DiabyKungFu
I'll walk you through it.
The intent of this comment (quoted below, that you also quoted above) is to point out Arteta and Edu's former optionality about Saliba's future at Arsenal. The effort that was made to sign versatile Ben White forms part of the evidence.
Burnwinter Arteta and Edu didn't spent up to sign Ben White, who without any coincidence has the qualities to start for Arsenal at both centre half and right back, because they held the view Saliba wasn't going to make it at Arsenal.
Why point this out about Saliba's case? To convey by example Arsenal will still be open about Smith Rowe's future. Due to a combination of factors including his recent surgery, interrupted season, and great talent, anything else would amount to gratuitous bad management.
Burnwinter The only things I'm confident of here are that it doesn't matter till summer, Smith Rowe's not going to be sold, Arteta doesn't hate him, and the final outcome's not certain.
You "objectively inferred" Smith Rowe will be discarded one way or another, and claimed the only question's whether Arsenal does a Maitland-Niles and messes up getting value from a transfer. But you're wrong.
DiabyKungFu The general takeaway here is that my scorching hot take (in football and in life in general) is that things are usually exactly as they appear to be.
Sounds good till you open a book, I guess. The wide-ranging relations of phenomena to noumena have been a crucial theme of ontological enquiry for centuries.
But if we do pick up Occam's Razor, restrict ourselves to the empirical and leave aside pipe-puffing about "objective inference", I say it's easy to spot Smith Rowe's Arsenal future remains undecided.
