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Arsenal’s Thrashing of Viking FK Will Not Appease Fans Hungry for New Signings
- Updated: August 6, 2016
After seeing his Arsenal side demolish Norwegian outfit Viking FK 8-0 in their latest pre-season friendly, Arsene Wenger might feel he has earned the right to relax a little.
However, in his post-match press conference, he seemed almost too calm about the club’s prospects in the transfer window. Arsenal are in serious need of reinforcements, and a friendly victory—however impressive—does not change that.
Arsenal fans want to see the club behaving bullishly in the market, ruthlessly pursuing their top targets to ensure they improve the team. Instead, the Gunners continue to use the rhetoric they made their trademark in the impoverished years immediately after the move to the Emirates Stadium.
The need for new players is obvious. Arsenal are lacking a top-class centre-half and a prolific centre-forward. It’s not even a question of quality any more—it’s a question of numbers. Long-term injuries for Per Mertesacker and Danny Welbeck mean they need to add players simply to have the requisite depth to survive the first half of the Premier League season.
The suspicion lingers that Wenger is not keen to engage in the highly inflated arms race that the transfer market has become. Although he paid big money to lure Granit Xhaka from Borussia Monchengladbach, he has not yet taken another major chunk out of Arsenal’s sizeable budget.
Nevertheless, Wenger insists it is not the rapidly rising prices that put him off. He told Arsenal.com:
It’s not the prices, it’s the players. At the moment I’m focused on the players we have. Today we didn’t have Ramsey, Xhaka, Alexis – he will play on Sunday. We still have Ozil at home, and Giroud and Koscielny too. We also have young players who came on and did well. We do not have to panic but we are on alert in the transfer market so that we can make the right move when the opportunity comes up.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Wenger is simply trying to downplay Arsenal’s desperation to avoid strengthening the position of the selling clubs.
Right now, if a club received a bid for their star striker from Arsenal, they’re immediately aware of two things. The first is that …
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