Arsenal have their fair share of players who can be thought of as ‘ones that got away’ having seen some major talent leave North London over the years.
Every club has them; those players that didn’t quite make it but went on to become stars elsewhere.
Sometimes, it’s not even that players become superstars but do prove themselves to be solid players, such as former Arsenal duo Donyell Malen or Ismael Bennacer.
Serge Gnabry springs to mind too having enjoyed an enormous rise with Bayern Munich after a frustrating spell with Arsenal.
Going back even further, Arsenal had Andrew Cole on their books as a youngster.
Cole came up in the Arsenal ranks but was given just two appearances as a first-team player.
After being loaned out to Fulham and Bristol City, Cole was sold to the latter for £500,000 – and that started his rise to becoming one of the top Premier League strikers in history.
Ian Wright on Andrew Cole
Cole smashed 55 goals in 70 Newcastle United games before a stunning spell at Manchester United, hitting 93 goals in 195 appearances for the club.
England success didn’t really arrive for Cole as he managed just one goal in 15 caps but he sits fourth in the list of all-time Premier League goalscorers with 187.
Only Wayne Rooney, Harry Kane and Alan Shearer are ahead of Cole on that list and he certainly deserves his place as a Premier League legend.
Arsenal missed out on those prime Cole years and whilst they were hardly bereft of attacking talent in the 90’s and 2000’s, his exit may still sting a little.
Ian Wright – one of the strikers Arsenal called up on in the 90’s – has now offered his view on Cole leaving the club.
Speaking on Stick to Football, Wright noted that Cole did the same thing as Kane in terms of being written off at a young age before going on to score regularly.
Wright even claims that people inside Arsenal didn’t think that Cole would score more than 12 goals a season before selling him to Bristol City.
Wright noted that Cole then ‘turned into a monster’ and proved people wrong for writing him off as a youngster.
“You know who else? Andy Cole. They’ve done the same,” said Wright. “I remember he went on loan, because when I got there, he went on loan to Fulham, then he went on loan to Bristol, then he came back, then he got bought by Bristol. But like, they would say at Arsenal, people were saying ‘he probably won’t score more than 12 goals a season’, the way he was and the way he played.”
“To be fair to him, when he was training, Andy Cole is how he is – he does his stuff. But something clicked at Bristol and then obviously, you get him to Newcastle with Beardsley and all that lot, he turned into a monster, he went supernova. Again, it comes down to what you’re saying about people writing people off at that age,” he added.
Maybe Cole needed to leave Arsenal to become the player he became.
Cole was competing against the likes of Paul Merson, Alan Smith, Kevin Campbell and Wright himself, so his decision to leave maybe wasn’t a surprise.
Cole took his chance elsewhere but it’s interesting to imagine how things could have been different if he was an Arsenal player during their famed rivalry with Manchester United.