‘I don’t think’: Journalist suggests it will be hard for Arsenal to do business with one PL club now

Add as preferred source on Google

Arsenal have done plenty of business with their Premier League rivals over the past few years.

They pinched a couple of players from Manchester City last summer in the shape of Oleksandr Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus, they took Ben White and Leandro Trossard from Brighton, and, of course, they took Declan Rice from West Ham this summer.

The deal to bring Rice to the Emirates was certainly complicated, and it sounds as though a few relationships have been strained in the process of getting this deal over the line.

Indeed, speaking on Inside Arsenal, James Benge has noted that there isn’t a lot of goodwill between West Ham and Arsenal at the moment when discussing a hypothetical deal for Lucas Paqueta, suggesting that West Ham won’t want to do much business with Arsenal going forwards.

West Ham and Arsenal are on bad terms

Benge shared what he knows about the two London clubs.

“He (Paqueta) would be brilliant, and he would be expensive no doubt, but I don’t think there’s a lot of goodwill between West Ham and Arsenal, but they’d be mad not to try if the opportunity emerged,” Benge said.

Strange

Football transfers are a strange microcosm of an economy, and it can only take one deal to sour relations between two clubs in the long-term.

From the outside looking in, there’s no reason for West Ham to be sour about the Rice deal. Arsenal paid a massive fee for the player, and the deal was done in a timely fashion.

However, it would appear that Arsenal have rubbed West Ham up the wrong way somewhere along the line here, and it sounds as though it will be tough for Arsenal to snap up any potential targets from the Hammers in the future.