Hello and welcome to a brand new R-Splog R-Scast right here on R-Splog.com.

How are you? Hope you're well. It's been a pretty quiet week all things considered. We didn't have a midweek game for the first time in ages.

So there was little or no news doing the rounds apart from a bit of injury and fitness updates.

And I was thinking going into this podcast, what are we really going to talk about? I know we've got a game against West Ham coming up the weekend.

And we can talk about transfers because the transfer window is open. And then today, Unai Emery at his press conference revealed that Arsenal can't buy.

Any players in the January transfer window, we can only loan them. Talk about putting the cat among the proverbial pigeons.

And by cat, I mean, Sabre II's tiger and by pigeons, I mean Arsenal fans online. And to say the news went down badly would be down playing it in a very considerable way.

So there is now a common theme running through this podcast. See if you can figure out what it is. I'll give you a musical clue. It's quite obtuse.

It might take you a little while, but see if you can work it out.

If it's more than what I want, that's what I want.

Money, the good way, the better you drop it, the better you pay your own pay.

I know very tough, very tough, but I've faith in the intelligence and education of the audience of this podcast that you've probably figured it out.

I'll be joined in a few minutes by Andrew Allen and Tim Stillman. We're going to talk about that particular Unai Emery statement. What it might mean doesn't mean we have no money. Is that explicitly what he's saying?

Perhaps it's something else that he's not capable of expressing in English or doesn't have the subtlety of language to get the point across in a different way.

The implication is we don't have any money, but maybe there's more to it. We'll try and tease that out with Andrew and Tim and look at our finances over the last couple of years.

We'll look at the money that we spent. We'll look at the costs that we've incurred, the money we've brought in and perhaps the money, very importantly, that we won't be getting that we should have got for various players in the past and also in the future this summer.

Of course, we know that there are going to be a couple of players who are going to be leaving for free and that, of course, is not good management, not good business sense.

So we'll get into all of that. What it might mean for this squad in terms of incomes and January. How it might affect our chances of achieving what we want to achieve this season.

We'll look at the West Ham game as well and anything else that crops up in that particular conversation.

Before we talk to the lads though, just a reminder that if you want more podcasts, more things to listen to, more things to read, you can become an R-Splug member on Patreon and get instant access to loads of extra content, history podcasts, the past cast extra with myself and James where we do a podcast on a game from the past as if it's just happened the brand new episode this week is Arsenal 3 Manchester United 2 from 1997.

You might remember that game. You do, don't you? Yeah, you do. You want a reminder? It was this game.

It's into the bottom. I'm sure you're going to get expected as Manchester United would have expected that.

...