Tam if you don’t think we could have Gyokeres tomorrow for a price well within our financial means, you lack imagination. Whether it’s quibbling over installments, a few million or £10m, it’s easily within our gift to get it done.
Sorry mate, and with all respect (sincerely), I disagree it's me that lacks imagination here.
Yes, Arsenal has a problem, which is that the Gyökeres deal has not (yet) been closed.
That we jumped from £80m to £100m on Rice or that we swiftly paid £50m plus for Madueke, these are the precedents that demonstrate the issues on the Gyökeres deal are not the same. These are the prior evidence that when money solves Arsenal's problem and Arsenal's problem needs solving, Arsenal spends money. We can give many, many other examples since the inception of the Project™.
Now take the contrapositive and surmise that Arsenal believes either Arsenal's problem doesn't need solving (yet), or that money doesn't (yet) solve Arsenal's problem.
So either Arsenal doesn't rate the question of the timing of this transfer as highly as the squeakiest wheels in the fanbase claiming Gyökeres not already surging across the Bifrost to Singapore and Hong Kong has already devastated our preseason, or Arsenal doesn't fancy that pouring an extra pot of gold over Varandas is going to turn him into the good-natured leprechaun we would prefer him to be.
In either case, an insistence Arsenal is "run by amateurs" doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The people who run Arsenal are by definition professionals. Whinging pundits are the would-be amateurs. The fans on the whole don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Aside from the differently conceptualised gritty hard-nosed economic factors underpinning any deal and its possible timing, it's clear enough there are elevated feelings on the Gyökeres deal and that the player and the Sporting president have blurred the lines of propriety in their interactions. They're lawyering up after all.
But there is nothing I have read to suggest we are forced to resolve the situation by bidding up a margin on the deal that you lot would rightly whinge about as intolerable. What would force us is another club Gyökeres would want to go to moving in on the deal. That could be a possibility—but which? Liverpool who just dropped €95m on Ekitike? Chelsea who are actively trying to dispense with a parcel of unwanted strikers? City who have Haaland? Newcastle who are in a state of confusion regarding Isak? Maybe, just maybe, if Isak did move on … but for now there's no English or Spanish Champions League club that looks a contender for the player.
More likely we reason that because there's open war between our target and his club and he is obsessed with Arsenal, we can afford to wait on this deal in a way we couldn't with those like Madueke's which are also being complained about, but for the opposite reason, we've supposedly been far too quick to spend there.
I guess there's a chance we got side-swiped by Sporting in such a way that we paid up on Madueke in the false belief we were set to save on Gyökeres. But it seems far more likely the Madueke deal was expedited at a high fee because it had to be due to possible competition for him, and the Gyökeres deal is not being expedited because there is little competition.
The level of resentment circulating is over the top for me.
