Report: Arsenal to make official bid for Youri Tielemans soon

Arsenal are moving towards making their first official bid for Youri Tielemans, according to the paper we don’t link to here. The Leicester City midfielder is in the final year of his contract, has reportedly told the club he does not want to sign an extension, and has been on the Gunners’ transfer radar for months. Earlier in the summer, reports were that Arsenal thought they could nab the Belgian midfielder for around £25M. The most recent reports have upped that number to £30M.

I may be totally off here, but my feeling has been that this move was more a question of when and not if. The Gunners reportedly have agreed to personal terms with Tielemans, and he supposedly wants to come to North London. A few weeks ago, the regular Arsenal journalists wrote (in varying words) that the Gunners had “cooled” their interest in Tielemans to work on other, more pressing transfer targets. That the club felt they had a move for Tielemans mostly complete and in their back pocket would reasonably explain why they started working elsewhere.

The timing of Arsenal coming back in for Tielemans right now is a bit odd. My sense was that the club were going to wait until later in the summer to move for the midfielder to potentially get him at an even lower number as Leicester became more desperate to sell to avoid losing him for nothing. Recent unexpected developments and potential absences in North London may have changed things. Yes, I’m talking about that. No, I’m not going to say anything further.