A signing that looks somewhat questionable considering the other club in for him was Napoli and they are about to get called out on the carpet for some fishy transfer business.
Raul really was a scumbag wasn’t he?
Rare breed, don’t you think?
Pepe would need a Klopp-esque management to really flourish and I don’t think we have managers out there capable to doing it on consistent basis.
Even a Klopp-lite will be a struggle to identify & onboard.
In other words, Emery and Arteta?
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I agree on the management style, Klopp the motivator-type. I’m not sure he would do well in their pressing football, he was surprisingly bad defensively when he arrived, almost non-existent work rate defensively. Arteta clearly worked with him on that for a while and he is better now, but as with everyone else on the pitch at the expense of output, probably lol
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Who’s this guy got to do to get on the pitch?
He’s done here
It’s not his fault, all will be well once he turns 30
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Arteta just saving him for AFCON when we’re losing players. Trust the process. 
Even more alarming when he’s not getting on as a substitute
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Bit unfair that, they’re not more productive than him…
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Safe to say he’s a flop at 72m.
That price was derided at the time as being out of step with the market and his talent. In hindsight it looks even worse.
He must be absolutely awful in training, simply can’t have youngsters above you in the pecking order, especially if you cost 72mil, courtesy of fraud Raul.
By who? Certainly not Arsenal fans
Remember Bayern being rumoured to be interested in him at the time but ending it there when the fee it would take to get him got bandied about.
No definitely not Arsenal fans since it felt like we had stolen a player and spent big on big talent. The nerds at places like ESPN and other outlets raised eyebrows over the money because it was a huge fee. I wonder if we would have been better off signing Zaha instead. IIRC that’s who Emery wanted.
Napoli too.
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Seems to be in a similar bracket to Walcott in terms of plenty of output (when looking at a longer period rather than just this season), but frustrating to watch so falls out of of favour.
We could afford to do that in the Wenger era when we were scoring plenty of goals as a team, but nowadays we score so few you can’t freeze out the player with the biggest output and expect everything to be okay.
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We also aren’t really a straight counterattacking side are we? Yeah, Pepe hasn’t been good enough or evolved his game but he also isn’t playing in a team suited to his strengths.
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He was a dream signing after his season with Lille. This place wanted him and we were all buzzing when we got him. Just hasn’t worked out. It happens
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