The fitness aspect feels so bizarre, I’ve not seen one player on loan not have it extended because the parent club want to get him on a fitness plan before heading off for a summer break anyway? Its not like he can play for us this season. If Nketiah was still on loan at leeds I can believe we would demand he comes and does training sessions at arsenal.
As Craigie says I guess the crux is the money and it is a real feels bad moment for St Etienne this money was part of the transfer deal they were expecting to take in for their young star and for completely unforeseen circumstances they will receive a smaller fee for him.
If you read the articles you’d see that it’s because he’s had injuries issues this season and Arsenal want to put him on a plan to manage that. There’s nothing unreasonable about that given his issues with injuries this season and the fact that next pre season is likely to start after a shorter than usual summer break.
If he gets injured in July there’s every chance he returns to our pre season carrying that injury.
I don’t think the main issue is our fitness plan as such. It’s more that our plan requires Saliba to be in London in the week/days leading up to the final. And St Etienne, understandably, want their team to be together rather than have to zoom call one of them into training and tactics sessions.
I just can’t see why that’s a problem though, given his fitness issues and the close proximity of the seasons it’s understandable that Arsenal will want to protect their asset which they’ve invested sizeable sums of money in (£27m for an 18 year old with only 16 games at the time we signed him). It’s also worth noting that ASSE have been out of action since March and won’t play again until the end of July (that’s nearly 5 months) - it’s even more important for us to be keeping a close eye on him.
At the end of the day, we can’t be punished for the French government’s decision to cancel the season prematurely (when the rest of Europe had made no such decision) and we almost certainly can’t risk any sort of injury to someone we’ve invested heavily in.
I just can’t see any circumstance in which I can grant ASSE some leeway in this. They don’t seem to want to compromise.
Yeah I totally understand why we’ve taken the stance we have. And of course the club are well in their rights to do that.
But I can also understand it from their point of view. Yes we’re doing them a favour, but it’s not really a favour if what is we’re offering is unworkable. I don’t actually know just how important Saliba even is to them, but is he good enough that the manager will just throw him in the team on the day despite him not being present at any training session? I’d imagine that any club would want to have at least their first XI altogether in the lead up to one of their biggest matches.
That’s the ideal solution. Player is happy, St Etienne get him for the cup final and we don’t have to pay a silly fee in the process. Common sense wins out for once.
