Add Arsenal to the list of clubs reportedly interested in Medhi Benatia

As much as the summer transfer window discussion has been about who’s arriving at Juventus the next month or two, there’s also the fact that Juve are likely going to have to sell players to acquire the bankroll to do more signings. With Douglas Costa’s loan move made permanent and both Mattia Perin and Emre Can’s signings now official, a good number of the attention has been turned to who might be leaving.

Like, say, Medhi Benatia.

According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, the list of teams interested in signing Benatia this summer has seen another one added to it. The links to Borussia Dortmund and Olympique Marseille aren’t new, but the one that involves Arsenal is, according to Italy’s resident pink sports daily newspaper on Saturday.

At Benatia’s age — he turned 31 years old back in mid-April — this is likely one of, if not the last, summer to cash in on him and recoup a lot of the €17 million transfer fee they shipped over to Bayern Munich last summer.

Benatia, who has two seasons left on the contract he signed when his loan move became a permanent one last summer, has certainly had an interesting two years in Turin since arriving from Bavaria in 2016. His first season was filled with sub-par play and relative ineffectiveness in defense as Juve shuttled central defenders in and out of the lineup due to a multitude of injuries. His second season, while filled with a very good spell of form mid-season, still left something to be desired in the big picture.

While rumors about Daniele Rugani potentially leaving seem to be a constant as the matches at the World Cup go by, it seems as though the same might be able to now be said about Benatia. Juventus need to get younger, surely, so it’s not like selling a 31-year-old center back who has been up and down with his form throughout his two-year Juve career is something that defies a lot of the logic behind it. For Arsenal on the other hand...