It's a case of "spreadsheet says" with Madueke. The moneyball guys are the ones who sneakily like him. Cannon Stats has just done this profile which shows he compares fairly well to the likes of Semenyo and Mbeumo, who are both on the market for over £60m.
https://www.cannonstats.com/p/noni-madueke-would-be-luxury-backup
The argument is Madueke gets very involved when he plays, and he has underperformed both xA and xG at Chelsea. This makes it at least possible for him to have a Trossard-like impact at Arsenal. And the proposed fee circulated by Chelsea is high, but is less than some others in an absurd market.
As far as Madueke coming in as Saka backup goes, I can't see Saka being rotated ever, not even for 30 minutes at a stretch, unless the understudy is a fully developed professional.
Relying on an untrusted option such as Nwaneri, who will only now be allowed to join the dressing room with the adults, would mean Saka going down injured again next season, and therefore a massive risk to our aspirations.
This creates a thorny problem for recruitment that reduces the search space. We need some unlikely player who'd expect to start at almost any club, but for some reason is still willing to play a squad role in order to reset his career. And that's why Madueke I suppose: he can play at Premier League level in a few different positions and has upside, but he's still surplus at clusterfuck Chelsea.
That argument having been made, I still can't bring myself to give a shit about any of this until we lock down a striker signing. And the earliest movement on wide players is surely the end of this cursed Club World Cup, given both Chelsea and Madrid are still in it.
