£63m player would be at Arsenal now if Mikel Arteta had his way

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Mikel Arteta has always been backed by the Arsenal board, but he doesn’t always get his way.

Indeed, sometimes the deals the Arsenal manager wants to pursue prove to be impossible to pull off.

Last January, the Gunners missed out on both Mykhaylo Mudryk and Moises Caicedo, and if you cast your mind back a further 12 months, you’ll remember Arsenal missing out on Dusan Vlahovic.

Speaking on KS1TV, Steve Kay has now shared some insight into Arsenal’s prior pursuit of Vlahovic, and he says that Mikel Arteta is a big fan of the Serbian, and if the manager had gotten his way the £63m man would’ve ended up at Arsenal.

Arteta wanted Vlahovic

Kay shared what he knows about the attacker.

“Dusan Vlahovic, there has been a lot of talk recently about him. I do know that he is very well-liked by Arteta he was on the list and he would’ve bought him, but he didn’t want to know and he went to Juventus, which is fair enough, his boyhood club, that’s not really working out so keep an eye on that,” Kay said.

Can’t blame him

Vlahovic may have snubbed Arsenal two years ago, but it’s hard to really blame the striker for opting to move to Juventus instead.

As Kay says, Juventus is a club that Vlahovic has always been a fan of, and, at the time, they were streets ahead of Arsenal in terms of their success.

Let’s not forget, in January 2022, Arsenal were just about to bottle their top four push, while Juventus had been the most successful team in Italy over the past few years.

In hindsight, Vlahovic probably would’ve been better off joining Arsenal, but it’s never easy to predict how these things will go in football.