how would Robbie know? Where is the evidence, does he have a shred of credibility when it comes to our transfer dealings? No.
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Yeah don’t want to fuss about with Captain Walcott… Kante is a wall-flower compared to our colossus of a captain.
Kante should want to play for Arsenal for free. So if he decided not to sign because wages, fuck him that cunt.
and what? Earn a living behind the bar of Wetherspoons?!
Let’s not get ridiculous now. He wasn’t even asking for that much in comparison to what most other players earn.
given that he is on 110k or there abouts, im inclined to think its rubbish.
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…
Kante couldn’t expect to waltz into Arsenal and be on the same sort of money as long term servants such as Theo Walcott now cmon… This bloke wears our captains armband from time to time and will have a testimonial.
Yeah Kante choosing Chelsea over us is due to wages.
Fuck off Fowler.
Another player we could have had.
Wenger was a big admirer, and it seems he wanted to come here.
He was a proven experienced PL player and exactly what we needed.
Yet more proof of Wenger’s indecisiveness and tight fisted approach to transfers.
Look where this attitude and stubbornness has got him.
He goes to one of our rivals, we get Xhaka, we drop out of the top four, and watch all our rivals overtake us.
Nice work Wenger.
good lord, hes off again.
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We probably did match it. He probably wanted to win things and compete in the CL rather than be embarrassed in it.
From what a lot of people said we were his first choice and we were also runners up in the the PL and playing CL football, Chelsea weren’t even in the Europa League.
There is no excuse.
Wenger and the board are useless when it comes to transfers.
We miss out on so many players, from Wenger’s own admission it has become embarrassing.
you are again picking nonsense that suits you instead of being objective.
There is no supporting evidence for this kante stuff. Given our persuit of Xhaka and recent acquisition of Elneny im inclined to suggest we were never really an option for Kante.
But one tweet from an unreliable source and BOOM. Moan moan moan.
Wenger himself said he tried to sign Kante twice, one of those times was last summer, so surely it’s clear that we were an option for Kante. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood what you meant with the above sentence.
Kante may have been an option for us. But given he allegedly turned Wenger down while he was at Caen, im confident we werent ever an option for him.
The club also signed Xhaka a fair while before Kante went anywhere.
Chelsea won the Premier League the year before. Let’s not pretend like they’re some mid table team because of one season off. It’s us that have the Champions League as a drawing factor over teams like Liverpool or Spurs (well, at least until this season) and Chelsea and the likes that will always bounce back to be a genuine title contender and likely a good team in Europe.
So matching wages with Chelsea was no guarantee for him to sign.
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He’s on 110k, that’s quite allot for a DM without much in the way of attacking qualities. It’s encouraging that we might have been in for Xhaka and Kante, meaning we might not be done building the midfield.
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Is there a reliable source for that?
I think in this day and age 110k is a perfectly reasonable wage for a player who could be on the verge of playing an incredibly pivotal role in back to back title wins with two different clubs.
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I did wonder if Wenger alluding to his wages being the issue when they are most certainly affordable for us was more Wenger not wanting to pay this type of player that kind of money when we’ve already got some significant midfield wages on the bill. I think it may also be worth pointing out that going to Chelsea being “obviously” about money could also be he didn’t want to lay out 30 million on this type of player too.
Realistically we’re not going to have what a lot of fans might want which is players like Ozil and Alexis on £250k and then on top of that have the rest of the players on £110k or more. A big club might have a wage spread something like 250, 200, 150, 130, 110, 90, 80, 70, 70, 50, 40, 40, 30, etc. and your defensive midfielder is rarely going to be towards the top of the scale.
However I think for Kante it would have 100% been worth it. It’s a cliche but he does really feel like he does the job of one and a half players and he’s been arguably player of the year for Chelsea and maybe arguably for Leicester too. He’s not just making the odd tackle and passing it sideways and world class attackers are winning their games single handedly, he’s a fundamental part of this team.
I think Ramsey is on the same kind of money as Kante so we could have tried to move him on to free up that spot but I doubt Wenger would have really wanted to add that kind of wage to an already packed midfield (at the time he was assuming Wilshere would be here too) and I doubt he’d want to actively move on any players that are fit. Even without being injured though Ramsey has been pretty pointless this season with no real role in the team, we might as well have tried to get rid of him.
And if Wenger really thought Xhaka was a box to box player then Kante would have been a great partner. He really should have been thinking long term with Cazorla’s fitness issues and Elneny surely never looking at any point like he’d become a regular but now we’re going to have to go and look for someone else to fill that hole.
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