The article below is taken from the wider Transfer DealSheet, which you can read in full here. 

Arsenal

What happened to Arsenal’s pursuit of Morgan Rogers?

Rogers was a clear priority for Arsenal in this window. They carried out extensive background work on the deal, with Rogers subject to a charm offensive from Mikel Arteta and Arsenal players. Arteta believed Rogers could bring a new dimension to the Arsenal attack.

Throughout this process, however, Arsenal did not want to go beyond £80million ($107m) for the 23-year-old.

Villa’s insistence on a fee above £116m naturally led to a stand-off. Chelsea took advantage, meeting Villa’s demands and wrapping up a deal in the space of 48 hours. Although Arsenal had believed they were Rogers’ preference, he was open to joining either club and personal terms proved no issue.

Once Chelsea had met Villa’s valuation, Arsenal were contacted to see whether they would be prepared to match the bid. They declined.

Arsenal did not want to spend more than £80m on Morgan Rogers (Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Who might they move for instead?

Arsenal will now turn to alternative targets. France winger Bradley Barcola is one of several attackers on sporting director Andrea Berta’s radar, although Paris Saint-Germain are reluctant to sell and value him above £100million.

Arteta remains a huge admirer of Argentina forward Julian Alvarez, but Atletico Madrid’s position remains that the 26-year-old is not for sale.

How does Christos Tzolis fit into the picture?

Arsenal have agreed a £34m fee with Club Brugge for 24-year-old Greece international Christos Tzolis. Although also predominantly a left-winger, their pursuit of Tzolis was always separate to any bid for Rogers. Tzolis effectively replaces Leandro Trossard, who has joined Besiktas for €20million (£17.1m, $22.9m).

Arsenal have agreed a £34m fee for Christos Tzolis (Bruno Fahy/Belga/AFP via Getty Images)

What other positions/players are they looking at?

Arsenal maintain their interest in Newcastle United’s Bruno Guimaraes. Again, Arsenal have a clear valuation for the player, and will only proceed if Newcastle are willing to negotiate within those parameters. Otherwise, Arsenal will move on to other targets.

Concerns over William Saliba’s fitness may intensify Arsenal’s search for defensive reinforcements. Aston Villa and England’s Ezri Konsa is a target — but once again, there is a significant gap between Arsenal and Villa’s valuations.

Who might leave the club?

Trossard has said an emotional goodbye to Arsenal and been unveiled at Besiktas.

The first wave of Arsenal squad have reconvened at the club’s London Colney training ground. The group includes Reiss Nelson and Gabriel Jesus, who are among the players Arsenal are hoping to sell this summer.

James McNicholas

In some ways, MLS is already up there with the big leagues across the world.

There were 45 MLS players represented at the 2026 World Cup – including two in the final for Argentina, Messi and Rodrigo de Paul.

MLS has a reputation for being almost a retirement home for superstars – a lucrative place to play for legends like Beckham and Messi after peak careers in Europe.

But that reputation is outdated, Courtemanche says, with the average age of new international players in the league now 23.8 years. Though many of them have dreams of playing in Europe after experiencing MLS.

MLS is changing its calendar in 2027 to adopt a summer-to-spring season, more aligned with Europe to make it easier for players to move between the leagues.

And the competition’s leaders are investing in youth development leagues.

All MLS teams run youth academies. As LA Galaxy hosted a viewing party for the US victory over Bosnia-Herzegovina on a big screen, dozens of children ignored the match, instead battling it out themselves on three separate pitches, occasionally running to the big screen when the sound of a goal spread through the crowd.

These were rare pick-up games in a culture full of highly scheduled children – and the skill level was high. Some of the kids played for MLS youth teams.

Eight-year-old Landon – named after US star Landon Donovan – was one of the more skilled, moving from goalkeeper to forward with glee. His mother Jen Wing is a coach and says her children have attended MLS camps and play on travel teams at their home in New Jersey.

Landon dreams of being a professional soccer player one day in MLS.

“LAFC,” he says, referring to his dream team.

But critics say MLS will never compete with Europe until it sorts out its “pay-to-play” culture in youth development.

