With the news that Mannone has finalised his move to Sunderland, the clear-out of this summer is nearing completion.

Considering the financial constraints that Wenger has been under for the last decade or so, clearing out some of the deadwood in the squad has to be considered a good thing for the football club. This summer has already seen Arshavin, Squillaci, Denilson and Djourou seal moves out of the club, while Bendtner is doing his best to complicate his inevitable departure.

Those aforementioned players that have left the club managed to play a total of 14 games for the club this season between them, while amassing a large wage bill.

Good riddance.

While I am sure most fans will share in the disappointment as to how Djourou’s career hasn’t quite worked out how it could have done. The club’s longest serving player leaves the club after yet another season of falling down the pecking order. He showed promise in early parts of his career, but due to a series of injuries and better defenders coming in, he lost both his confidence and that of the manager. He needed a new challenge, and took a pay cut to do so.

While others will look at Squillaci and Denilson and see the opposite, players who have maintained all ties to the club as long as the pay cheques keep on rolling in. You can debate the morality of doing that all day long, but personally, I would accept around £60,000 every week to turn up to training for a club I had no personal connection to.



Mannone comes under the criteria of doing everything right, apart from having the talent. He did show that he is not utterly useless as a keeper, and if it were not for a clanger in the Champions League, maybe his reputation would not have suffered so much. A few decent league games were not, however, enough to convince Wenger that he was in contention for the number one spot. With reports of Julio Cesar coming in from QPR this summer, Mannone would probably appreciate being number one choice at Sunderland rather than fourth choice at Arsenal.

Good luck to the Don.



The players that offer nothing to the club, and Arsenal will be looking to offload ASAP: Chamakh, Park Chu Young, Bendtner & Andre Santos.



The only news regarding Chamakh this window have been pictures of him the Na$ri drinking and surrounded by girls while on holiday. Snore. Hard to imagine clubs looking at what he has done for Arsenal and West Ham in the last few seasons and saying,” you know what, that is exactly what my team needs, let’s match his 60k a week wages”. The 29 year old Moroccan has no intention of leaving the club, with his wages being around treble what he will get anywhere else, it looks like he will wait out his contract either on the bench or on loan. You never know, he may get a Denilsonesque pay off to leave the club this summer.

It is worth noting that his wages are higher than they would otherwise have been due to the fact that he was a free transfer, and the club could afford to siphon off some of the budget that would have gone on his initial fee to pay his wages.

Andre Santos is still on loan at Gremio, due to the different timing of the Brazilian season. The signing of Nacho Monreal from Malaga means that he is now third choice at best. It would not be even slightly surprising to see him spend the next couple of seasons on loan in Brazil, with no transfer being made.



Park Chu Young has to be the most bizarre piece of business Wenger has ever done. The player leaving his medical at Lille to fly to London and complete the move of around £3m, going on to play only once in the Premier League in the 2011-12 season. Then, by winning the Bronze Olympic medal, he was told he was allowed to delay his military service for 10 years, which meant Arsenal had to pay Monaco move of a transfer fee. The 2012-13 season saw him playing on loan at Celta Vigo, where he played 20 times in the league and scored just 3 times. Having seen his number go from 9 to 30, and spending an entire year abroad, it is hardly surprising that Arsenal will be listening to any offers. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any…



Bendtner’s move to Frankfurt seems to have been stifled by their signing of Joeslu on loan. Never fear, the world’s greatest striker still has a plethora of clubs fighting over which of them gets to sign him. Unfortunately for the Dane, they all seem too intimidated to actually make a move to try and sign him.

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