Yer da would have made Arsenal’s three biggest summer signings if he was made sporting director over Andrea Berta.
Viktor Gyokeres was the obvious striker choice. Martin Zubimendi was the best available No.6. Eberechi Eze is an Arsenal boy. The only plaudits Berta is possibly due in those transfers is for negotiating skills we aren’t privy to.
There’s current kudos over his and Mikel Arteta’s push for Noni Madueke, but we’re really bringing out the flowers for his £13m(?!) capture of Cristhian Mosquera, who is currently solving a problem for Arsenal and may yet create a big one for Mikel Arteta.
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He was unfazed after coming off the bench to play near enough the whole game against the Premier League champions at Anfield and followed that up with a display of such confidence against Nottingham Forest that rather than hanging on Mikel Arteta’s press conference injury updates for hints as to when William Saliba may return, as has been the case whenever one of the two Gunners centre-back stalwarts has missed a game or two in the last three seasons, we’re now wondering whether there may soon be a new-look pairing.
When asked after the 3-0 victory over Forest whether Mosquera will be pushing Gabriel and Saliba for a starting spot, Arteta confirmed: “You’ve just seen today and what he did at Anfield — he’s going to push them very, very hard. This kid wants it a lot, and he’s so willing to learn.
“He’s got already some great qualities that fit very well in any position that we want to use him in, in relation to the connections and the qualities of the other defenders.”
Mosquera has so far made more tackles (3.6) and ball recoveries (4) per game than both Saliba and Gabriel, and has had a greater duel success rate (81.8 per cent).
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Any centre-back breaking up the formidable pairing would have been unthinkable before the season started, let alone someone they signed for roughly half what they sold Eddie Nketiah to Crystal Palace for the year before. If this is how good a £13m centre-back is, £45m Piero Hincapie must be the greatest defender of all time.
Valencia made the error of allowing Mosquera to enter the final year of his contract, or they failed to get him to agree to a new deal, but far more baffling given what we’ve seen from the 21-year-old (oh yeah, he’s only 21) is the seeming lack of interest from other Premier League giants to secure his signing.
It’s why Berta deserves huge credit as the Daily Mail claim he ‘pushed hard for the defender, having tracked him while working for Atletico Madrid’ and told the Arsenal board ‘he was a must’ as a player whose ‘value would multiply in future’.
The concern will have been (and still is) whether Mosquera would see enough game time for that value to increase in the way it promises to do after those displays against Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. But he, as well as Hincapie if he proves to be a similar transfer coup, doesn’t just grant Arteta the ability to rotate his defenders without concern, but also offers Arsenal the option of boosting their coffers to the tune of £100m next summer.
Reports claim the Gunners are confident of nailing Saliba down to a new deal, but with Real Madrid eyes trained on the Frenchman as their ideal marquee defensive addition, we wonder whether it may be in Arsenal and Berta’s best interests for those talks to stall, if only until the new year, to see whether a nine-figure sum may actually be more useful than a third or fourth excellent centre-back.
