While it’s been about six and a half years since he left, Arsène Wenger will always be integral to Arsenal’s identity.
The French icon joined the club as a relative unknown from the Japanese side Nagoya Grampus Eight in 1996 and transformed the club and English football as a whole.
He delivered domestic glory to the Gunners and gave platforms for legends like Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires to thrive.
However, as with all great managers, he also made some mistakes, including the decision to sell a certain youngster in 2016 who is now worth millions more than the fee he left for.
Arsenal's notable signings in 2016
Before we get to the player in question, it’s worth looking at some of the other notable signings Arsenal made in 2016, starting with the controversial Granit Xhaka.
The Swiss international completed his £35m move to the Gunners in May, and over the next seven seasons, would go from a villain who threw the captain’s armband to the floor under Unai Emery to a beloved fan favourite who the Emirates serenaded during his final season under Mikel Arteta.
In all, the former Borussia Mönchengladbach star made 297 appearances for the North Londoners, scoring 23 goals, providing 29 assists and winning two FA Cups.
In the same summer, the club spent around £17m on Spanish striker Lucas Perez, but unlike Xhaka, the then-27-year-old would leave little to no impact on the club.
In fact, the A Coruña-born poacher would only spend a year with the Gunners, in which he scored seven goals and provided five assists, before being loaned back to Deportivo La Coruna and for the following campaign and then being sold for £4m to West Ham United in the summer of 2018.
However, the departure of another attacker in the summer he arrived proved far more consequential.
The international star Arsenal must rue selling
While the likes of Arteta retired, Tomas Rosicky was sold, and Wojciech Szczęsny was sent out on another loan to Roma in 2016, the sale that Arsenal must regret the most was of a 21-year-old winger who’d go on to be a world-beater: Serge Gnabry.
The German winger joined the Gunners’ youth set-up in 2011, and after several years of impressive performances for the academy sides, he started to make a few appearances for the first team between the 12/13 and 13/14 campaigns, 18 to be exact.
However, in the summer of 2015, he was sent on loan to West Bromwich Albion, where then-boss Tony Pulis famously claimed he wasn’t “at that level to play the games” for the Baggies, which saw him return to the Emirates in February 2016.
However, with Wenger not playing him for the rest of the season, he was sold to Werder Bremen for around £4m in August 2016.
The Stuttgart-born dynamo was an instant hit in Bremen, and after racking up 11 goals and two assists in 27 appearances, agreed to join Bayern Munich for around £7m, who immediately sent him on loan to Hoffenheim for the 17/18 season, where he produced 18 goal involvements in 27 games.
Team
Bremen
Hoffenheim
Bayern
Appearances
27
26
265
Goals
11
10
90
Assists
2
7
56
Goal Involvements per Match
0.48
0.65
0.55
The following year saw him integrate into FC Hollywood’s first team, and almost eight years later, he’s made 265 appearances, in which he’s scored 90 goals, provided 56 assists and won everything there is to win in the club game, including five league titles and the Champions League.
This incredible rise has also seen the valuation of the player talent scout Jacek Kulig once dubbed a “future legend”, explode, with Football Transfers now pricing him at up to €38.5m, which is about £32m, or 700% more than the price Arsenal sold him for.
Ultimately, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and picking the right youngsters to invest in is notoriously tricky, but we can’t help but wonder how Arsenal would have looked over the last few years had they been able to keep hold of Gnabry in 2016.
Signed by Emery: Arsenal hit gold on "unplayable" ace now worth 1300% more
The incredible talent could do great things with Arsenal.
1 ByJack Salveson HolmesFeb 18, 2025
