Arsenal are reportedly demanding a whopping £50 million for a player Wolves have reportedly shown interest in.
Gary O’Neil is seeking to prepare his squad for the 2024/25 season and wants a bigger pool of players to work with.
Wanderers fell away at the end of last season, with a number of injuries meaning the manager had to turn to inexperienced players. In the end, Wolves limped to a 14th-placed finish.
O’Neil had wanted a striker in January, but the club’s concerning financial predicament meant no one came in. Armando Broja was the main focus, the striker joined Fulham on loan from Chelsea.
A new centre-forward is on the agenda again this summer, but it looks like one target could prove far too expensive.
Wolves would need to pay £50 million to sign Eddie Nketiah
Wolves are expected to sell both Fabio Silva and Sasa Kalajdzic this summer, and if both do depart then that would mean O’Neil would have just Matheus Cunha and Hwang Hee-chan to play as strikers.
Neither of them are natural number nines, despite them both doing a good job last season.
Eddie Nketiah is a player Wolves have been linked with in previous weeks.
The Arsenal man is on the fringes at the Emirates, with Kai Havertz, Gabriel Jesus and Leandro Trossard all ahead of him in the pecking order.
Despite him being fourth-choice, Arsenal are not wanting to let him go on the cheap this summer.
talkSPORT’s chief football correspondent Alex Crook has claimed that the Gunners want as much as £50 million for the 25-year-old.
Previously, it had been suggested he’d be allowed to depart for a fee in the region of £30-35 million.
£50m is an absurd valuation
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Arsenal wanting £50 million for Nketiah is laughable if true, and Wolves must abandon their pursuit immediately if there was any actual intention to move for the player.
He has shown since he broke into the Arsenal squad in the 2017/18 season that he can be a capable striker.
But at the end of the day, Nketiah has never in his career managed to score more than five goals in a Premier League season. He has only managed 38 goals in 168 games for Arsenal in total.
Quite possibly, he could actually make for a decent signing for Wolves. The Englishman is mobile, and we saw O’Neil really favour players with mobility last season. Nketiah could very well be a hit under the current Molineux boss.
But simply put, Wolves mustn’t go anywhere near him if the asking price is £50 million. That makes zero sense, for a player Arsenal are supposedly open to letting go.
You can understand clubs setting high asking prices for players they don’t actually want to lose. But Nketiah is their fourth-choice striker and someone they’d apparently be happy to let go. So the reported asking price is truly baffling.