that lacked a little creativity and struggled against low blocks, so they went and signed one of the best creative players in the game.
There were some wrinkles about where she slotted in; she played on the left, on the right and as a 10 before eventually settling into a Santi Cazorla like deeper midfield role. Ultimately little of that tinkering mattered, Arsenal won the Champions League and Mariona won the WSL and PFA Player of the Year.
To me, this is the sort of signing Manchester City made in their pomp, or that Chelsea made under Abramovic. The back half of your team needs careful assembling, in attack, there is more a sense of stacking talent and allowing things to sort themselves out. If a big player falls by the wayside as a result, well, that’s just the cost of doing business (and you might even make some money from sales as a result, imagine that!)
It feels, if you will excuse the parlance, like a big dog move. But once again, just as importantly, it’s really, really funny because, in the words of our dear friend Michael Keshani, the joke is somehow always on Tottenham. And in this cold, uncertain and quite mad world, that constancy is comforting.