Osimhen Hunt, Barcola Dreams: Arsenal and Liverpool's Unfinished Business

The World Cup is barely cold and already the anxiety of an unfinished squad feels like a stone in the boot. That is the condition of being Arsenal or Liverpool in August 2026 — talented enough to dream, incomplete enough to worry.

Victor Osimhen remains the name Arsenal cannot stop circling. Talks are ongoing, which in the language of summer football means the fee is the problem and both clubs know it. Osimhen is not a signing you make quietly. He is a statement, a declaration that Mikel Arteta's project is ready for the next elevation. Every week without him is a week the Premier League title conversation gets a little more complicated.

Liverpool's situation carries a different weight. Andoni Iraola has inherited something extraordinary — a club rebuilt, a fanbase re-energised — but the Bradley Barcola question now sits on his desk like an unsigned contract. Paris Saint-Germain's wide forward is the kind of player who changes the geometry of a game, who makes space where none existed. Liverpool want that. Whether they can afford it, in every sense of the word, is the question Iraola's summer pivots on. The report of a "huge problem" is the sort of language that keeps directors of football awake at 3am, which is precisely when I tend to be watching football from other time zones anyway.

Manchester United, meanwhile, are pursuing Ibrahim Mbaye from Paris Saint-Germain, with Michael Carrick choosing his words carefully in the way managers do when a deal is neither confirmed nor dead. Carrick has always struck me as someone who thinks before he speaks — a quality rare enough in football to be genuinely interesting. The Mbaye link suggests United want dynamism in the middle, something to carry the ball through the lines rather than around them.

At West Ham, the Arne Engels transfer from Celtic is the quietest interesting deal of the window. Belgium international, confirmed medical, Martin O'Neill pragmatic enough to acknowledge what he cannot hold. Engels is twenty-three, technically precise, the kind of signing that does not make headlines until November when suddenly everyone asks why he was available. West Ham have a habit, under the right conditions, of finding those players.

And Crystal Palace are chasing a £13 million target who their own analysts apparently believe could be "unplayable" alongside Daichi Kamada's compatriot Naouihal Khalaili. Thirteen million for unplayable is the best value proposition in football, if it turns out to be true. It almost never does. But occasionally, very occasionally, it does — and that is precisely why you keep watching.

The window closes. The stone in the boot either becomes a signing or becomes a problem that defines your season by December.