It's fair to say that this Arsenal team is a work in progress. But while the football seems to be improving on Mikel Arteta's watch, the Gunners remain a mess in the transfer market, particularly when it comes to selling their players.
So we decided to look at what exactly Arsenal have done in recent seasons in terms of outgoings and how the situation is likely to develop in the next window.
We'll only look at the post-Wenger period because it's where the mayhem was exposed to its fullest. The legendary Frenchman at least masked some of it when he was still manager.
Selling deadwood
Just this season we cut loose a number of players without getting much, if anything, for them: Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi, Sokratis and Henrikh Mkhitaryan were all paid off just to trim the squad.
While all past their best, the former trio cost Arsenal combined £95m. Miki was valued at £18m when his contract was terminated. We couldn't have recouped all this money of course, but the fact nothing at all came our way is diabolical.
And that's just this season. If we look at the previous campaigns, David Ospina, Laurent Koscielny, Nacho Monreal, Danny Welbeck, Aaron Ramsey, Lucas Perez, Jack Wilshere and Santi Cazorla all left the clubs for peanuts - around £12m combined.
Their market value at the time of leaving? £100m. That's taking into account Cazorla's estimation was decimated by injury. Pre-injury we could have got £22m for the diminutive Spaniard.
In fact, Arsenal's only decent sales are Alex Iwobi (£27m) and Emi Martinez (£16m). Decent from a financial perspective, we hasten to add.
Depreciating value of current players
What's even more frightening is that Arsenal don't seem to learn. We currently have Matteo Guendouzi, Sead Kolasinac, Lucas Torreira, Ainsley Maitland-Niles and William Saliba out on loan. How many do you see at Arsenal next season?
The brutal answer would be only Saliba but given his recent interviews, Arteta might move him on for the sake of instilling the culture and sticking to non-negotiables.
We are not saying it's wrong in terms of what the Spaniard is trying to build - what we are saying is that we do not expect Arsenal to benefit much financially much from their potential sales. Arsenal spent a combined £60m on these players, their current market value stands at £83m.
And we are not even talking about Willian, Nicolas Pepe and maybe Reiss Nelson, who are not playing a lot and their futures are up in the air. Or Alex Lacazette, whose deal is up in the summer of 2022.
The verdict: Arsenal need to sharpen up in the market. By hook or crook we need to be extracting decent fees because right now we are literally throwing hundreds of millions of pounds away.
It's not a good financial model at the time we are barely making the Europa League and are affected by COVID-19 (admittedly, everyone is). Maybe Arteta needs to soften his stance towards players out of favour too: it's hard to sell exiled footballers for good money.
