Here we are people, welcome to Friday. It’s been a fun week.

There’s not a lot of news doing the rounds. David Ornstein set tongues wagging when he suggested Arsenal might not have the funds to finance a Maddison deal.  Honestly, that sounds about right… Arsenal dropping £70m on a creative midfielder felt a little bit wild to me. If we went to £35-40m for Buendia, that seems closer to the number you would expect. That said, odd that there are so many strong stories that the player wants Arsenal. Surely Edu wouldn’t harass a player without knowing the costs?

There’s a lot of general angst in system about how we’re spending money we haven’t spent.

I don’t think Arsenal will pay £32m for a backup keeper if Bernd Leno stays this summer, that would be a wild amount of cash to send to a club that has just been relegated… who cares what they paid for him in the first place. There can’t be a recession in football with the only club not benefitting from it being Arsenal.

There are still plenty of bargains to be had around Europe, Houssem Auoar scored a cracking volley for Lyon last night, and we know they are looking to move on talent to raise funds.

Quite incredible how slow transfer business everywhere seems to be dragging.

Granit Xhaka still hasn’t moved. This Roma negotiation is painfully boring considering the hype started before the Euros. I can’t blame Edu for standing firm on a decent fee. The Swiss was in the team of the tournament and he’s only 28 years old. He’s literally at the peak of his powers and we can only squeeze £20m for him.

Ralph Hassenhutl made a point that seems to be very on point.

“At the moment, in the transfer market, it’s always the same,”

“Everybody wants players; nobody has money.

“Everybody wants to have the most money for his players when he wants to sell it and that keeps everything on hold.

“Therefore, a lot of players are running down their contracts and finally leaving for free. This money is what smaller clubs are missing then.

If Stan K hadn’t tried his luck at the super league, we’d be in the same boat this summer, because there’s no way we’d be raising enough capital to splash properly

The interesting thing is that no one is accepting the deflationary realities of the game for almost everyone. If all clubs just operated at a lower level, things would move, but it seems like no one wants to blink first just in case other clubs are hoarding pots of gold.

Arteta has been talking about what he wants from players at Arsenal and I like it.

“Absolutely there is another character in this dressing room that transmits every value that I would like to transmit to the club and our fans [and it is Kieran],”

“Again, it is young, hungry, talented, and people with huge desire and again he has all four ingredients – and he didn’t want to talk about anything other than staying here.

“That character, I think it shows on the pitch – when anything happens that is not going for us, you don’t give up, you just raise your level, try to be better and transmit that to the rest of the team so they all believe.

“Kieran has this capacity, and Emile as well, to lift the crowd with an action, Gabi Martinelli has this capacity – and this is something you either have or you don’t have.”

The vision is coming out piecemeal, but this is something I think most of us wanted to hear heading into the new season.

• Clarification on what sort of players Arteta wants to take us to the next level.
• Confirmation that there’s a type of player he loves.
• Some certainty that young/hungry players are the future of the club.

Well, it’s all there. We’ll see more Gabi next season, ESR won’t be a bit part player replaced by a clogger, and KT is probably in the running to be our next captain at some point.

There’s still plenty to do this summer, but tying down the future is an achievement, and signing players at a lower age profile is exactly where we want to see things head.

Right, see you in the comments. Watch the additional content below. Have a GREAT Friday night.

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We dropped another podcast that we recorded for the video creeeeew. Enjoy. Find my co-host @iJohnnyCochrane.

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