The Gunners currently have a lot of dead weight lying around who are of no use to Mikel Arteta. A massive exodus of players was expected earlier on but has become difficult with the financial implications of the global pandemic.
That means clubs are not willing to buy as eagerly as before or pay up the asking price majority of the times. Arsenal could potentially raise a lot of funds by offloading some of the biggest names on their books but that will be difficult, as explained by Edu himself. The Gunners did get the ball rolling this signing Willian on a free transfer from Chelsea.
“To balance the squad properly, we need to sell players, to buy players and that takes time, not just day and night,” Edu said. “It will take time but with Willian, we’ve started a big process. We’ve identified the needs in the squad and he’s the one to start to rebalance the squad as we want to. I am really excited and really happy to have a player like Willian because I’m convinced he’ll be the one to impact the team straight away.”
Mesut Ozil, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Shkodran Mustafi, Sokratis Papastathopoulos, Mohamed Elneny, Lukas Torreira, Calum Chambers and Matteo Guendouzi are all up for sale right now. With the arrival of Willian, younger players like Reiss Nelson and Joe Willock could find themselves loaned out to other clubs as well.
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