Serge Gnabry, Ismael Bennacer and five of the biggest transfer mistakes Arsenal made

The Gunners have dropped some real clangers in the transfer market

Arsenal are attempting to improve their recruitment strategy for the future, with hopes the likes of William Saliba will provide excellent quality and value for years to come.

That hasn’t always been the case previously, with questionable deals completed for several players over the past few years who didn’t impact or impress as hoped.

But there’s another side to recruitment, too: player sales. Arsenal have often tried to bring in and help progress talented youngsters before seeing them emerge in the first team, but of course not all of them make the grade at senior level.

Sometimes, however, the decision of whether they can impact or not is taken too early - or the signs that they can be genuinely excellent players are entirely missed.

Here are Arsenal’s biggest mistakes in the market over the last few years in this regard, where youngsters are allowed to leave, often on the cheap, before developing into great talents further down the line.

Serge Gnabry

The stand-out name is of course Bayern Munich’s fleet-footed forward Gnabry, who has become an elite talent at the Bundesliga giants and is a regular for his national team, too.

It’s all rather a far cry from when Arsenal decided he wasn’t ready and loaned him out to West Brom, where he was also deemed not good enough to feature.

Werder Bremen quickly made their move the following summer and Gnabry hasn’t looked back since; he’s now 24, on the verge of a second successive league title and has a national team record of being the quickest player to reach 10 senior international goals.

Wojciech Szczesny

Not far behind Gnabry in the reputation stakes is Juventus goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny, a long-standing top tier goalkeeper at this point.

Szczesny had chances early on at Arsenal, essentially being first-choice for three years, but a series of errors and below-par performances meant he was jettisoned in favour of Petr Cech rather than be given the chance to recapture top form - which he subsequently did in Italy, instead.

First with Roma, now with Juve, he has proven himself an excellent all-rounder, a reliable performer and a two-time title-winner, with another likely to follow this season.

Ismael Bennacer

Given the indecision and inconsistency in Arsenal’s midfield over the past couple of years it’s hard to fathom how they decided Bennacer wouldn’t provide a good option a season or two down the line.

He was allowed to leave for Empoli in 2017 and less than three years later is one of the most exciting young central talents in Serie A, now with AC Milan.

Bennacer is a fierce competitor, tremendously gifted in terms of passing and vision, has operated with great consistency in a two-man centre of the park and already has over 20 caps to his name with Algeria. This was a huge error from the Gunners and could turn out to be as big a mistake as letting Gnabry go.

Donyell Malen

We’ve already had rumours of Arsenal being interested in signing Dutch wonderkid Donyell Malen - the problem here being that they already had him, and sold him for just half a million three years ago.

Having moved to centre-forward from a wide role, Malen has discovered a lethal finishing touch to his game and looked irrepressible for PSV before an untimely injury.

The 21-year-old will surely be one of the next big-money transfers out of the Eredivisie and has already made his senior bow at international level - another top forward Arsenal cashed in on too soon.

Carlos Vela

Rolling back the years, a similar theme emerges: Arsenal moved fast to sign a 16-year-old Carlos Vela, needing to loan him out thereafter to get around work permit rules. Sporadic appearances followed across a couple of seasons, but by 2011 he was off to Spain with Real Sociedad.

The Mexican asked to leave permanently due to a lack of consistent game time with the Gunners, with his last Arsenal appearance coming at just 21 years of age.

Vela maybe never reached the truly elite level, but he was still an excellent forward who was a massive success in La Liga, an icon for the national team and, later, a free-scoring veteran in MLS. Another big talent missed out on for Arsenal.

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Oguzhan Ozyakup

He’s not quite a big name on the scale of Gnabry, perhaps, but Dutch-born Turkish midfielder Ozyakup was another who joined around 16 years of age, starred in the youth sides and was barely given a chance.

Arsenal offloaded him at 20 for just £500,000 - and he has gone on to play well over 250 times for Besiktas since then, as well as amassing close to a half century of caps for the national team.

He’s currently on a loan spell with Feyenoord and has proven easily capable of holding his own in a competitive European side, as a creative attacking midfielder and a regular goalscorer.

Jeff Reine-Adelaide

Finally, another from the current era which Arsenal might soon be regretting: they sold Jeff Reine-Adelaide for just €1.5m to Angers two years ago and within a year he was a €25m signing for French giants Lyon.

Now patrolling the centre of the park for Les Gones, the poor nature of the Gunners’ dealings is highlighted by the fact that Angers actually negotiated a bigger sell-on clause in their sale than Arsenal did when offloading him originally.

Reine-Adelaide and Bennacer together might have formed the basis of a very talented midfield for Mikel Arteta to work with - instead fans can only watch them both starring with new clubs on the continent, after Arsenal chose to sell early, and cheap, and allowed their abilities to flourish elsewhere.