On 17 August 2012, fourteen years to the day before this column was written, Manchester United confirmed the signing of Robin van Persie for a fee in the region of £24 million. He had worn the Arsenal armband for one full season, scored thirty league goals in it, and spent the summer explaining, in the careful language footballers use when they mean something blunter, that the club's timetable and his own no longer matched. The photograph everyone remembers is the captain lifting nothing, walking off after another near miss. The small print says he had a year left on his deal and made it plain, months in advance, that he would not extend it. Arsenal sold rather than lost him for nothing, which even at the time felt like a small, grim mercy.

He was not alone that year, or the year before it. Samir Nasri had already gone the same route in August 2011, running his contract down and moving to Manchester City for a similar fee once talks over a new deal collapsed; the reported gap between what Arsenal offered and what City did was not small, and Nasri did not pretend otherwise. Cesc Fabregas took longer and cost more sentiment — three transfer windows of speculation before Barcelona, the club that had shaped him as a boy, finally paid something over £29 million to bring him home in the same August. Three departures inside two seasons, and three names still recited by Arsenal fans the way other clubs recite their trophies, as a unit, as if they happened to the club rather than in three separate boardrooms for three separate reasons.

The kind explanation, offered at the time and still offered now, is that Arsenal simply could not compete. Wenger's wage structure was famously conservative, the stadium debt from the move to the Emirates was still being serviced, and City and United were operating in a different financial register entirely — City newly owned by Abu Dhabi money, United still the country's dominant club by trophy count if not always by football. Under that reading, van Persie, Nasri and Fabregas did not betray anything. They read a market correctly and left before it closed. It is a fair case, and I have made versions of it myself over the years, usually to someone in the Clock End who wanted a name to blame and settled for the manager because the manager was the one standing there.

But the case has a hole in it, and the hole is Fabregas, who did not leave for money — Barcelona's wages were not obviously superior — and who spent two years being talked out of exactly this move before finally getting it. The pattern across all three was not poverty. It was a period in which Arsenal's best players had somewhere better to be, in football terms, and enough leverage in their contracts to get there. The financial gap explains United and City. It does not explain Barcelona, and it does not explain why the club let all three situations run to the final year rather than resolving them two summers earlier, when the fee and the exit could have been managed rather than absorbed.

What makes Gabriel Martinelli's summer worth reading against that decade rather than folding into it is that the mechanics are close to reversed. Martinelli has not refused to sign a new Arsenal contract. He has refused to leave. Galatasaray came in with an offer reported at around £38.9 million, sourced in part through the Turkish connections of Arsenal's new sporting director, Andrea Berta, and Arsenal made clear they would listen. Martinelli's camp told the club, before the bid could go anywhere, that Turkey was not something he wanted. Arteta, asked about it before the Community Shield, gave the answer clubs give when they mean it both ways — that the market moves in both directions and Arsenal would have to respond to it.

The player said no. The club had said yes.

That is the van Persie situation with the sign on the door turned round. Van Persie forced a sale by making himself unaffordable to keep on his own terms; Martinelli has refused a sale the club itself was open to. He still has a year left on his contract, with Arsenal holding an option to extend it by a further twelve months — a detail that matters more than it looks, because it means the leverage that Nasri and van Persie built by simply waiting does not exist here. Arsenal, whether by accident or by a decade's hard-won caution, do not need Martinelli to sign anything to control his next two years. Ethan Nwaneri, offered to Galatasaray in the same conversation and similarly uninterested in going, sits in the same bracket: talented, contracted, and currently worth more to the club's balance sheet than to its ambitions, in the eyes of whoever is drawing up the list.

None of this makes Martinelli's position comfortable. Arseblog reported this month that players are finding out they are considered saleable via transfer stories rather than a conversation with the manager, which is its own kind of damage, quieter than a public contract standoff but not obviously kinder. The fear in 2011 was that Arsenal could not hold on to its best players. The fear now, for a player who has been at the club since 2019 and has given no public indication he wants to be anywhere else, is that wanting to stay is no longer enough to keep you.

Nothing here is unprecedented, and nobody at the club would claim it was. What has changed is which side of the negotiation gets to want something. In 2011 it was the player who had somewhere better to be. In 2026 it is the club, and it is Martinelli who has had to say, twice now, that he would rather stay where he is.