Arsenal must move on after huge transfer demand for key Emery target - opinion

This article is part of Football FanCast’s Transfer Focus series, which provides opinion and analysis on recent transfer news…

Crystal Palace have placed a £100m valuation on attacker Wilfried Zaha in order to ward off interest from Arsenal, as reported by The Daily Mail.

What’s the story?

It was reported last week that Gunners boss Unai Emery had made Zaha one of his big summer transfer targets, but it now appears to be far too difficult for the club to get a deal over the line.

The Mail say that Palace are worried about letting both Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Zaha leave in the same transfer window, with the right-back’s move to Manchester United already confirmed.

They’ve now put a £100m price tag on their star asset, knowing full well that Arsenal are unable to pay that kind of fee this summer, according to the report.

Celtic fans aren’t happy about Arsenal’s bid for one of their key players…

Time to move on

It was reported by BBC journalist David Ornstein in May that Emery’s transfer budget before player sales stands at just £40m, so clearly the club are falling well short of Zaha’s valuation, with the player effectively now becoming an unrealistic summer target.

Zaha is a potent attacking talent in the Premier League, scoring 26 goals and assisting 26 times for Palace over the past three seasons in the competition. But he’s also never played European football before and his last spell at a top club, Manchester United, resulted in just four first-team appearances.

So if the 26-year-old is now unavailable it’s important that Arsenal move on as quickly as possible to other targets rather than linger and try to drive his price down, or worse, shell out the reported £100m.

Smart recruitment is so important for Arsenal this summer with the lack of UEFA Champions League money meaning that good value is required when bringing players into the club.

Paying over the odds for players is not a route they can afford to go down.

from FootballFanCast.com https://ift.tt/2KOReow