Why, for once, we’ve done the right thing

The chase for Nuri Sahin is finally over.

Liverpool have emerged victorious in the so-called ‘battle’ to sign the Real Madrid midfielder.

Arsenal, yet again, have missed out on a big international player.

Good.

If you look at the way the story has developed, it appears we didn’t ‘miss out’ on anything at all. What appears to have happened is that just for once, we did exactly the right thing and withdrew from negotiations.

If the reports are correct, Sahin was on 120k-per-week to warm the bench at Real Madrid. That’s almost the amount we offered to Robin van Persie to stay with us.

Is Sahin in the same league as Van Persie? I think not.

But it gets ‘worse’.

On top of 120k-a-week, we were supposedly going to pay a loan fee, somewhere around £2-3 million. That takes the deal, with wages, to around £8-10 million. And the question no one is asking is: for what?

The only answer is – in order to get a player we’d then have to hand back at the end of next June. The stumbling block to the deal seems to have been the option to make the loan permanent. Sahin was clear he didn’t want this. Real were clear they didn’t want this. And it seems, in the end, we didn’t want to go forward without this option.

In withdrawing from negotiations, Arsene Wenger has done what every fan for the past two years has been begging him to do.

The criticism has been that we spend time and money nurturing talent and then letting them go to our main rivals.

Gael Clichy, Samir Nasri, Cesc Febregas have all been used as sticks to beat Wenger with. Arsenal – feeder club to the big boys. The Sahin deal was exactly more of the same.

We’d have spent time and money nurturing a talent only for that talent to leave at the end of the year. You can almost hear the whinging now. And for once, we said

‘no’. Most excellent.

Well done Arsene.

Let’s invest the time and let’s spend the money on developing a player who wants to be with us and who wants to wear the Arsenal shirt for many years to come.

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