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In the end, Arsenal got their man.
It took some feet-dragging, some deadline-day scampering, some cobbling together of cash, and some steely resolve to get the deal over the line, but the Gunners have managed to prise Thomas Partey away from Atletico Madrid, the club that nurtured him into one of Europe’s most coveted midfielders following his arrival from Ghana eight years ago.
It’s not a conclusion I find particularly exciting — as I have explained in some depth on this website — and Ghana head coach Charles Akonnor, a month before naming Partey as the national team’s vice-captain, also argued — to the ire of his countrymen — that the 27-year-old would be better off at the Wanda Metropolitano, for reasons similar to mine.
But, of course, my opinion hardly registers. And Akonnor’s, weightier though it may be, matters little more — no more, in fact, than Atleti’s desire not to lose a key player (Lucas Torreira temporarily moving the other way should fill some of that vacuum, but manager Diego Simeone knows it’s just not the same). What mattered most, aside Arsenal ultimately being able willing to trigger a £45 million release clause, was Partey’s dream of playing in England, even if it meant swapping — for a season, at least — Champions League football for a run in the Europa League.
“The Premier League is a good league. It’s very competitive and has some of the best players in the world,” he told ESPN in 2018. “Hopefully, one day, I would like to play there.”
That day is here, finally, but it could well have found him elsewhere in London, at the club that, 15 years ago, set a new transfer record for a Ghanaian player — Michael Essien, another soft-spoken but protean and dynamic midfielder. Chelsea, days to the end of the window, were rumoured to be pondering a move for Partey, as an alternative to West Ham United’s Declan Rice, in strengthening their own midfield.
True or not, the Blues were urged to sneak ahead of their cross-city rivals for Partey by retired English internationals Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand, but Arsenal — having missed out on one top transfer target in Olympique Lyon’s Houssem Aouar — weren’t going to let Partey slip, and thus pulled out all the stops to reel him in just in time. In doing so, they have overtaken — almost doubled — the fee that Chelsea paid to make Essien the most expensive Ghanaian player in history, underlining the sheer value that Arsenal believe — and rightly so — that they’re getting.
Partey — a player any manager would love to have, and any fan would pay to see — may not be the final piece in constructing the unit Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta hopes would return the club to brighter days, but it’s quite obvious — from how the club eagerly cleared space on the roster and wage bill courtesy late loan deals for Torreira and Matteo Guendouzi — that he is regarded as a pillar, the ticket that former Premier League star Gabriel Agbonlahor believes will guarantee that Arsenal “finish in the top four.”
If Partey turns out anything like the last great Ghanaian midfielder in the English capital, Arsenal might even prove capable of soaring beyond the heights that Agbonlahor predicts, and my reservations — like Akonnor’s — would matter even less.
How about that?
NY Frimpong — Daily Mail GH
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