Why have Chelsea and Arsenal left it so late to move for the brilliant Wilfried Zaha?

Zaha is fantastic and ripe for the plucking at £30m. Arsenal, but mainly Chelsea, will be kicking themselves if they’ve left it too late to move for the Crystal Palace talisman.

Much of the speculation linking Wilfried Zaha with a move away from Selhurst Park is of his own making: he’s openly talked about wanting to move to Arsenal when they opted for Nicolas Pepe and asked to leave Palace before Patrick Vieira took the helm last year.

Add the fact that he’s obviously good enough for the Champions League and is playing for a club who have next to no hope of providing him with that opportunity, and Zaha is one of the most attractive transfer morsels for gossip columns.

So attractive in fact that it’s got to the point where it’s bizarre when he’s not being linked in a transfer window, spuriously or otherwise, with bigger teams vying for trophies. It’s been particularly bizarre this summer.

Zaha’s current Palace deal expires next year. That could be an explanation for the lack of interest, with teams perhaps happy to wait to land him on a free transfer. But given how brilliant he was last term, scoring a career-high 14 Premier League goals, combined with both Chelsea and Arsenal needing a player of exactly his type and quality, it’s baffling it’s taken them this long to consider a move for the Ivorian.

Pedro Neto is said to be Arsenal’s preferred option to replace Nicolas Pepe, but Wolves’ £50m price tag is thought to be a sticking point, meaning they may well turn their attention to Villarreal teenager Yeremy Pino, which is almost certain to irk Zaha.

“Yeah, 100 per cent,” Zaha said in January 2021, when asked if players from foreign leagues are preferred. “I feel like when players come from abroad, I don’t know, they just have that edge with clubs, it’s just like [they say], ‘yeah, I may want him a bit more because he’s from there’.”

Age may well be a factor in Arsenal’s apparent reticence to put Zaha above Neto and Pino on their transfer wish list. Goalkeeper Matt Turner is the only player over the age of 25 to have joined the club in the last two years, and although Zaha is in his prime at 29, longevity is clearly a key part of Mikel Arteta and Edu’s transfer thinking.

The same cannot be said for Chelsea. They’ve signed teenagers Carney Chukwuemeka, Gabriel Slonina and Cesare Casadei, but they’re unlikely to feature much (if at all) this season, and owner Todd Boehly has also splashed out on…