Arsenal look to get younger, keep the good times rolling

Congratulations to Arsenal on securing the Premier League title last night. We now quickly dive into rumour season, where the Gunners will probably be linked to slightly younger players than they were last year. We liked Arsenal’s “win now” summer of 2025, and it worked! They won now! But they’ll need to start swapping out some of their older talent for younger players if they want to avoid a steep drop-off, so today’s headline rumour makes a lot of sense.

Ed Aarons at The Guardian is reporting on a handful of potential targets, with Bournemouth attacker Eli Junior Kroupi being the most interested (and detailed) of the bunch. The 19-year-old has had an excellent debut Premier League season, operating as a second striker. You don’t see pure goal-hunting 10s like this too often these days.

Back in January, Mohamed asked if Kroupi could keep up his white-hot finishing, and it turns out he could. This is a lot of goals from not a lot of shot volume. I can hear the sirens going off in your head: 🚨 xG OVERPERFORMER WEE WOO WEE WOO 🚨

But Kroupi put up some pretty insane numbers in Ligue 2 last season. Bournemouth bought him in the middle of a very good campaign and loaned him back for the remainder of the season, after which he proceeded to go absolutely nuclear.

Yes, this is also a big xG overperformance, but it’s an extremely impressive volume of quality shots for an 18-year-old playing against grown adults. If Arsenal or a team with similar budget decided to pay a big fee for Kroupi, this would be a big piece of evidence for why he’s worth the risk. He’s not an out of nowhere, flash in the pan double-digit goal scorer. His season for Bournemouth has been a natural continuation of what he did at Lorient.

Because Kroupi has 4 years remaining on his contract, he’s going to be expensive. But that contract length is also a good reason to go in for him now, rather than waiting, if you’ve evaluated him as a future star who will be good enough to improve Arsenal in the near future.

If your evaluation is correct, the implication is that he’s likely to produce more next year as he gets more minutes and becomes more important to Bournemouth. After that, he’ll still be 20 years old with 3 years left on his contract. Potential buying clubs and the player are not going to gain additional leverage. Obviously injuries and dips in form happen — Kroupi is far from guaranteed to improve — but the price is more likely to increase than decrease heading into summer 2027.

Bournemouth don’t really need the money given the other huge sales they’ve made recently, but they seem quite confident in their ability to evaluate young talent, buy for £1 and sell for £2 over and over again. I don’t currently have a read on what the fee would be, but I do think Kroupi is Arsenal quality, I think they should sign younger players this window, and I think Bournemouth will be open to negotiations.

By the way, if you’re in the greater London area, you should check out the live version of rebuilding Arsenal on Friday. Pat and Ted will be doing the podcast in front of a live audience at the Royal National Hotel, and you can get tickets here.

More transfer rumours

• If you’re wondering how the Gunners will make room for Kroupi or a similar player, it’s going to be from selling Gabriel Jesus. The bigger Serie A clubs are reportedly interested.

• Jose Mourinho’s appointment at Real Madrid combined with their internal turmoil is likely to make them the Main Character of this transfer window, with tons of crazy rumours that it’s tough to make sense of. Here’s a wild one: Mou apparently loves Marcus Rashford and wants him at Madrid. How are you fitting Rashford into a team with Mbappe and Vini? Uh… you’re not.

• Another player Mou reportedly rates is Sporting’s Morten Hjulmand, who was linked to Prem clubs all last summer. This would, again, require selling one or two very talented and famous players in the same position. Are Madrid seriously going to do a clearout and make like €500m in sales?

• Welcome to the completely insane Chelsea rumours section of the newsletter! These guys are also likely to be main characters with Xabi Alonso apparently securing some level of control of football operations as a condition of his appointment. The Blues have big interest in Morgan Rogers, who I do like a lot absent of any financial context, but who I would absolutely not pay £80m for.

• One of the players I can’t imagine Alonso wants to sell is Joao Pedro, but here’s a wild rumour that he’s a primary target for Barcelona. I don’t know enough to say “never,” but let’s give that a 0.01% chance of happening.

• Said El Mala has had an incredible season for Cologne, and he’s drawing big Premier League interest. The richer clubs are sniffing around, but Brighton and Brentford are considered most likely to make a move for him. I think he’s worth £35-40m and has the physical skills to succeed in the Prem. Big time shot-getter.

• Every year Karim Adeyemi’s agent and/or Borussia Dortmund float his name to the press to get Premier League teams to bid, and every year it comes to nothing. England’s just not that into him. It’s going to take someone with more money than sense to get this done… smells like Tottenham to me.

• We discussed the Jarrod Bowen rumours on the last roundup, but here’s that one from a better source. I’m more inclined to believe West Ham rumours if Jacob Steinburg is reporting on it, and he says that Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United are all interested in Bowen if West Ham go down.

• Atlético Madrid are always one of the most interesting teams in the market, with their signings ranging from under-the-radar hidden gems to old guys you’re surprised they’re in for. They’re pushing to sign Bernardo Silva on a free, and they’re interested in Porto winger William Gomes. I haven’t seen a ton of Gomes outside of highlights/whiparound shows, but this profile from a right winger who likes to cut in on their left is interesting to me.

• Bayern Munich would like to sign Yann Bisseck from Inter Milan, and he has an interesting story. Apparently not good enough to stick at Cologne, loaned to and later signed by AGF in Denmark, where he then turned in a dominant season en route to getting signed by Inter. He’s 6’5”/196cm and had good stats on his loans so uhh I’d really like to know why Cologne gave up on him, very weird!

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