DRAGGED INTO THE MUD FOR VINI JNR — NOW WHAT?

THIS IS A VERY LONG BLOG ABOUT MANY ARSENAL THINGS, BUCKLE UP!

I’m kind of having fun this summer transfer window, but, you know, stag do fun… I’m drinking, we’re doing the right things, but I’m out of my comfort zone, talking to people I’m not used to fraternising with and I’m fully aware the hangover will outsize the joy I’m having pretending to be a big dog at a bottle service night club in which I am the oldest and poorest patron.

Did that make sense? No? Well, we’re off to a bad start. But please, continue.

The Vini Jnr deal seemed to go off the rails yesterday as Gary Cotterill of all people seemingly put a dagger into Arsenal’s hopes when he declared that Madrid won’t let him go even if he doesn’t sign a new deal.

My suspicion from the off has been that Madrid are so perception-sensitive that they would forgo £100m rather than seem like they were bullied into selling a player they wanted. Especially when the English club is nouveau big daaaawg in their eyes. Letting him go on a free has many benefits if you’re a Trumpian owner of a football team.

1. Reframe the L: You make the player look like the one that wronged the greatest club on the planet, so no one can accuse you of being poor, or ugly compared to the beauty of Arsenal.

2. Traitor Narrative: You have a whole year to desecrate the character of the player you want to keep, rendering them damaged goods by the time they leave on a free the following season.

3. Annoying guy at the bar: When I was 13 years old, I took my first work experience at a famous boutique hotel in Holland Park. I polished glasses, made beds, met a hotel manager who said ‘let’s rock and roll’ a lot… then I was put on duty with the front-of-house concierge guys. I was taken to my first pub ‘lunch’ by a guy in his mid-thirties who was the resident ‘is it beer o’clock?’ at 1030am office lad. He gave me my first Red Bull; you can imagine how that landed. As he crassly flirted with the older lady behind the bar, he noted that this pointed strategy was designed to bypass the heartache of normal women walking away from his cold call shanter, namely because she was stuck with his bad jokes for an extended period of time, and his charms would eventually break through (even at 13, I sensed this strategy had not delivered for him). Madrid, with a whole year on their hands, could put in a lot of work to make sure that a signature lands. They can have conversations we can’t. Jose Mourinho dad jokes and flirtations over the course a year in the trenches might prove fruitful.

This transfer just doesn’t have the hallmarks of an Arsenal win, at least right now. The story is Vini wants to be treated like a superstar, versus a fluffer for Mbappé… and he wants the pesetas in his deal to prove the love. Arsenal being invited to the table feels like one of those high-stakes poker games with Tobey Maguire — if you’re a normo at that table, it’s because you’re going to end up without a house. We won’t lose a house, but we might get carried away with the sweet nothings and end the summer having to gas up £68m Savinho and those first three games at City where he looked like a KING.

This sort of deal, if it were to happen, looks like it’ll go more like Özil than anything else - end of the window, last minute, a moment of madness.

Right now, we just don’t know who is holding what cards:

Do Madrid have the money to offer Vini?

Is there a price that Vini will say yes to?

Do they actually want to sell Vini, so they can rebuild… but want to make it look like a fight for the aesthetics?

Do Arsenal want to look like they’re in this deal, even though it’s a long shot, because the optics of their own summer have been really second rate?

Is this a Kyrie Irving thing… the player just wants out of the LeBron shadow, even if it’s detrimental to future earnings?

This is a bar fight, with the UFC heavyweight who knows mixed martial arts, in 19 different fighting dialects (if you like fighting, that probably didn’t make sense, but it sounded cool when I wrote it)… the football club we’re fighting here is an unbeaten great. They always win. The idea that the team that can’t get a buyer for Fabio Vieira or Gabriel Martinelli is going to somehow rip Vini Jnr from Madrid just feels a touch fanciful.

But hey, happy to look like an idiot here.

William Saliba will be out for four months, which brings him back, at best, just after the second international break in November. The club, according to many random journos, will be going in for another centre back. That won’t be John Stones, who went to Inter Milan (thank the lord). A Brazilian journalist reckons a deal is coming soon… sooner than Bruno. So who knows who that is.

A couple of things here… if you’re adding another centre back, that means you are writing Ben White off as cover. Which I suspect means there’s still a chance he’s moved on this summer. It also means the club might be worried about the return of Jurrien Timber. He’s had a minor op, but there’s no guarantee that’ll solve his problems. It’s all a bit shaky at the back, we’ll see how worried the club is by how large the fee they put down on a centre back. We’ll also see how much faith they have in Mosquera… if it’s Konsa, not very much. If it’s a younger player like Ramón of Como, maybe we’re talking a different type of deal.

My biggest worry about the new season is that Arteta has put a whole group of people in place that’ll just agree with him.

“First of all I saw the energy in the bodies, in their eyes, how they look. And then the players, it was incredible — the shape that they have all come back, better than ever. That tells you the direction that we want to seek and the culture that we have set. Then the way they are training, the questions that they ask you, the direction that they want to take. They are all super powerful signs.

“It is all programmed.

“We have three different pre-seasons with different groups. But the most important thing is not the programme, it is the attitude behind the programme. When I speak to Kai, he is desperate to come back tomorrow and Viktor the same and Piero the same. And when I speak to Declan, he is already talking, ‘OK, if I come this day, then I can play then’, and the rest the same. And that is much more powerful than the programme.

“We want to adapt to the context, which is different. There are a lot of opportunities within them because most of them have great experiences throughout the tournament and have really positive performances this past season as well.”

That Declan line did make me dry-heave. Managers leaning into players who say they are fit when they are not has a very long history of not panning out well. If he’s back for the Community Shield, we’re in big trouble next season.

