SUPER AGENT HAWKS €100M TALENT, IS IT REAL?

MENDES BACK ON THE SCENE, BUT CAN WE TRUST LIGA PORTUGAL?

Listen Le Grove gang, together we’ve been in the business of haaaaawt transfer summers for many years. This is the 16th summer window we’ve covered. We’re an experienced bunch. If there was a job that required transfer knowledge, we’d be pushing for CEO roles. Private jets, Saka Sauce lattes, Chigwell Grill flown into our New York working space, vacations on the OdeYacht… it’d be the best.

That’s why the hype around Gyökeres isn’t quite capturing me yet. Jorge Mendes was part of the crew of super agents that chummed up with Edu to deliver us some of the biggest Ls in sporting history. He’s now the rep of the Swedish player, and the hype appears to be generated mainly from the Portuguese side.

To recap: 3 weeks ago, Arsenal wanted a fresh-faced 21-year-old they were planning to spend £45m on - that move worked for Arsenal for a number of reasons.

• The age profile clicked with where the club is going.

• We have a striker operating at £100m levels.

• The price point suited a position that isn’t a priority right now.

You can also add content of the highest veracity from David Ornstein, who has suggested focus would shift to getting an output master out wide.

Gyökeres is 26 years old, he’s bummed around Europe for years, he’s clocked a single good season in a Portuguese league that had Fábio Vieira dropping output per minute like a Lionel Messi regen. The Swede is a risk, however hard you’ve immersed yourself in his comp videos. His fee, which will be at least £70m, plus the monster costs associated with working on Mendes deals, seems a little pricey considering the priorities.

Does this seem like an Arsenal move? Or does it look a little bit like a post-Ivan Gazidis WOW move that we might later regret?

If he was 21 years old and free-scoring like this, I’d be more inclined to join the hype train because of the sell-on value. We’ve seen plenty of kids make it big moving to England, but we’ve also seen some huge flops for big numbers:

• João Félix €127.00m

• Enzo Fernández €121.00m

• Darwin Núñez €85.00m

• Gonçalo Ramos €65.00m

Even at low prices we’ve got Fábio Silva, Fábio Vieira, Hulk… there’s quite a list of expensive flops.

We don’t have a £100m need right now and if we did have that need - surely there are safer gambles to be taking?

Joshua Kimmich is rumored to be exiting Bayern this summer. He’s apparently entertaining interest from a lot of clubs, one of them being Arsenal. He’s world-class on his day, no doubt, but this is another player loaded with risk. He’s older, has won everything, has never experienced the physical pressures of the Premier League, and I’m not sure I’d want to be investing that heavily in an older player who has been getting rough critiques from the German press all season.

Arsenal should be aging down the midfield this summer - not adding older bodies. We have two incredibly experienced older 6s who can cover for Declan Rice. If we can exit Partey, that’s where I want to see movement. People keep pumping Onana, again, not for me after watching him again. People like the visual of someone that extreme in a deep-lying role for Arsenal. He’s tall, fast, incredibly aggressive, and a lot of folk, my brother included, think he should be judged on his Lille days. Maybe… Ramsdale was a hoof merchant at Sheff U after Wilder left, but if you looked at his play under Eddie Howe, that was a fairer reflection of his talents.

Here’s my rebuttal - if Sean Dyche thought Onana could be doing Thomas Partey things in midfield, he’d be engaging that skill set. David Moyes was a long way from a progressive coach when he landed at West Ham - but he recognized the beauty and talent of Declan-ball and he let him do his thing. Declan is a similar physical specimen to Onana - tall, strong, fast, aggressive, agile… but he could play ball, and he did play ball for West Ham. If Onana was a world-class one-touch release master with top-tier progressive passing mode - we’d be seeing more of that for Everton.

I haven’t been a fan of him for Everton and I haven’t been blown away by him at the Euros so far - we can do better. This is a guy that ends up in a Spurs midfield. The hype feels almost Bissouma-like. Remember people begging us to sign him? Now he’s the guy holding Angeball back. At least Bissouma was playing in a JdP system.

Still, I am open to being wrong. Arteta and his team are great developers of talent and let’s be clear - Thomas Partey was being held back by a very restrictive Diego Simeone and the stats nerds said they wouldn’t take him on a free… an L for the ages. I still saw more in Thomas than I have in Onana. I’d say go back and look at the archives but they’re squirreled away for later use for Le Grove Members.

A little MLS update. If you saw a video of a ref talking to the crowd, that was from where I work. The ref dropped his best WWE impression, telling the fans the goal was onside HOWEVER there was a foul. Pretty mean. But, to be fair, he nailed the decision. Minus the theatrics, you can’t know the refs chatting to the fans about what their thinking is. MLS is paving the way for lots of innovation on the rules that the Premier League should be looking into.

While we’re talking about great tech - I do love the offside radar tool they’re using at the Euros. No arguing radar or whatever the fuck it is. Get that into the Premier League.

Ok, that’s all I’ve got for now. We’ll be recording a podcast later on this evening. Let me know if there are any things you want to hear us talking about! I’ll have better luck recording and publishing this week as I’m back stateside.

BIG LOVE xx

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