Maybe it was a sign of Manchester City’s confidence this summer at the state of the Premier League that they were happy to sell Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko to Arsenal. There was a time when the Big Six clubs were reluctant to trade among each other, fearful of bolstering an opponent.
In truth, there is probably more than one reason why City were quite relaxed about doing business: a need to balance the books to pay those Erling Haaland wages within the rules and the collapse of any decent transfer market outside of the Premier League would have guided those decisions.