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Pundit hails forward Arsenal sold for £2m after scoring a brace in European competition

Giuseppe Labellarte

Sat 16 December 2023 7:15, UK

Arsenal may have got better at player retention in recent years, but there have been some top talents that slipped through the net and are now shining elsewhere.

Serge Gnabry is the biggest such name. Arsenal sold him to Werder Bremen for £8million in 2016, and he went on to star for Bayern Munich, even winning the treble in 2020.

Now, another player the Gunners sold several years ago for a fee in the single millions is starting to impress for an iconic club overseas.

The player in question is Chuba Akpom. Back in 2018, Arsenal sold him to Greece’s PAOK for . Now, he’s at Ajax, having impressed at Middlesbrough last term.

Akpom helped Boro reach the Championship playoff semi-finals last term thanks to 28 goals and two assists from 38 league outings.

Ajax opted to sign him for around £10million this summer and he has eight goals from 17 outings, including a brace against AEK Athens in the Europa League this week.

‘Those English clubs are crazy’

That performance led to compliments from Dutch football pundit Kenneth Perez, who can’t believe that English teams didn’t push to sign him.

“And I still say: those English clubs are crazy,” he said, as per .

“They buy everything they can. He played football there in front of them, but they still didn’t take him.

“They would’ve signed the top scorer of the Championship. There must be more to it as to why they didn’t sign him.”

Fellow pundit Pierre van Hooijdonk replied: “It’s a good purchase if you don’t expect him to score 25 goals for you, because he will miss a lot of opportunities.

“He does score a number of goals, but I think that ratio is at a completely different level than Gimenez and Pavlidis, the top scorers in the competition.

“I have looked back at goals from the period when Akpom played at Middlesbrough. There is no marker.

“A lot of hard shooting, but then everything can come in for a month, and the month after that everything can hit the post.”

Arsenal gave Chuba Akpom many chances

It’s good to see Akpom doing well. However, Arsenal will probably feel that selling him at the time was justified.

The 28-year-old had six loan spells while on the Gunners’ books, and they didn’t seem convinced that he had what it takes to shine for them.

However, you’d like to think that, if he continues to shine at Ajax, a Premier League club will take a chance on him in the summer.