According to France Football, 22 year old Nimes striker Anthony Koura is in advanced negotiations to join Arsenal.

The player is currently out of Ligue 2 action with a vertebrae injury and will only return next month.

His entourage has held discussions with Newcastle United, Sunderland, Stoke City and Monaco, but London club Arsenal have in recent days launched their offensive for the player, according to the report.

The striker is understood to have caught the eye of Arsène Wenger and certain Arsenal scouts with 9 goals this season and with the profile of a rapid and vivacious attacking talent.

The latest murmurs are that talks are well advanced and a deal could be concluded rapidly.

Looks like we've found our top top class striker after 5 years of Giroud.

😆 A Ligue 2 played with a broken spine. That's vintage Wenger!
That profile fits with Yaya Sanogo when we first heard of our interest btw. 🙁

Sanogo was a perfectly fine gamble to be fair. Low financial risk versus high potential payoff. He just didn't work out. Our mistake wasn't to take a chance on him. Our mistake was to count on him coming good and then make plans accordingly. It still begs belief how much Wenger was convinced that Yaya would be a class player. He was effectively our second choice striker before he had ever kicked a ball for us.

Agree with all that.

not a position to be gambling on with such players and certainly not in a situation to be gambling on in such positions me thinks.

No, you buy talented youngsters when you can, but you certainly don't let your first team be reliant on them.

Low financial risk?

Yaya probably got a decent sign-on and reportedly earns 40k a week.

By the end of this season he'd have earned more than 7m in salary not including his sign-on.

For what? He's got a grand total of 0 league goals for us.

That's money Wenger could've used for a top striker.

Couple million spread across a few years, and the loan clubs have paid the largest chunk of his wages. It's pocket change in the grand scheme of things. It's precisely the kind of gamble we should try more often. We'll get a couple of million from someone when we offload him. And if not, no biggie. We made money off guys like Afobe and Simpson in the past when they left. Even Bartley. There's absolutely nothing apart from Wenger's crappy transfer ideology that prevented us from signing other strikers in addition to Sanogo.

I refuse to believe that Wenger is going to add to his MASH unit by bringing in another casualty. Can't be true.
Not so sure if Yaya is the guy we should've gambled on, but we certainly need more gambles. I am happy seeing Iwobi, Bellerin, etc., getting regular time. Not everybody will work out, but now we are fortunate that we have a minimum cost right back who is considered good enough to succeed Dani Alves. The key is to dump people quickly when they don't show progress.

Assuming Sanogo's loan is more of a selling advertisement rather than a training experience, Wenger did get rid of him quick enough.

The problem is that Wenger had us relying on him to be a part of the first team when he very obviously wasn't good enough.

Gunner89 wrote:

Low financial risk?

Yaya probably got a decent sign-on and reportedly earns 40k a week.

By the end of this season he'd have earned more than 7m in salary not including his sign-on.

For what? He's got a grand total of 0 league goals for us.

That's money Wenger could've used for a top striker.

i always love the word reportedly. you don't really believe that bullshit do you? no way he's on 40k a week. i heard he's on half that "reportedly". and a decent sign-on? come on, you're more than likely talking hundreds of thousand, not millions. he was a ligue 2 player coming off major injuries, we weren't in a bidding war.

All that bs seems to turn out pretty accurate in the cases the clubs publicly report figures so yeah I tend to believe them- Ones like the beeb, Guardian and telegraph.

well let's put it to rest that he's making 40k a week. he's clearly not good enough, we don't need fictional wages to beat him over the head with as well.

There is no way yaya is on 40k

Honestly, who cares? He isn't here, hasn't been here for a while, and won't hopefully be here in the future. Signing him wasn't the big problem here, even if he is on 40k, but making him an integral part of the first team was. Financially, Yaya Sanogo didn't hold us back one big from signing other players.

I would love it if we sign more players like Yaya and loan them out. Zero risks, good potential, whats there to lose?

Have a laugh boys and girls.

Arsene Wenger is being ordered to go on the biggest spending spree of his career. Arsenal will not consider giving him a new deal unless he competes for the likes of Toni Kroos, Gonzalo Higuain, Paul Pogba, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and John Stones in the transfer market this summer (The Sun)