White's been a fine player for us and this season sees him moving pretty seamlessly from centre half to right back, few injuries, few errors, involved in two of our goals at the weekend … he may not be world class, but there's a generous handful of people on here who won't stop talking about his £50m fee as if it was more than, say, 50% over the odds. The argument about opportunity cost is a bit more salient but in absolute terms White's fee just … wasn't that outrageous.
Same goes for Aubameyang when the "massive" disaster of last January has never been worth more than £15m or so in real terms. The conflict issue was far more serious than the money side of it, and the way we were all talking about it, I thought Arteta might lose the dressing room. Until of course that definitely didn't happen, which was interesting.
Anyway, all big clubs make a fair few transfer "errors" that cost these sorts of sums, the issue for Arsenal is the systematic one, the problem we've got with players leaving and the low fees we're earning for them, not any individual cases.
