Nicolas Pepe and Arsenal's worst-ever signings - ranked

Arsenal signed Gervinho at a time when Lille had the likes of Eden Hazard and Yohan Cabaye in their Ligue 1-winning team. It's fair to say, then, that Wenger went after the wrong player, as the Ivorian international never settled at Arsenal after coming in as a replacement for Samir Nasri.

Eleven goals in 69 appearances showed that he wasn’t the right man to lead Arsenal’s attack and a terrible open-goal miss against Bradford City in the League Cup probably best sums up his Arsenal career.

Lucas Perez came to prominence in La Liga in 2015-16 with a fine season to keep Deportivo La Coruna out of relegation trouble. His 17 league goals convinced Arsenal that he could be the answer to their troubles up front. 

Unfortunately for the Gunners, Perez proved to be an unmitigated disaster. He managed just one goal in 11 Premier League games during his first and only season with the club, and spent the following campaign back at Deportivo on loan before Arsenal offloaded him to West Ham at a considerable loss.

Marouane Chamakh joined Arsenal on a free transfer from Bordeaux in 2010 and had a promising start to his Gunners career. However, the striker scored just 14 goals in 67 appearances before joining West Ham on loan in January 2013, as Robin van Persie’s rise to prominence displaced the Morocco striker from the starting line-up.

Chamakh later revealed that he feels Wenger misled him over his first-team opportunities at Arsenal, saying: "I played for six months, I scored goals, I was decisive. In January [2011], Robin returned from injury and overnight, I landed on the bench without justification.

"It is clear that I am a little annoyed at [Wenger] because I think I deserved more playing time than what I was given. As the year began, at the start of the season, he told me that we might change tactics and maybe I would be able to play up front with Robin.”

Signed in the same transfer window as Per Mertesacker and Yossi Benayoun, Andre Santos arrived at Arsenal to solve the club's left-back shortage.

However, his lack of pace and poor positioning saw him vilified by press and supporters alike, and his decision to swap shirts with Van Persie at half-time during the club’s 2-1 defeat to Manchester United only provoked further ire.

Given the fierce rivalry between Arsenal and Manchester United during the Wenger-Sir Alex Ferguson era, it was little surprise that the arrival of Mikael Silvestre from the Red Devils was greeted with reluctance from the Gunners support. 

The Frenchman did little to dispel those doubts, spending two years in north London as a bit-part player and never coming close to the level he showed at Old Trafford. 

Stefan Malz signed from 1860 Munich in 1999 but could not force his way into a midfield boasting the likes of Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit and Robert Pires. He left just two years after joining, having made only 14 appearances.

He may have arrived in the same year as Nicolas Anelka, Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars, but Alberto Mendez certainly didn't follow in their footsteps. Signed from German non-league side SC Feucht in 1997, Mendez ended his Arsenal career with just 11 appearances to his name.

Wenger described the signing of Amaury Bischoff as a "gamble" due to midfielder’s history of injury problems. The move never paid off, though, because even after eventually returning to fitness, Bischoff found himself low down in the midfield pecking order.

He revealed in an exclusive interview with GOAL that he decided to leave Arsenal due to a lack of game time, having seen just 25 minutes of action in a solitary Premier League outing.

"It wasn't easy [to decide to leave], because I was injured," Bischoff explained. "But I came back and gave it my all. Then the question came up whether to stay or to leave. I talked to Wenger and then we decided that it might be better to leave the club because I wanted go play more games for the first team.”

David Grondin signed for Arsenal from Saint-Etienne at the age of 18, but made only one league appearance in five years at the club, before being sold to Scottish side Dunfermline Athletic.

“I was young and inexperienced at a big, big club full of great players performing well. I couldn’t exactly then go to the manager and say I should be in the team," Grondin said. "Each time I returned to Arsenal after a spell away, I started back at square one, but I had to accept it and work away in the hope of being ready if called upon. 

"I don’t know why I cost £500,000 ($627,000), and can only assume this money was paid as a gesture. There were a lot of good youngsters at Saint-Etienne at this time and I think that was why Arsenal got involved."

In what is one of the strangest signings of Wenger’s reign at Arsenal, Park Chu-young walked out of a medical with Lille after being informed of the club’s interest.

The South Korean was highly rated in Ligue 1 and having been handed the No.9 shirt, scored on his Gunners debut in a League Cup match against Bolton. But a lack of game time and questions over his quality saw him leave the club in 2014 after making fewer than 10 appearances.

Shkodran Mustafi came to the Emirates Stadium with a burgeoning reputation after impressive spells with Sampdoria and Valencia. He started well, going 22 games unbeaten in the team to set a new club record.

Despite his hefty transfer fee, the German defender would eventually make a number of errors during his time with the Gunners, and by 2019 had slipped out of the first team. 

He was finally released on a free transfer in February 2021 and currently finds himself without a club at the age of 31.

French defender Sebastien Squillaci was signed to bolster an Arsenal backline that was short of numbers, but several errors early on showed that he was out of his depth. Squillaci slid down the pecking order and was released in 2013.

Igors Stepanovs was signed following an injury to Tony Adams, but after playing in the infamous 6-1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford, his confidence clearly took a knock from which he would never recover.

He made just 17 league appearances in four years before joining Grasshoppers Zurich.

‘Fox in the box’ was the description given to Jeffers when he joined Arsenal for £8 million ($10m) from Everton in 2001. "We were considering (Ruud van Nistelrooy) and Francis Jeffers and, in the end, we went for Jeffers," revealed Wenger at the time.

Jeffers, though, scored just eight goals while having various fitness issues before being sold to Charlton Athletic for a fraction of the fee the Gunners paid in 2004. Van Nistelrooy, on the other hand, won the Premier League with Manchester United, and two La Liga titles at Real Madrid.

When you spend a club-record sum on a player, you want a guarantee of success. However, Nicolas Pepe - who was Arsenal's most expensive player by some stretch until Declan Rice's arrival in 2023 - turned out to be their biggest transfer faux pas to date.

The Gunners were persuaded to part with a whopping £72m ($90m) after Pepe's prolific 2018-19 campaign with Lille, where he scored 23 goals and provided a further 12 assists - but he was never able to translate that form to English football.

After a couple of semi-productive seasons he fell out of favour at the Emirates, and following a loan back in France with Nice, he is set to depart in 2023.