Hello and welcome to the TFO Football Podcast. I'm John McKenzie and I'm joined as I always

am by my good pal and producer Mike Zimmerman. Mike, how are you doing today? Doing good,

John, how are you? Really good and I'm really good because I've had the chance to talk

with a couple of really smart guys about Arsenal Football Club, one of the most intriguing

football clubs I think in World Football today. And we had a really nice conversation about

how Arsenal have attempted to solve some of the problems they had last season in the transfer

window. You've just listened to that conversation, Mike, what did you make of it? Yeah, well, one

of those players Arsenal aired it to try and fix those problems is Kai Hiverts. And I think

we all know that there are many opinions about him, some good, some not so good. And we kind

of dove into what he brings to Arsenal and kind of the reason why they did sign him. And then

another thing is the huge elephant in the room, which is the at the time record fee for Declan

Rice and whether or not the fee actually matters over the player. Yeah. And I think the thing that

I took away from it was just talking about how Arsenal are going to become antagonists this season

rather than just protagonist. So they're going to come out and there's going to be big games for

them in Europe in particular, but also at the top of the Premier League where they are going to

have to suffer a little bit and they're going to have to work hard for their wins. And that's

what we saw at Crystal Palace recently, but we're going to see it happening more and more as the

season goes on. So I think the best thing for us to do is to just jump straight into that conversation now.

So everyone knows the story of Arsenal last season, they start off at a remarkable pace,

they hold Manchester City off for a long stretch of the season, but eventually they fall

away in the final month. So going into this season, Arsenal fans have been keen to see evidence

that the club have implemented solutions to those problems that they saw last season. And two

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