Eighty-three minutes gone at the London Stadium last May, the game locked at 1-1, City still breathing down the neck of a title race that had gone the distance, and Leandro Trossard did what Leandro Trossard does. He arrived from nowhere in particular, took it on the half-volley, and put Arsenal back in front. It kept them clear of City with three games to go. Nobody in the away end that night was thinking about his age, his contract length or his resale value. They were thinking: thank God for him again.

Fourteen months later he's on his way to Besiktas for a fee reported around €20m, and the club would like everyone to understand this as a clean, dignified transaction. A Premier League champion departing through the front door, on his own terms, rather than shuffling out the back after two years of declining minutes. That framing isn't wrong. It's just doing a lot of work to avoid the actual question, which is who covers the eleven league starts, twenty-eight appearances and fifteen goal contributions he was still producing at thirty-one.

The logic for selling him deserves saying properly rather than waving away. He turns thirty-two in December. He had a year left on his deal, which is exactly the window in which a smart club either extends a player or cashes him in before the market decides for you. Arsenal watched Iwobi, Willock and Smith Rowe leave for respectable fees and understand the mechanics of selling well rather than selling late. And Trossard leaves happy, a title winner remembered fondly for the Cruyff turns and the West Ham winner, cashed in for fresh funds rather than allowed to run down his contract for nothing. On a spreadsheet, this is exactly what a well-run football club is supposed to do.

The trouble is that Trossard was never really a squad player in the way that framing implies. Since arriving from Brighton for £27m in January 2023 he made 174 appearances, scoring 36 and assisting 34, predominantly from the left but regularly through the middle whenever the injury list demanded it. He wasn't rotation. He was the insurance policy that also happened to be good enough to start a title-winning season twenty-eight times. The most honest thing said about him before the deal was that his minutes would only drop below 2,000 if his teammates stopped getting injured, which is another way of saying his entire value was contingent on the club's ongoing inability to stay fit. That condition has not, historically, resolved itself over a single transfer window.

So here is the ledger. What the club would like you to feel is gratitude: a job well done, a graceful exit at the perfect commercial moment. What you actually feel, if you've sat through the last three seasons, is the specific unease of watching your only reliable central-attacking cover walk out the door in July with no confirmed replacement in the building. Martinelli stays, presumably, on a deal that runs to 2028, but Martinelli's fitness record is its own well-thumbed chapter, and nobody sensible is pretending he offers what Trossard offered from the bench in minute seventy against a low block. The bloke behind me put it in July terms rather than football ones: "great business, shame we've got no left foot left on the bench."

None of this is really about Trossard the individual. He's owed nothing but thanks and a fair fee, and he's getting both. The problem is structural, and it's the same one that's followed Arsenal through every deep title push of the last decade. The squad gets built to win the league and then gets sold to fund the next attempt at winning it, on the theory that a replacement will materialise before August's third fixture congestion arrives.

Sometimes it does. When it doesn't, you find out in October, in the away leg of a Europa tie nobody circled, when the front three needs a fourth option and the fourth option left for Istanbul in July.

Arsenal have a squad good enough to win the league they just won. Whether they have a squad deep enough to defend it while chasing everything else a champion is now expected to chase is a different question, and it won't be answered by a transfer fee or a farewell video. It'll be answered in December, when somebody pulls a hamstring in a game that matters, and there's nobody quite like Trossard left to bring off the bench.