Saka stopped £140k-p/w Arsenal Flop From Reaching Potential
When Nicolas Pepe signed for Arsenal in the summer of 2019 there was much fanfare.
It wasn't every day that the Gunners threw such vast sums of money around, as Unai Emery and co smashed the club's transfer record and shelled out £72m on the Ivorian.
Whether the winger had exceptional numbers or not, that was a lot of cash for someone who was still relatively unproven.
That said, when you welcome a new attacker through the door, there is always going to be widespread excitement.
Here was a player who had bagged 22 times in 38 Ligue 1 outings the campaign prior for Lille, proving himself to be one of the best in the French top flight.
Sadly, Pepe has and likely never will live up to his true potential at the Emirates Stadium.
What went wrong for Nicolas Pepe at Arsenal?
After being signed for such a huge price tag, you either sink or swim.
Chelsea are currently feeling the negative impacts of spending upwards of £88.5m on Arsenal target Mykhailo Mudryk in January, with the Ukranian so far having registered just a solitary assist during his nine outings in Blue.
There are worrying parallels to that of Pepe, who has also struggled significantly during his time on English shores.
Overall, the Ivory Coast international has found the net on 27 occasions while also supplying 21 assists. The quality of each goal is well measured too, with few boasting a better left foot across Europe.
Who can forget his dipping curler from the edge of the box against West Ham or his late free-kick against Vitoria Guimares in the Europa League that picked out the top corner.
Sadly, that quality has been few and far between with the 27-year-old largely reduced to a role on the bench.
So unconvincing has the 6-foot wide man's time in the English capital been, that he's now back in France, on loan at Nice. His eight goals across all competitions are unspectacular and suggest that a lack of consistency still plagues Pepe.
That has been his biggest issue since that mega-money move, even if he did score 16 goals across the 2020/21 campaign.
That record is more than handy but the price tag involved always denoted that he should be reaching truly awe-inspiring numbers.
As such, it has rather harshly seen him labelled as the Premier League's "biggest flop" by African football journalist Ezzedine Said.
Pepe's best position is arguably on the right-hand side of an attack and because of that, it's unlikely he'll ever be a regular in this Arsenal team.
After all, the French-born asset has paid the price for Bukayo Saka's emergence on the scene, a young dazzling star who is now 'the best right winger in the world' – as per Arsenal's GOAL correspondent, Charles Watts.
Few would argue against that statement with the 21-year-old having scored three goals at the Winter World Cup, while registering 13 strikes and ten assists for Arsenal throughout the current campaign.
Pepe was always going to struggle to get in ahead of someone like that and it was typical that Saka's first full season of football came during the former Lille star's debut campaign in England.
Of course, the England international did start out as a left-back in this Arsenal side, but his swift progression into becoming a real Premier League star as a right-winger saw Pepe simply forgotten about.
Arsenal's current number 7 only actually played twice on that right-hand side during the 2019/20 campaign, but the following term, after the club's record-signing had scored just eight times, he featured on as many as 20 occasions from the right.
It was from that campaign that Saka leave Pepe in the dust, without a chance of ever reaching his true potential at the club. For the Gunners, that has only been positive. For the £72m man in question, though, it has left him without a permanent home for the 2022/23 campaign.
As a result, few would bet against the £140k-per-week flanker still being in Islington come next term.