At the top level, MLS academies train and develop youth players for free, much like their European counterparts.

But to get to that level, where an MLS academy team would notice a teenage player, families typically pay thousands of dollars for private lessons and access to travel teams, a common theme in US sports.

MLS officials say the development leagues are constantly evolving and improving when it comes to developing young talent, and that every team has scholarships available to talented players.

Commissioner Garber says the league is always improving and is determined to get even better at developing young players so they can deliver “more and more to the men’s national team and just be better, bigger, stronger, faster, all those things that give you energy to think of a better future”.

When it comes to attracting audiences, Messi is the league’s biggest draw.

But the cult of celebrity runs throughout the league. More than two dozen entertainers and athletes hold ownership stakes in MLS clubs, including Will Ferrell (LAFC), Reese Witherspoon (Nashville SC), Matthew McConaughey (Austin FC) and Magic Johnson (LAFC).

And it’s a lucrative business.

Drew Carey was an original Seattle Sounders owner when the club joined MLS in 2009 for a $30m (£22m) expansion fee. The Sounders are now valued at more than $900m (£668m). David Beckham’s 2007 LA Galaxy contract included the option to buy an MLS expansion team for $25m. He now owns Inter Miami CF, a club that experts have valued at more than a billion dollars.

Why are Mercedes struggling to understand George Russell’s straight-line deficit? They must have all the data on his battery deployment, ICE output, e-motor power, plus how much drag his aero and car set-up, such as rake angle, generates – Sean

At the Belgian Grand Prix, Mercedes experienced unexplained behaviour from their power unit.

Russell suffered for this, by having a mystery lack of energy over a lap in qualifying. It cost him some but not all of his deficit to team-mate Kimi Antonelli. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff put the loss from the engine at about 0.2-0.25 seconds.

A pretty much identical thing happened at McLaren to Oscar Piastri in relation to Lando Norris.

Both drivers also experienced a shortfall of energy on the first lap that contributed both to Russell’s incident with Hamilton and Antonelli being passed by Max Verstappen on the approach to Eau Rouge.

As Wolff said: “All Mercedes engines had a lack of energy out of Turn One so that wasn’t only George. It affected him more than Kimi but also Kimi had that issue to a certain degree.”

The one in the race was, Wolff said, “a new issue”.

Mercedes said they did not understand why either situation had happened.

The fundamental issue is that the latest F1 hybrid engines are highly complex, as are the rules by which they have to be operated, and the manufacturers and teams are still learning about them.

One of the impacts of this is that small nuances of driving can have a disproportionately large impact on energy availability. It’s one of the reasons why the drivers do not like these engines.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, among the best technical communicators in the sport, has talked about this extensively this season.

At the weekend in Spa he said: “To operate these power units, you don’t operate them in an open-loop way, whereby I would be able to have an off-line simulation and say, ‘Oh, that’s how the electrical power will be deployed and it will always be identical to itself’.

“There’s a large component of the controller that operates the power unit that happens with live calculations and the power unit forward-thinks, forward-calculates what it has to do. There’s a lot that happens as the car goes.

“This is why it’s not so easy to understand what kind of calculations have been made as the car was going.

“I’m sure we will understand the reason, but at the same time you need to be able to anticipate and make sure that the operation of the power unit unfolds as expected.

“Because this is not only for the influence it has in the power-limited sections, [and] in the straights, but also because it affects the braking points.

“Because if you have an additional amount of harvest before braking, then you are approaching the braking 10km/h slower and your braking point changes.

“This is quite difficult to master for the drivers, and it’s one of the reasons why they talk about the difficulties of exploiting the power unit from a driving point of view.

“It’s not only to get the most out of the power unit, but also because the variations of the power unit affect the references as you approach a corner.

“But the variations that are significantly relevant are so small that they may happen from one lap to the other, even if you have learned from the previous laps.”

This complexity also explains why McLaren have been frustrated this season by some aspects of their relationship with Mercedes, particularly in terms of how much information they have been given about the operation of the engine.

As Stella said: “It’s only now, and we are mid-season, that we are starting to have the required tools in order to be able to anticipate, optimise, and study these sensitivities.”