Olivier Giroud has just signed for Arsenal. More relevantly for us, Giroud has apparently explicitly confirmed that he rejected Chelsea in so doing:

Giroud confirms on TF1 that Chelsea was interested but he signed for Arsenal because of the stability and philosophy of the Club.

— Vince (@ASCFR) June 26, 2012

Now, what Giroud says is different from what actually happened, but if we take everything at face value, it appears that Chelsea's revolving door policy has cost the club one of their transfer targets, while giving a direct rival that same player. Obviously, that's not ideal, no matter how highly you think of Giroud. I'd expect this to get thrown back in our collective faces at some point.

But it's not really a big deal. Chelsea are coming off a three managers in twelve months spell which saw them win the Champions League and the FA Cup while snapping up some of the brightest young talent around (didn't Arsenal want Juan Mata and Eden Hazard?). If stability costs up backup striker types like Giroud, so be it.

The most interesting thing to come out of all this is that Chelsea were indeed interested in signing him, which would seemingly imply that the club are genuinely searching for a backup to Fernando Torres. I like Giroud, but he's essentially interchangeable with many other talents across Europe, so if we really were interested in him we're almost certainly going to be chasing other strikers hard this window.