5 times clubs missed out on Deadline Day signings

#4 Thomas Lemar to Arsenal, 2017

Thomas Lemar's Arsenal move fell apart on deadline day in 2017

When Manchester City began sniffing around Arsenal’s star forward Alexis Sanchez in the summer of 2017, a move seemed likely as City could offer Sanchez more money and likely more success, too. And so Arsenal began to shop around for a replacement for the Chilean star and seemed to have settled on Monaco’s French winger Thomas Lemar, who’d risen to fame in 2016/17 by helping his side tear through to the Champions League semi-finals.

Arsenal supposedly agreed a deal in principle with the player, and were all set to bid up to a mind-boggling £90m for him, but on deadline day the plug was pulled, and with no replacement available Arsenal held onto Sanchez – for a few more months at least. But what happened with regards to Lemar? Well, at the time it was claimed that the Frenchman simply didn’t want to move to Arsenal – whether he was holding out for a better offer or just wished to stay put was a question mark.

Since then, however, Monaco have stated that Lemar did want to move to the Emirates, but having lost a handful of their other stars to bigger clubs – Kylian Mbappe, Bernardo Silva, Benjamin Mendy and Tiemoue Bakayoko all left for pastures new during the same transfer window – they simply decided to put their foot down and reject any and all bids for the winger. By doing so, the French outfit not only caused Lemar’s move to fall through, but Sanchez’s too, making it a fine example of the domino effect in football.