Last week, it looked like the arrival of Gonzalo Higuain to Arsenal was just a matter of finalizing some details, but for now, Real Madrid are still the team he is supposed to play for next season, even if he doesn’t want to.
According to a Florentino Perez interview with Univision, Arsenal have never made an offer for Higuain, and Real Madrid don’t plan to sell him at all. Higuain himself declared at the end of last season that he won’t be playing for the club in 2013-2014.
At the moment, he’s training on his own in Madrid, but pretty shortly, he’s going to have to report back to Real Madrid for their training camp, and a huge sense of disappointment (unless these are all negotiations tactics) for not leaving a club he feels doesn’t treat him properly.
It seems that the arrival of Carlo Ancelotti has halted any talk or sense of departures at the club. No more Cristiano Ronaldo talk about Manchester United (although that was also cleared up by Ronaldo himself), and Xabi Alonso as well, who some thought was trying to find a way out back to the Premier League, is going to stay and fight for his place no matter how many defensive midfielders are there next to him.
Arsenal? Despite all the talk of money they’re willing to spend, we haven’t seen anything happen yet. The Higuain transfer saga is currently stalled, while it’s not quite clear if they actually did or didn’t make a £30 million bid for Luis Suarez. Stevan Jovetic prefers Juventus, and for now, except for Yaya Sanogo, arriving on a free transfer, we haven’t seen anything from Arsene Wenger to show us he’s changed.
At Real Madrid, business as usual. They might not have gotten all the names they would have liked, but bringing back Dani Carvajal from Leverkusen and winning in the race for Isco shows that spending and the ambition isn’t slowing down, even if Barcelona did get the biggest prize available this summer.