Gunners hope to be able to lure the Chilean to the Emirates for next season.
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Arsenal are interested in signing out-of-favour FC Barcelona forward Alexis Sanchez at the end of this season after learning of the player’s current unhappiness with life at Camp Nou.
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The north London club are set to embark on a major overhaul of their first-team squad at the Emirates as soon as the summer transfer window reopens for business at the start of July, with head coach Arsene Wenger understood to be keen to prioritise bringing in a new attacker next season in order to help provide some much-needed support up front for current striker Olivier Giroud.
As a result, the Gunners have been linked of late with a whole host of possible new marksmen for the next campaign, including the likes of Julian Draxler, Antoine Griezmann, Luis Suarez and Josip Drmic, however, it now appears as though the north Londoners are set to focus all their energies on trying to persuade Barca’s unsettled Chile international to swap Catalonia for the capital next season.
Initially, while Wenger has always been a fan of Alexis’s, having followed the player’s career closely ever since he first arrived on the Continent from Cobreloa eight years ago, the experienced French trainer was said not to be confident of being able to persuade Alexis to leave the La Liga champions.
But by all accounts, Wenger and Arsenal have recently been made aware of the player’s current unhappiness at Camp Nou, with Barca head coach Tata Martino preferring to utilise the likes of Cesc Fabregas, Neymar and Perdo ahead of him, especially when it has come to the season’s biggest matches.
And with the Chilean having generally produced the goods when he has been called upon by Martino, the attacker has only become more and more frustrated with how he has been treated by the club’s coaching staff of late, culminating in Alexis not getting the nod to start Wednesday night’s Copa del Rey final against arch-rivals Real Madrid at the Mestalla.
Alexis has so far managed to register a hugely impressive 23 goals and 18 assists in total in his 54 matches in all competitions for both his club and country so far in this campaign, including 17 strikes and 11 assists in his 29 Liga outings for the Catalans.
And with a contract at Barca that currently runs until June 2016, the Gunners will be needing to fork out somewhere in the region of £25m in order to sign Alexis this summer.
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