There’s a world of difference in structuring a deal like Hincapie’s (everyone and their dog knew Arsenal were basically delaying paying his fee for a whole year) and Araujo’s (straight loan, might do well, in which case Liverpool might sign him).
The hard work you mention occurred over the last calendar year and the end result is getting Araujo on loan to play with ageing and overworked Van Dijk, with hope that two kids will get over their fitness issues soon. I’m aware I’m being more negative than usual but this is a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
The two “kids” don’t have fitness issues. They’ve both picked up one long term injury each after we bought them. You can go spend £60m on Konsa on top of the £80m we’ve spent on them but then you probably can’t do the business you want elsewhere.
Or, we can loan an experienced player at the highest player to help cover things short term.
I get the nervousness but we missed out on Guehi and couldn’t get Konate tied to a new deal. So yeah, something needed to happen this summer in addition to Jacquet but they’ve got to plan for more than just the period between now and getting Jacquet and Leoni fit.
What I mean by set is that the club do not want to drop £50m on a new centre back now, because they have just spent 80m on a pair of the hottest young centre backs in Europe, the have an option to bring back a much more experienced Quansah (which I think was always the plan) and Ndweke and Ndiaye are just a rung below that.
This season the pool will be Van Dijk, Jaquet, Leoni, Araujo and Gomez. And that’s fine.
