Target On: an Arsenal of transfers

Italy: the restructuring of AC Milan begins. Zlatan and Thiago Silva are gone. Antonio Cassano is unhappy but said that he will give it another run through in the Champions Leagues before reassessing. He still dreams of his best years at Sampdoria. Kaka is available and cheap. Arjen Robben´s contract with Bayern ends in 2015 and Milan have inquired at around 20 million euros. Pipo Inzaghi retired and will train youngsters. It seems though that the reshuffling is cosmetic. They should be signing young and promising domestic talent and vetting their youth-team not trying to recapture lost glories by signing players on the final third of their careers.

Spain: Real Madrid have cleared away some room: Altintop has signed with Galatasaray, Pedro León has made his stay official at Getafe, and Fernando Gago has returned from AS Roma to join his compatriot Ever Banega in the Valencia midfield. They have signed right-back Fabinho for Castilla, and there are rumblings that many of them will be moving on as well. There will be new signings though. Luka Modric is one, Maicon is another, and former co-Captain, his Guti-ness himself is being approached by River Plate in Argentina. Individually Modric looks like an impact player, though I wonder how well he will be received by a club that is notoriously difficult to adapt to in first years of play

England: when was the last time that the nexus of all transfer possibilities revolved around North London? Specifically Arsenal? Are we shocked or will you believe it when you see it? I tend to think it will be more the latter than the former. Signing Santi Cazorla for 20 million euros is a steal for a player that can play all along the midfield and is a dead ball specialist. He´ll join Lukas Podolski from Koln and Olivier Giroud from Montpelier, but losing Robin Van Persie will be an immense loss. The captain will not be joining either of the Manchester clubs it seems but Juventus looks like the one club in Europe that can promise him both money in the realm of 190k pounds per week, a Champions League stage and the real possibility of trophies both domestic and internationally. A mistake? Van Persie is the right kind of player to adapt to the more tactically diverse nature of Serie A, but he will never have the opportunity to be the sort of transcendental player that Alessandro Del Piero was for Juve or that he might have been for the Gunners.