A lot of question marks need to be resolved: Mikel Arteta

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes that there is a lot of lack of clarity with regard to the status of his players, as the summer transfer window draws to a close. The Gunners have been linked to goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale in recent times, with other players also expected to join the club in the coming days. However, Arteta refused to confirm any reports while interacting with the press ahead of the Premier League opener against Brentford.

“It is trying to do what we have to do and it’s not about the player or the position it’s about where the squad should be finishing. That’s what I would pick for the squad, the squad that we’re going to have at the end of this transfer window. That is what I would be doing. I think everything is related to who we bring in, who is out, our capacity to hold foreign players in the squad. There are a lot of question marks still to be resolved. It’s still pretty open,” he said as quoted by Arsenal’s official website.

“Well, in this first period of the transfer window I think we’ve done a few things we wanted to do and it’s going to help us to get the squad in a much better place. There is still a bit of the window to go, so I’m sure things will happen either way. I’m willing to work with the players that I have at the moment and get the best out of them, and we will see what we can do. We identified what we wanted to do and how we can strengthen our team short, medium and long term, and what we needed to achieve that. We defined the profile of player that suits the model that we have at the moment at the club that can sustain our financial position, and we made three movements in relation to that,” added Arteta.

“Wish the team puts in place what we’ve been working on”

The Arsenal manager further discussed the scenario surrounding Joe Willock who is linked with a move to Newcastle United.

“Wish the team puts in place what we’ve been working on and the spirit that they have and the energy that they’ve been training with and in games more consistently, because we’ve had some very good patches against both teams in the last two games against Spurs and Chelsea. It’s how we compete in matches to get the wins, which is the most important things. The situation is that he’s (Willock) our player and we’ve held some conversations because it’s not only about what we want to do, it’s the player’s interest and the role that a player can field in a squad and in a club. What he’s done is put himself in a really strong position where he can choose a little bit with more options of what his future could look like, and this is what we’re trying to define right now.”

“I don’t know. In football I’m not going to do that because if not, you will come with the quote that you said at the end of last season, so I would prefer not to answer to that. It has been really busy and you’ve just named a few names but that tells you as well how much we’ve had to do from the position that we started the window. We are talking about probably the most difficult transfer market in this industry over the last years for sure and we are trying to adapt. The club, the owners and myself, we all have the same interests, which is to make this team much stronger and we know that we still have things to do to get what we want,” concluded Arteta.