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To write about Arsenal’s best transfer windows in the Premier League era is almost weird, given they’ve had more strange windows than perhaps any other top club.
Never a manager to splash money like a Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger – who has been in charge of the Gunners now for over two decades – has relied more on bargain buys and moulding players into his vision in order to gain success.
The move to the Emirates Stadium in 2006/07 meant that the club had millions in debt to pay off, which in turn led Arsenal to slow down on signing big name players even more than they’d done before, and it also meant they became somewhat of a selling club, allowing some of their best players to leave for hefty transfer fees.
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Regardless of this, they’re still one of the most successful clubs of the Premier League era – winning three Premier League titles and seven FA Cups, as well as capturing the UEFA Cup-Winners Cup and reaching the Champions League final in 2005/06.
And despite not paying big money, a lot of their success has been down to the players they’ve bought in. Here are Arsenal’s five greatest Premier League transfer windows:
#5 Summer 1995
This one actually pre-dates Wenger and goes back to the point when Bruce Rioch was in charge of Arsenal, but it’s hard to play down its importance to the club in the long run, given the two players they brought in that summer were massively high-profile ones and pretty much paved the road for the success Arsenal would have going into the late 1990’s.
The two players signed? Dutch striker Dennis Bergkamp, who came in for a hefty price (at the time) of £7.5 million from Inter Milan, and then-England captain David Platt, brought in from Sampdoria for £4.75 million.
While Bergkamp’s reputation had taken a bit of a kicking in Italy and Platt was largely on the downswing of his career at 29, both men fitted into Arsenal’s system immediately, with Bergkamp scoring 11 goals and forming an impressive partnership with Ian Wright.
Their first season saw Arsenal finish 5th – an improvement on 1994/95’s 12th place finish – but the greatest successes came under Arsene Wenger a season later. He improved the team to 3rd place and then in 1997/98, they won the Premier League and FA Cup with Bergkamp being the star man, scoring a total of 22 goals in 40 appearances.
Platt eventually left Arsenal in 1999 but Bergkamp remained a mainstay there until 2005/06 – the final season at Highbury – and will probably go down as one of their all-time greatest players, as he lifted nine trophies while at the club.
#4 Summer 2000
It seems odd having this one on the list, but then I think it shows how shrewd prime Arsene Wenger was at making smart signings that led to success just a little down the line.
That summer could’ve been seen as one of the most frustrating ones from an Arsenal fans’ point of view, as two of the star men from their 1997/98 double winning side were sold to Barcelona. Flying Dutch winger Marc Overmars and classy French midfielder Emmanuel Petit moved to the Nou Camp for a total of £32 million.
In reality, though, the powers of the two were waning – Petit lasted one season at the Nou Camp before returning to England with Chelsea, where he had little success, while Overmars’ Barca career was wrecked by knee injuries.
As for the men Arsenal brought in to replace them? Robert Pires went on to spend six seasons at Arsenal and was named in the Premier League’s Team of the Year three times, while Sylvain Wiltord scored 49 goals in 4 seasons at the club, and Lauren was one of the team’s more consistent performers for a solid period of six seasons.
And Arsenal? They did fine. Just a season later in 2001/02 they captured the Premier League title for the second time under Wenger, and went on to win it again two seasons later in the legendary Invincible season.
All three players starred in that side, with Pires finishing as their second-highest scorer and Lauren making an impressive 47 appearances in all competitions. The window marked some of Wenger’s smartest transfer dealings during his time as Arsenal boss.
#3 Summer 2013
By the end of 2012/13, Arsenal hadn’t won a trophy for nine years, and their most high-profile signings since their move to the Emirates hadn’t really been world-beater types, more players on a slightly lower level, though still good in their own right, like Olivier Giroud, Per Mertesacker and Marouane Chamakh.
That changed in the summer of 2013 and it wasn’t due to the signings of Mathieu Flamini and Yaya Sanogo on free transfers.
No, it was the biggest signing for Arsenal in probably over a decade – German superstar Mesut Ozil arrived from Real Madrid, in the prime of his career, for a club record fee of £42.5 million.
Admittedly, it wasn’t like they simply marched in and took him from Real – the Spanish giants were willing to sell him as Ozil had become surplus to requirements, but it was still a marquee signing not expected of Arsenal in 2013.
Unsurprisingly, Ozil was a massive hit at the Emirates instantly. He gave Arsenal a spark they’d been lacking for years and although he didn’t score that many goals in his debut season – seven in 40 appearances in all competitions – he did provide 13 assists, a great tally by anyone’s standards.
Oh, and he helped Arsenal to end their trophy drought by winning the FA Cup, too.
Throw in the fact that – until recently at least – he’s been one of their most consistently excellent players, and also the fact that the same window didn’t see any other major sales – and the summer of 2013 was definitely a successful one for the Gunners.
#2 Summer 1999
Arsenal might’ve lost one of the biggest stars of the 1997/98 title-winning campaign in the summer of 1999 when they sold sulky French striker Nicolas Anelka to Real Madrid, but at least they received some serious money for him - £23.5 million – and with some of that money at least, they bought a replacement who turned out to be his superior in all ways, basically, a man who went on to become one of the Gunners’ all-time legends and their record goalscorer.
That man was, of course, Thierry Henry, who broke the record that Ian Wright had worked so hard to achieve in just six years. And while he couldn’t lead them to the Premier League title instantly, he did finish as the club’s top goalscorer in his maiden season with 26 in all competitions.
Two seasons later, he scored 32 as Arsenal won the league and then 2003/04 saw him net 39, as Arsenal won the league and went the whole season unbeaten – the ‘Invincibles’ season.
Overall, in 7 of his 8 seasons at Arsenal, Henry finished as their top goalscorer, and he also hit over 30 goals in five of those seasons too. Sure, other 1999 signings such as Sylvinho (two decent seasons) and Davor Suker (way past his prime during his Arsenal run) didn’t fare as well, but who cares?
The window saw them sign probably their best ever player, which means it’s got to be ranked highly.
#1 Summer 1997
Even twenty years on, Arsene Wenger’s greatest achievement remains, perhaps, the double win in 1997/98. Sure, the Invincibles season was an incredible one, and is a feat that may never be matched again, but to overhaul a seemingly unbeatable Manchester United team in 1998 – just one season before they achieved the Treble – with a team of largely unknown players – was a massive achievement that’s somewhat unfairly forgotten today.
Sure, Marc Overmars was a big name at the time – he’d won the Champions League in 1994/95 with Ajax and had already starred in international football for the Netherlands, but practically nobody had heard of Emmanuel Petit, brought in from Monaco for £3.5 million, nor Christopher Wreh, Alexander Manninger, Gilles Grimandi or Luis Boa Morte – all of whom starred alongside existing Wenger signings Patrick Vieira and Nicolas Anelka, particularly as the season came to an exciting conclusion.
It was Manninger, Wreh and Anelka who stepped into the shoes of star players such as David Seaman and Ian Wright when they picked up late-season injuries, and it was Petit’s formidable midfield partnership with Vieira that largely drove the Gunners to both their title win and their FA Cup win too.
It was the first sign we had of Wenger being a mastermind and the first time that Sir Alex Ferguson had really been faced with a genuine rival in the Premier League era. All for just under £17 million.
