Not doing the most common sense thing and paying for it in the end has been a major glaring flaw in Edu and Arteta’s management. Fans want Xhaka replaced for being a red card magnate, Arteta makes him a fixture in the team. The fans want reinforcements, Edu and Mikel punt until summer. It feels like each time we know exactly what we need but the guys in charge think they know better and end up failing by a nose hair.
If we don’t fix this midfield crisis and get another backup on the wing now we’re going to have another ALMOST successful season.
I do have some slight hope though, they great mod leper said we don’t need any new additions, so hopefully he’s right and we still cruise to an 80 point season and top 4 .
Disappointing to have the club leak this but it’s not really surprising. We’re paying the price for handing out bad contracts and not recouping fees. It leaves us two players short again. Overall we did good business but what will kill us is the business we didn’t do.
CM was the number two priority, only by virtue of us literally having no strikers contracted past June at one point.
We didn’t address it yet, we have 36 hours almost. Will be a huge disappointment, particularly given the injuries we’ve already gotten, if we don’t address it by 11pm tomorrow.
Edu and Arteta have shown that they’re going to be very strict with signings and that they will only sign a player if he matches up with the particular criteria they have set, at the cost of basically everything else.
They’d rather risk our standing in the league than sign a player for the sake of signing a player and then ending up with a very expensive mistake we can’t shift like Pepe or Mustafi.
I totally get where they’re coming from, but surely there must have been some kind of Plan B CM and Winger who we could have signed in a contingency that was still appropriate in the lens of their criteria.
Generally agree on the approach and find it positive as a whole. But surely there’s a player we could take on loan or a 10-15m gamble we could add to give us an extra number given existing frailties.
Throwing half a season and CL football away was almost acceptable. Risking another whole season on the back of that is not, at least for me.
I think the issue is that we’re beyond Plan B and into Plan D, E, F with some of the names. Do you pay PSV 25m for Gakpo in July? Maybe? Do they ask for 40m in August because they can’t get a replacement? Would you pay that? Waxtap want 50m for their winger. That’s a lot of cash.
And the CM thing looks the same to me.
Once we started hearing stories about FFP and Arsenal our market was over. I’m not sure what happened with the Tielemans deal or if there ever was one but that whole situation was strange.
Edu and Arteta are taking a huge risk (again). It’s fine to have specific criteria on what type of player you bring in but if we’re without Elneny and Partey for six weeks or something like that*, it could wreck the season before the world cup.
*they’d presumably know by now what the prognosis is for both injuries
I think we’ll still get a CM, possibly a back-up option on loan. If they had to switch to prioritise that position then fair enough.
We do still have January by which time we’ll know how Vieira, Lokonga and a few other squaddies are settling in and have a clearer idea of what is needed for the next phase of the project, serious title challenges
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definitely a fake account.