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£401,500 A Week Is Not An Arsenal Number
Somewhere in Madrid this week, Florentino Pérez is sitting across a table from Vinícius Júnior's people, and by
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£401,500 A Week Is Not An Arsenal Number
Somewhere in Madrid this week, Florentino Pérez is sitting across a table from Vinícius Júnior's people, and by every account that matters — Sky's, ESPN's,...
Saliba's Absence Is a Structural Gap, Not a Blip
Thirty minutes into a World Cup semi-final in Dallas, on 14 July, William Saliba went down again. He had been
Read Article →Arsenal's Ambition Was Never a Famous Name
The banner going round the Emirates on the final day read "CHAMPIONS," which was accurate, and underneath somebody
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Saliba
28 July 2026
Saliba's Absence Is a Structural Gap, Not a Blip
Thirty minutes into a World Cup semi-final in Dallas, on 14 July, William Saliba went down again. He had been carrying the back problem through the tournament for weeks, playing on it because that is what defenders who function as the spine of a title-winning side do, and then Spain
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28 July 2026
Arsenal's Ambition Was Never a Famous Name
The banner going round the Emirates on the final day read "CHAMPIONS," which was accurate, and underneath somebody had stitched "PARIS" in smaller letters, which was also accurate and considerably more honest. Arsenal won the league in May and lost the Champions League final to PSG
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27 July 2026
Selling Anelka Taught Arsenal a Lesson It Forgets
The summer of 1999 was a bad one for reading the back pages if you supported Arsenal, because for most of July and August there was really only one story, and it kept not ending. Nicolas Anelka, twenty years old, PFA Young Player of the Year for the season just
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27 July 2026
Arsenal's Real Transfer Business Is Duller Than Vinicius
The story ran in the Standard on the last day of the window's quiet phase, and it said, carefully, that Arsenal are "monitoring the situation" of Vinicius Junior, that no direct conversations have taken place, and that any deal would depend on the player deciding for
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transfers
26 July 2026
Christos Tzolis and the Cost of Buying Time
The announcement went up on a Sunday morning with the usual studio photo — the shirt held at chest height, the smile pitched exactly between gratitude and nerves — and within about four minutes somebody had found the 1-0 defeat at the Emirates, September 2021, in which a twenty-year-old Tzolis made his
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Emirates Stadium
25 July 2026
The Emirates Optimised for the Wrong Ledger
Twenty years ago this May, Arsenal played their last match at Highbury and moved four hundred yards down the road to a stadium built, in effect, to solve a problem that had nothing to do with football. Capacity at Highbury had been capped under 40,000 since the North Bank
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24 July 2026
Arsenal's Title Defence Now Rests on Men Still Mending
He went down without contact in the 30th minute, in Dallas, on the night of 14 July, kicked the ball away in something between frustration and diagnosis, and lowered himself to the turf. Team-mates say he told them his back was gone. France went on to lose the World Cup
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23 July 2026
Arsenal's Defence Ran on One Man's Deferred Pain
At the Dallas Stadium on 14 July, in the second half of a World Cup semi-final against Spain, William Saliba went down, got up, tried to continue, and was substituted for Maxence Lacroix. He left the pitch visibly upset. What he told his France teammates, according to the reporting that
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22 July 2026
Andrea Berta Inherited Arsenal's Argument With Itself
In the last 48 hours of this summer's window, Arsenal were still trying to sign a goalkeeper who plays for Espanyol. Joan Garcia had been the target for weeks, the deal had gone convoluted and expensive in the way these things do when too many people are steering,
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