Quantcast
Home   >   Transfer News   >   Arsenal ‘Offered A Lot Of Money’ But Could Miss Out On £37m Star

Arsenal ‘Offered A Lot Of Money’ But Could Miss Out On £37m Star

By on February 17, 2014

Reports today claim that Bayern Munich will trigger Julian Draxler’s £37m release clause this summer after we failed to land the attacker in January despite offering ‘a lot of money’.

Le10 Sport claims that Munich boss Pep Guardiola is keen to sign Draxler at the end of the season and has persuaded club bosses to spend the £37m required to trigger the players release clause.

Bayern have a long history of signing the best talent in the Bundesliga and keeping the top players in Germany, so we shouldn’t be surprised to hear of their interest. We should of known the competition was going to be intense in the summer after we failed to get the deal done last month.

Our pursuit of the 20-year-old dominated the January window but we couldn’t get a deal agreed as Schalke refused to lower their £37m asking price and Wenger refused to meet their demands.

There was a lot of talk over if we actually ended up making any formal offer for the player or whether it was all newspaper hype, but Schalke sporting director, Horst Heldt, has claimed that we DID make a bid but it wasn’t enough to persuade them to sell.

Heldt says we offered ‘a lot of money’ but doesn’t give up the exact amount we tabled. He said when asked about Arsenal’s offer for Draxler on German TV:

“It was a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough for us,” [Source: Mirror]

Obviously £37m is a huge sum for a player who’s just 20 and is relatively unproven at the top level, but Draxler is one of the most highly-rated players in Europe and sometimes you just need to pay the going rate to land these players.

We were in the privileged position of having sizeable funds available in January so really we should have been able to get this deal done last month. I really hope we don’t live to regret it because if Draxler ends up impressing at the World Cup, all the big-boys are going to be circling, not just Bayern.

2 Comments