*Delete as appropriate
With Arsenal suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Man United, the newspapers have been able to riot for two days, free to write anything they want safe in the knowledge it'll be gobbled up by desperate Gooners. It's obvious Arsenal need to buy; they lost Fabregas and Nasri, arguably their two best players, over the summer and haven't yet replaced them. Journalists and avid tweeters have used this situation to pointlessly name-drop hundreds of potential targets, players that could leave their current clubs, but probably won't. A quick twitter search of "Arsenal target" brings up a huge list of names. Here's just a few:
Arteta, Baines, Cahill, Fellaini, Jagielka (Everton), Johnstone, Tevez (Man City), Cahill (Bolton), Samba (Blackburn), Hazard (Lille), M'Vila (Rennes), Kaka (Real Madrid), Sneijder (Inter), Dann (Birmingham), Elia (HSV - possibly transfered to Juventus today), Bent (Villa), Alex, Benayoun (Chelsea), Gotze, Hummels (Dortmund), Martin (Sochaux).
The list goes on. Obviously I'm well aware that these are mainly wishful thinking fans simply expressing opinion, but it's such a naive opinion. Here's three tweets I've selected to illustrate my point:
Breathe them in, and look at how many exclamation marks are involved. These are your average Arsenal fans. Look how ridiculously optimistic they are. Look how they all seem to think Gary Cahill is a worthy signing. Look how they've been completely influenced by the way the media has hyped up English football. Inspirational.
As a firm believer that the EPL is not the best in the league, it's no surprise to me that instead of signing Cahill/Jagielka or Baines for ludicrous amounts of money, Wenger has cleverly went abroad and picked up two experience players (Santos & Mertesacker) on the cheap. Mertesacker is a year older than Cahill, and has 72 more caps at international level. Looking at honours, Gary Cahill has a goal of the season award, and a players player of the year award at Bolton. Mertesacker came third at two World Cups and was a runner up at Euro 2008 with Germany, he also has a Europa League silver medal, after getting to the final with Werder Bremen in 2009.
Cahill plays for Bolton and is valued at £12/15m. Reports suggest Wenger's signed Mertesacker for roughly £7m. From what I can see, Cahill's a decent player, but Mertesacker is better than him, by a fair distance, yet he's valued a lot lower. Why? There seems to be this current belief that an Englishman playing in the EPL is instantly better than any foreigner playing in any league. Look at this tweet from a Birmingham fan on how much he thinks young English defender Scott Dann, who was also linked with Arsenal, is worth:
By my calculations, that means he's suggesting that Dann is worth £15m. How? In my opinion he's done very little to justify a £5m price tag, let alone double figures.
Arsenal are doing things the right way; buying established players from abroad for cheap. Unfortunately, this seems to confuse some incredibly dumb fans, who can't understand why they're not stumping up for unproven players like Cahill/Dann/Samba etc.
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