It was clear that Arsenal wanted to get rid of Matteo Guendouzi towards the end of last season, but their general approach just made it impossible to get a reasonable fee for him.
He was left out of squads, Mikel Arteta refused to publicly back him and it was clear that he didn’t have a place at The Emirates, so it left Arsenal over a barrel when it came to any kind of negotiations.
It was interesting to see a recent report where Arteta confirmed that the Frenchman would be given a fresh chance to prove himself, but it was never clear if that was genuine or merely an attempt to present a better situation to interested teams.
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A report from Superdeporte in Spain has indicated that Valencia have now approached Arsenal in a bid to sign Guendouzi, and it does sound like Arsenal would be willing to let him go.
One of the issues would be that Valencia are an absolute basket case of a club just now – they’ve let their best players go and it looks like they have no money to make signings at all.
For that reason the report claims they would only be looking to take him on loan without an option to buy, but their squad is threadbare just now so you have to wonder if Guendouzi would actually want to go there.
Despite that, he does need to play regular football and Valencia are still a big club, so a loan move to Spain would be better than sitting in the stands for another year.