Up until the last day of his move, Thomas Partey says, he was not thinking about leaving Spain and his move to Arsenal caught him by surprise.
Thomas Partey has admitted that his deadline day switch from Atletico Madrid to Arsenal took him by surprise.
The Ghanaian has been linked with the Gunners since 2018 but says he never once thought about leaving the Spanish capital.
Things changed in less than a day literally as Arsenal agreed to pay the €50 million clause for Partey on deadline day. The Gunners faced a race against time to complete the deal but were able to see it through.
Looking back at the timeline of the sequence of events, the new Arsenal signing says he didn’t see the move coming, and neither did he have it in mind.
“I was not thinking of anything,” he told Sky Sports as quoted by Goal.
“I was OK, I was talking to a friend that I train with to go and train in the morning and then my agent called me.”
“He said: ‘No, we have to go to this place to sign this paper in case we have to sign some papers for you and you are not there, we will sign for you.”
“So in the morning we went there, we did that. Since we went out from the morning we could not come back home.”
Partey continued: “We went to a restaurant to eat and the chef was like: ‘Don’t leave us today,’ I was like: ‘What do you mean?”
“He was like: ‘Today is the deadline day, do not leave us today.’ And I think my agent knew something about that and was like: ‘Nothing will happen, don’t worry.”
“So we went to sign the papers, we went to eat and I think they talked to Edu, and Edu said: “No, we have to do this today.”
Since making his move, Partey has featured three times for Arsenal and is expected to start when the Gunners take on Manchester United on Sunday.
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