What would salve some of those blistering thoughts is new players. The Bruno transfer story, in my opinion, would be the most important deal we could do this summer. He’s a ready-made that could eat up Declan minutes without too much damage to the way we play. If Declan is heroin, then Bruno is a fine methadone substitute… Arteta won’t know the difference.

There are just no bad outcomes from a football perspective this season if we get Bruno for around £75m. He slots right into our system. He’s intelligent, relentless, nasty, and he can shoot and pass as well as anyone in world football… he also seems like the kind of guy that gets agitated when he has to introduce himself as a Newcastle player at World Cup duty. He is a latecomer to the elite spheres of the game… and he will make his mark.

Honestly, can you imagine how it’ll feel to us? Only Meslier to calm the cravings? Bruno will be massive for the fans and massive to the dressing room. He’s the sort of player you want to line up with. Just an all-action hero. I really hope Berta can get this deal done with Kia… and if Kia makes it happen, I might be prepared to forgive the Willian deal. Cédric Soares? We have some work to do there.

This comment from Arteta is drawing a lot of attention, the indication being that it means we’re close to something.

“A lot is happening.

“We all know about the context of this transfer window. From ownership to the board, the sporting director and myself, we know that we want to take this club to a different level. That is going to require a better squad, better individuals. We have identified where we have opportunities to grow and to improve and to evolve our game and what is going to be needed to achieve that. Hopefully very soon we can start to put things in a very concrete way.”

You could read this comment in the sense that the club is going to get something magnificent done… you could also read it as the sort of comment a manager who is more psycho than me or you when it comes to bringing in great players, making a pretty big statement about what he wants as he negotiates a new deal worth close to £20m a year, plus bonuses.

Arteta won’t sign for just money, he’ll seek assurances about the level of talent he wants at the club, and the amount of investment… so I kind of see these comments in a bit of a grey area. Clearly, Arsenal are moving at big targets, I just wonder what happens if Vini stays at Madrid, Kvara moving out of PSG becomes impossible, and we’re left with a plan C that looks a lot like what we had in place before.

Too negative? Maybe I’m just protecting my feelings here. This doesn’t feel like a window of abundance for anyone right now… and the level of talent we need to go to ‘a different level’ doesn’t seem clear to me right now. Or it seems clear, but out of reach.

Final bit from me is on Achilles injuries in the NBA. A new study just dropped… and obviously, as a sports science amateur expert, I jumped on it.

Short-Term Workload Patterns Before Achilles Tendon Rupture in National Basketball Association Players: A Descriptive Epidemiology Study

This is my robot summarising the report for the thickos (me baby).

What they studied:

• Researchers looked at every NBA player who tore their Achilles tendon between 2014 and 2025 (19 players in total) to see if there was a pattern in how much they’d been playing right before the injury.

Key findings:

• Playing time spiked before the injury. In the 10 and 15 games right before players tore their Achilles, they were playing noticeably more minutes per game than their season average. Basically, a burst of heavy use seemed to precede the injury.

• No single ‘type’ of player was at risk. Age, position (guard, forward, center), starter vs. bench role, and whether someone played multiple sports in high school didn’t make a meaningful difference. This wasn’t limited to any particular kind of player.

• Experience mattered, but in an interesting way. More experienced (veteran) players tended to carry heavier overall workloads in the season they got injured. Younger, less experienced players who tore their Achilles were actually doing so under relatively lighter workloads, suggesting different factors might be at play for them.

• Season-long workload wasn’t unusual. Comparing the injury season to a player’s career average, there wasn’t a big difference in total distance run or total minutes. It was really the short-term spike right before the injury that stood out, not a season-long overload.

• Schedule congestion (back-to-backs, games in a 30-day window) didn’t show a clear link to these injuries, which is somewhat surprising given how much this gets talked about in sports media.

• 2024-25 had a record number of Achilles tears (6 of the 19 cases in this study happened that season alone), which is part of what prompted the research.

So, in short, a small sample size, but the conclusion seems to be that sudden spikes in activity tend to have the biggest impact when it comes to one of the worst injuries in sport. My amateur take here… don’t risk your big-dog players in domestic cups, especially after a World Cup. Be gentle with players returning from major injuries… and be very empathetic when games come extremely thick and fast in December and towards the end of the season (even if players say they are gagging to play 9 games in 3 days).

Also… make sure that the 24-person squad you adopt has at least 18 players who are judged by the manager to be decent. I don’t want to hear that Norgaard is really good in training. No one wants to be complimented for trying really hard at school, but failing the test. We need some genuine selection headaches next season. I want to see Myles robbing Zubi. Put Ethan in the mixer and trust him. Let’s see Marli Salmon taking right back minutes in the domestic cups. All these small risks we take reduce the chance of minutes spikes that break our players.

Also… let’s also remember minutes spikes aren’t just those you see on the pitch. Kai Havertz coming back, then bombing straight back out was just as much to do with the minutes we don’t see… on the training pitch. We have a setpiece coach bonused on setpiece goals. How often does he have players on their feet after training practicing their moves? It all adds up.

Arsenal ranked third for injuries in the Premier League over the past two seasons. We were one of the worst in the league last season. This new raft of specialists have to be able to wrestle that to the ground this season… because if we can ride out the first 4 months of the season without too much damage, we’ll be cooking in January. My fear is, as you know, an exhausting season, combined with an exhausting World Cup, is going to be a mighty sizeable mountain to climb.

Ok, I’m getting all negative again, someone take the laptop from me…

WOAH, give me back my shiny block of metal, I have one last thing… Kroupi, out for 4 months with a fifth metatarsal fracture? Not for me boss… not for me. That is bad news I don’t want a part of. Low blood supply to a fragile bone… baaaad news.

See you in the comments, check out the latest Dugout with Simon Collings and have a damn fine time.