During his three years at the helm of Everton, Marcel Brands has tended to favour two types of player in the transfer market.
Promising youngsters with substantial re-sale potential – see Niels Nkounkou, Ben Godfrey, Moise Kean – and seldom-seen players down on their luck, struggling for game time at bigger clubs – Lucas Digne, Andre Gomes, Alex Iwobi.
Folarin Balogun, then, would have been a mixture of both, a highly-promising striker at the centre of this particular Venn diagram.
The Mail reports that Brands’ Everton were one of the clubs, alongside Crystal Palace and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, weighing up a summer swoop for Arsenal’s New York-born England U20 international.
Like Nkounkou, Balogun would have arrived at Goodison Park with a fine track record at youth level – one that is yet to translate into senior, first-team football.
And, like Iwobi, the powerhouse centre-forward is finding game-time hard to come by in the capital, his only minutes in 2020/21 coming in the Europa League and Carabao Cup.
An Everton side with only one out-and-out striker – the increasingly injury-hit Dominic Calvert-Lewin – might have been able to offer Balogun the sort of opportunities that are yet to come his way in London.
But, with Arsenal now closer than ever to agreeing a new, long-term contract with a player who has scored nine goals in 17 Premier League 2 games this term, this most typical of Brands targets looks set to slip through Everton’s grasp.
“We are going to make it official when it’s official and everything is done,” says Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, admitting that Balogun is about to sign a new contract at long, long last.
“I have always been very positive that he wanted to stay at the club. We are very close.”
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