Aaron Ramsdale

At the end of the day that was his market.

Goalkeeper market is tricky. De Gea is a superior and more accomplished keeper than Lenk and he stayed as a free agent for more than a year before he ended up at Fiorentina.

I thought Arsenalā€™s interest in Raya went back much further. Before Arteta arrived at the club.

Both Leno and Martinelli were perfectly good and arguably better than Ramsdale, who Arteta paid a record amount for, although Raya is obviously a top GK.

But my point is that Arteta has spent several seasons and a lot of money to get Raya and maybe should have focused more on the attacking positions where we clearly need better quality.

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A lot of money? How?
We sold Leno for about 10m, Ramsdale for about 25m, Martinez for about 25m and Turner for about 5m.
We bought Ramsdale for about 25m, Raya for about 25m and Turner for 5m.

Weā€™re actually up 10m and we upgraded.

Leno was Ā£3m

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Sounds like a lot of administrative time wasting & agent fees :sweat_smile:

All for one position? Either our talent ID in this area is shocking, or weā€™re incredibly unproductive as a club in the transfer market.

But weā€™ve had a different GK almost every season.
Did we really need to sell Leno and Martinez only to get Ramsdale, who was around 30m, then sell him to spend another 30m on Raya?

Thereā€™s not a lot of continuity in a position where itā€™s needed and as I said, there seems to be more focus on the GK than the attacking positions where weā€™re desperate for quality players.

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This is what bothers me too; weā€™ve spent so much time on this one position that itā€™s taken us 5 years to get it right (but Iā€™m glad Rayaā€™s our #1). But have now left ourselves open up the other end.

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No we havenā€™t. 2 years of Ramsdale, into the second with Raya which looks like itā€™ll continue for a few more years. Prior to that it was Leno/Emi who were already here.

In reality itā€™s one goalkeeper purchased and then an upgrade on that.

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Martinez was our backup to Leno.

Even if I believed in Big Emi since 2014 even I never thought he would turn out to be this good.

Thats just unlucky for us

But was Ramsdale really an upgrade on either Leno or Martinez?
Whatever has happened, the GK position has been changed frequently since Arteta came here, while upfront Jesus has remained the same, despite being underwhelming.

On Leno, yea.

Martinez was never staying so irrelevant.

Iā€™m not sure Ramsdale was 30m better but Raya certainly was worth the money.

Some would say yes, others would say no. The club/manager obviously felt he was, relative to our needs and ideas around how we would play. Which is irrelevant anyway because the point Iā€™m making is we donā€™t have a different GK every season.

We signed a new starting keeper and then upgraded him with a guy who looks like he will be here for 5+ years.

Whether we have signed good forwards is another thing altogether. It has nothing to do with us ā€œhaving a different GK every seasonā€.

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Thatā€™s just the wrong way to think about it. If weā€™re upgrading, why care about the figures.

cause it impacts our ability to improve in other areas during that fiscal year? Though we donā€™t know AFCā€™s financials to say for sure how much they had available to invest in X position per se.

Ā£30m for Ramsdale. Ā£30m for Raya. We had the soon to be crowned best goalkeeper in the world, Emi Martinez.

Now I like Raya, but give me a goddamn forward for that Ā£60m

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I think itā€™s important to note that the kind of ruthlessness weā€™re asking for in the forward positions was demonstrated in the GK position, yet it keeps getting criticised. Think weā€™re going to have to make our minds up here fellas.

I backed Ramsdale but this debateā€¦doesnā€™t make sense honestly.

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Martinelli was better than Ramsdale?
:wright2: :martinelli:

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Youā€™re forgetting the mighty runarsson