No, Arsenal are not interested in Ousmane Dembele
Barcelona’s French forward Ousmane Dembele looks on during the Spanish league football match be tween FC Barcelona and Levante UD at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, on February 2, 2020. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP) (Photo by LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images)
Arsenal’s transfer window figures to be rather active, but that doesn’t mean that everything is on the table. Ousmane Dembele, for instance, is not.
I feel like it was just yesterday I was writing about how the “stupid” Arsenal transfer rumors seem to have dried up. All of a sudden, every player we’re linked to (Chris Smalling being the exception) makes sense. And even with Smalling, the positions makes sense.
But then Ousmane Dembele happened. £70m worth of “in what world does this make sense?” later and I feel like the universe heard my celebration and decided to smite me. Because here we are, with headlines stating that the Gunners are in the market for the French winger.
Three years ago, I was swooning over the idea of Dembele coming to the Emirates. We didn’t have a winger and he needed a new place to reassert himself on the world stage. That was three years ago. Since then, the club has beefed up the wingers so much that the only winger I would take as an upgrade is Serge Gnabry.
The club spent a record amount to bring in Nicolas Pepe. Pepe, who is our second most efficient goal producer and he’s not even through his first year at the club.
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Pepe is going to be a superstar as long as no one gets in his way. Mikel Arteta‘s approach is getting a lot out of Pepe and as long as that trajectory continues, we can expect some pretty amazing things from him in the future.
Opposite him, we shouldn’t have winger problems for years. With Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli both competing for the starting job, the Gunners have two teenagers destined for greatness.
Having Pepe and Saka and Martinelli costs £0m. That’s a flat fee. You don’t have to pay that off. Adding Ousmane Dembele to an already crowded winger set-up costs us what we paid for Nicolas Pepe all over again.
Do you know what £70m can get us? That can get us Thomas Partey and Jack Grealish. Or, if that’s too optimistic for you, Partey and Orkun Kokcu. Or Partey and Jonathan Tah. That’s a lot of money and I refuse to believe that our highly intelligent decision-makers are considering spending it on another winger.
Even if we sell both Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette, it makes no sense. So let me go ahead and say that no, the Gunners are not interested in Dembele. At least not this one.
