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So it’s finally happened. Not just that we bought A player. But that, finally, we might have bought THE player.
Today, Arsenal will complete the formalities of the signing of José Antonio Reyes from Sevilla for a price estimated to be between 16 and 25 million pounds, much of which will be largely payable in instalments.
It is a huge amount of money for a 20 year old, smashing not only our own record purchase, the £11-13 million spent on Wiltord, but also, if the upper estimate is to be believed, eclipsing even the maximum price yet to be paid by the billionaires of the Kings Road.
Signing Reyes is not only about signing possibly the best young player in Europe. Better than Rooney, better than Torres, better than Cristiano Ronaldo. It’s also about sending out a clear message to the rest of European football that what Arsène Wenger has been building towards since he came here in 1996 is starting to come true: Arsenal are about ready to take their seat at the very top table of the world game, in that rarified group of Manchester United, Juventus, AC Milan, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid who dominate the European elite. With Reyes, we are ready to announce that we can be the best, and everybody else should be very, very worried.
Compared to some of the players we could have signed, Reyes is a risk. Kluivert has the experience; Defoe or Smith a lower price tag. Samuel Eto’o would have cost just as much, and could have been the more conventional striker some felt was necessary to compliment Thierry Henry. But we’ve signed Reyes, an attacker of infinite potential, capable of playing anywhere across a front line.
Not only does his arrival tell the world that Wenger will never back down from his principles of how football should be played. It also tells La Liga, which prides itself on being Europe’s best that Arsenal are capable of taking away two of its best talents within the space of eight months.
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Wenger’s vision of football, whatever it’s origins in the French and German game, has always best resembled the combination of flare and steel played out in Iberia’s great arenas on a week by week basis. And Spanish football, like that of any great league, prides itself on the raw native talent it produces – and keeps hold of. Just as few of the major English or Italian players have ever plied their trade abroad until their twilight years, so Spanish football has resolutely kept hold of its young stars.
Not now though, because in the last 6 months Wenger has taken in Reyes the attacker deemed the best prospect since Raul, and in 17 year old Cesc Fabregas a player who Barcelona believe to be the most complete talent they have produced since Guardiola. That’s no mean feat, and if there is a shift in the balance of power to take place from the Spanish big three to the English big three, its roots can be located directly in Wenger’s actions.
La Liga followers not only believe that it is the best competition, which in terms of overall quality it still is, but, vitally, and in direct contrast to Italy’s Serie A, that the attacking football there is also of the best technical quality.
What Wenger has been trying to build at Arsenal is not only a trophy winning machine to rival our foes at Old Trafford, but also exactly the ideal La Liga is supposed to uphold – nowhere more-so than at Barcelona and Real Madrid, both of whom Reyes refused to sign for: winning football of the highest technical quality.
The very highest quality has been something Arsenal have long been capable of, but have achieved only sporadically. As Bergkamp’s talents have waned with the passing years, there has been an increasing burden of responsibility on the genius of Thierry Henry and Robért Píres to produce the flashes of inspiration to match the workrate and awesome precision of Patrick Vieira, Freddie Ljungberg, Kolo Touré and the rest of this squad’s core members. Reyes, alongside the burgeoning brilliance of David Bentley and Jeremie Aliádíère, neither of whose longterm importance is diminished by this move, adds an extra dimension to this need for the wit to unlock the toughest defences. Reyes, like all the players Wenger most covets, plays and thinks at pace, is adaptable, and can interchange coherently with any of the other members of the basic attacking unit of 4 on whom Wenger relies.
As able coming in off the right flank as he is on the left, as capable of leading a line as he is in the hole, he matches the same ideal Wenger found in Thierry, Bobby, and, in a different, more direct, way, in Freddie.
Every other coach who has watched Reyes play will think this.
Ferguson, Queiroz, Rijkaard, Lippi: each will look at this and think, this is the perfect player for Arsenal, and with him, they will be much, much harder to stop.
They already had reason to fear us, but now they have reason to fear that stopping the fluid movement of what a lot of us at Arsenal-Mania like to call Wengerball just got a whole lot harder.
They’ll think that not only because Reyes is a world-class talent, but because they’ll see that Wenger is building a squad built on youth that could be together for another 10 years. They’ll remember the signing’s of Cesc and Senderos – the two highest rated teenagers in the game – and see that Arsenal, and Arsène, have the clearest vision in Europe of where their club is going.
They’ll listen to the announcement of Ashburton Grove’s funding being in place next week, and know it might not take until it’s opened in 2006 for us to win the Champions League.
They’ll look at Vieira and Henry’s refusal to even countenance playing for anyone else and know they won’t be able to prise them away for all the money in the world.
Right now, those that count in football’s corridors of power are scared of Arsenal, and they have good reason to be.
The signing of José Antonio Reyes is the most important in our history, because it is the first time Europe’s superpowers will ever have worried about just how powerful a club Arsenal could be.
And frankly, it won’t be the last time.
All hail the new number 9.
Image from: unsplash.com
