Morning, welcome to a brand new week.
Arsenal travel from the sunny climes of Spain to Ireland this week where the weather, after weeks of quite lovely summer, is set to be a bit more ‘changeable’, as they say. We had some rain for the first time in weeks last night!
There’s a game against Real Betis at Lansdowne Road on Wednesday, and we’ll await transfer developments over the course of the coming week. In the absence of key World Cup players, the presence of guys like Fabio Vieira, Reiss Nelson etc is useful, but I do wonder if and when we might see an outgoing or two. We know Christian Norgaard is heading to Everton this week for a medical, and Hamburg are interested in Vieira although not quite willing/able to match what we want in terms of a fee.
One player I didn’t mention yesterday, but who Mikel Arteta was asked about after the win over Girona, was Ethan Nwaneri. Referencing his loan spell at Marseille last season, the manager said:
When you just stand in front of him, you sense the maturity and he looks like a different man. The experience on paper, it wasn’t ideal but I think he went through something that is going to help him a lot in his career.
I am curious to see what happens with him, because when we get everyone back, and more than likely make a significant signing in the shape of Bruino Guimaraes, midfield is a crowded place. We’ll have the Brazilian, along with Declan Rice, Martin Zubimendi, Martin Odegaard, Eberechi Eze, Myles Lewis-Skelly, and Mikel Merino (who moonlights in there when he’s not being the hottest striker in the world). So, while there’s a lot of football to play in the season ahead, and players whose minutes need to be managed early in the season, it’s not easy to see Nwaneri get the the playing time he really needs.
He’s still only 19, quite young in the grand scheme of things, but after something of a breakthrough season in 2024-25, he mustered just 927 minutes of playing time in the last campaign. I wasn’t against the loan move, per se, but clearly it didn’t go as well as he and Arsenal would have liked after Roberto de Zerbi left just weeks after he arrived. The Italian has since demonstrated he’s a man of zero conscience and integrity by becoming manager of Sp*rs.
There’s been some talk of interest from Fulham, and a story about how AC Milan are interested in a deal which sees Arsenal insert a buy-back clause, and I can see how that would make sense on paper. How much we actually need to sell this summer is not exactly clear, but after big spending last summer, and a potential mega-deal on the horizon for Vinicius Junior, you could see how a chunk of cash for an Academy player would be tempting. As I’ve said before, my preference would be find a more suitable loan deal this summer that gives him a chance to play, and gives Arsenal the opportunity to delay any kind of final decision on him for another 12 months. I don’t think his value would tank in that time, bar some kind of significant injury, but you shouldn’t let that influence the decision making.
I suppose the other thing to say is that there’s probably another world where we don’t even discuss the possibility of letting such a talented youngster go, but that’s a world where Max Dowman doesn’t exist. It’s quite rare to see two left-footed attacking midfielders of such potential emerge at more or less the same time, and even with the age difference, if there was a through-line between Nwaneri’s future and Dowman’s pathway, you wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of Arsenal’s thinking. Anyway, we’ll see what happens, Nwaneri is likely to feature in Dublin this week, another chance to impress and stake a claim, and I’m interested to see him up close, so to speak.
Ok, I think I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll have an Arsecast Extra a bit later this morning, and we’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com, so fire away using the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
For now, have a good one.
