SESKO SAYS Y-ESKO - WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ARSENAL?

MEGA ROUND-UP OF ALL THE BIG-HITTING TOPICS

Arsenal are dancing towards their first signing of the summer, Benjamin Sesko. Nothing is a guarantee in the world of transfers, but this one has seemed pretty logical for a while. John Cross is still very close with the club, and he’s telling the world the player has said yes, and the fee is £45m. A number he’s most certainly landed from the club and one that would indicate the rumours about the £60m release clause are absolute nonsense.

I wrote about Sesko at the start of May being a hot option for Arsenal, one of the reasons we’re moving on him, and not an Ivan Toney like figure is because Kai Havertz has given Arteta some breathing room. We have a striker operating like an £80m player, so we can afford to raise the floor with a player who can sit behind him for a season. 

Sesko turned 21 years old today, a baby in striking terms. He gives us something we don’t have… an out-and-out forward who dreams of goals. He’s 6ft5, very fast, powerful, good with both feet, and raised in a system that demands 100% effort on and off the ball. This is the player who replaced Haaland at Red Bull Salzburg because he has some of the same traits.

Arsenal will have looked at the market and made a judgement call on some of the prices in the market.

• Gyokeres - £100m

• Isak - £100m

• Toney £80m

• Oshimen - £120m

You get something slightly different with all those names, but you don’t get value at those prices, and there’s no chance of selling those players on. Not that selling is the most important feature - but all three of those strikers come with their own risks. Isak is injury-prone, Gyokeres was a Coventry player two seasons ago and might just be on a hot streak, and Ivan Toney is older. He has suffered addiction issues, though certainly a good player who could make the jump.

Benjamin Sesko is most certainly a gamble. In my personal opinion, he’s as raw as Darwin Nunez, but half the price. That’s a great bet to be placing. From a weaponry perspective, just ask yourself this: Would Sesko have been more involved in the Arsenal run-in than Eddie or Jesus? I think the answer is a big yes. He’s strong, a goal hunter, and he’ll be a total menace in the box after he’s been coached by setpiece GOD Nico Jover.

That means we have some work to do with players heading out the door. This is the end of the road for Eddie Nketiah. He’s a good player, his biggest weakness is probably that he’s so average coming off the bench. This is a guy who needs to feel the love in a first team. There will be offers, the data guys in the Premier League like his profile, so don’t be shocked to see him leave for a decent fee. Remember, we got a £42m fee for Balogun, and Eddie is a far better option.

Gabriel Jesus is surplus as it stands. It might be harsh to judge him on a season that was themed with ‘return from injury’ but the reality is, even during his hot streak, he still went 11 games without a goal. He could be a good rotation option on the left, but where does that leave Martinelli and free-scoring Bossard? I could easily see a move to Spain or Germany where Vincent Kompany has just landed.

Talking of Germany, Vincent Kompany has taken the job after Bayern offered it to 72 managers who all refused. The charismatic ex-captain of City has been written off hard by the whole of Europe because Burnley tanked in the Premier League. Personally, I think that’s harsh. Getting out of the Championship whilst changing the DNA of Burnley was an incredible achievement. We know he’ll have the respect of the dressing room, he’s going to have Pep Guardiola ideas, and he’ll be at the biggest club in Germany. It could work.

But it would work better if the rumors are true and he signs Sambi Lokonga and Oleks Zinchenko from Arsenal in a double deal for the ages! The Ukrainian is 26 years old. Not sure if we’ll get more than we paid for him but the stories are saying £39m is achievable. Sambi is very young, he had a decent season at Burnley, we have to get at least £30m if a Bundesliga giant is in for him. 

As you can see - our assets are in a different class this summer. There’s no reason we can’t claw back £120m this summer.

Then it’s a question of who we sign - but a top-quality young striker is certainly a good place to start. It was also good to see other publications are now linking us with a move for Douglas Luiz from cash-needy Aston Villa.

I’m on a plane heading to Miami right now so I’ll write about something I was going to ignore. 

Jamaica-gate.

Reiss Nelson and Emile Smith Rowe have taken a trip to Jamaica for a lovely little jaunt to the Caribbean. I’m down for players doing whatever the fuck they want, but I do wonder if Arteta is of that mindset.

On one trip, you have Odegaard and Havertz going away on a Below Deck style yacht trip. They’re playing chess and doing mostly middle-aged boring things I find particularly appealing. Especially the part of the trip where they stayed in an empty looking luxury hotel. Dreamy. Take me there. Get me the chessboard and a really heavy book on the human misunderstanding of animal senses and we’re cooking (did you know worms move to the surface when they hear banging because that is their defence mechanism for escaping moles and cows have a 360 view of the world which is why their eyes are so big and dogs noses are built so they can sense smell when they breath in and out BUT human sense of smell is a match for them across lots of metrics so don’t be intimidated by them).

Then you have Reiss and ESR. Reiss held up a Leon Bailey shirt and captioned it with LEGEND. Cleary, he forgot the damage done to our title hopes by the winger. The next faux pa was them getting snapped out in a night club like it was the peak Auba years. One of their friends was wearing a Smith Rowe Arsenal shirt, presumably to make sure any ladies they bumped into knew that they were amongst football royalty. None of this bothers me - if I were a footballer, I’d be out of the Arteta system within 4 days. But for two players that managed sub-800 minutes this season, you wonder if the Arteta Eye of Sauron is paying attention.

UK Garage MC Mike Skinner was very famous in the 2000s. He said in interviews that he’d be a nobody if he went to celebrity parties, so he’d prefer to go out to Bogner Regis nightclubs to get the attention he wanted. Emile and Reiss earn £190k a week between them. They could go to high-end establishments where taking pictures is an embarrassing act. They chose the Mike Skinner route, and now their excursion is on Twitter… and Mikel has an account there.

Sometimes, you have to look at the behaviours of more successful people around you and deduce whether replicating what they do could be a good idea. The folly of youth is you don’t see it until it’s too late.

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Ok, that’s me done; check out the latest Arsenal Therapy Session. It was a good one. x