Seems like that is it for Arsenal.
Our squad is better than last year but thinner than last year. It will be a long year considering the fact that we will play in Europa as well and most of these players will play WC as well
Desperately need a CM, Winger and Fwd.
It such a shame if thatâs it for this window, basically no real replacement for martinelli and saka, elneny and lokonga as our backup CMâs and if Jesus gets Injured we have Eddie as the only natural CF in the teamâŚI know Arteta talked a lot about tactical flexibility and a lot of players covering multiple positions but it just seems our squad is too thin.
Letting Pepe go without replacing him is suicide. Iâm not a fan of it, but we do have numbers in cm with Partey, Xhaka, El Nenny, Lokonga, AMN, Vieira, Zinchenko and Odegaard all able to play there.
Watch us lose 3-1 to Villa tonight because Lokonga absolutely shits the bed and then we end up in a bidding war with Newcastle for Tielemans and pay ÂŁ60m for him lol
If we lose and the midfield looks like crap the first thing weâll hear are leaked stories about how the club are prepared to stay the course.
On the one hand Iâd hope that theyâd have learned their lesson from January but I think they might have taken the opposite lesson. We didnât buy Wout Weghorst or loan Arthur on a five year plan and then were able to secure Jesus for a below market price. Edu might look at that and say itâs because we didnât make a move in January 2022 that we were able to make these moves during the summer which ignores that the Jesus deal was pretty unique imo.
I can appreciate the transfer strategy. We only want our top targets and at the right price.
Weâve just gone through the laborious process of offloading unwanted players. Guys who we either overpaid initially, or we gave stupid contracts to (Auba, Ăzil, Kolasinac etc). Those decisions set us back massively. Long lasting damage.
Now that weâre almost free of all of that baggage, itâs clear the club is being very selective on recruitment. And generally, the recruitment has been hugely vindicated.
Saying that, for fucks sake there has to be a few loan options we can explore in the short-term.
It would be really disappointing if we didnât strengthen right when weâre so close to moving up another level.
Yeah its hard to disagree with the idea of only signing top players but at the same time, squads need depth and that is really what we are crying out for.
We donât necessarily need any more top guys at the stage we are at (obviously in an ideal world the more top guys the better), we need decent players who can come in and do a good job for 25-30 games a season, some of which will be off the bench.
Personally, I will be very disappointed if we sign noone and use this excuse of only wanting top quality.
I understand their hesitation though. A few years ago you could bring in a âbenchâ guy for 10m, not pay him huge wages and if it doesnât work, it doesnât work.
But if you shell out 50m or 60m for a guy to rotate into the squad and they flop, you may have locked yourself into a bad situation.
If Tielemans is available for around 20m and we donât have any more signings, it would be underwhelming window to say the least, especially after getting rid of Pepe and possibly AMN.
Before the window opened we needed to buy a minimum of two top quality strikers, CM, winger and LB.
So we bought Jesus, then signed our previous third choice striker on a new deal and also got a good LB but weâve ignored the CM position, which has been a problem since Wenger was here.
It seems negligent to have a complete lack of quality for such an important position for so many seasons.
Either Arteta and Edu lied when they said to be excited about this window or they have something up their sleeve but if our business is done, top four and finishing ahead of spurs is unlikely.
Not every player costs 50m and huge wages, we have millions invested in scouting and all that jazz so itâs not really a good excuse to suggest everyone is too expensive so we will just have noone. What are the folks in our scouting department doing if not this type of thing? Itâs not like we need them all to spend all their time scouting Jesus and Zinchenko lol
Why would we have needed two top quality strikers? A winger was more important than a second striker
Deffo.
Get rid of Aubameyang and Lacazette in the space of 6 months and you have to replace both of them, not just one.
Eddie effectively replaced one of them since he went from never playing to being our main backup striker. And then we got Jesus. Two strikers is enough, with Martinelli capable of deputizing in a pinch.
The guy we havenât replaced yet is Pepe.
We literally havenât spent ÂŁ50m on any of our additions this summer too lol. And most of our current squad cost less than ÂŁ50m.
In fact Ben White @ ÂŁ50m is the only ÂŁ50m player in our current first team.
And Eddie doesnât have the quality to lead the line if Jesus is out.
Donât get me wrong, Iâd love to see the boy do well, but if we went into tonightâs game with a fully fit team but minus Jesus and plus Eddie, it wouldnât fill me with confidence.
The idea that we need a second high quality striker is borne out of this idea that we had two high quality strikers to begin with.
Laca was always trash and Auba hasnât been able to produce effective results for the last year of his time at Arsenal. Weâve massively upgraded our striking options just by giving Eddie more chances and also by signing Jesus. There was never a need for another high level striker. Especially not when Jesus is being brought in to play as a number 9
In the same vein, we supposedly HAVE to replace Pepe who played how many minutes last season? The over reaction is massive.
If anyone thinks the club do not want to sign more players, they are deluded. The club is however being fussy in who they will sign and if they cannot get the player(s) they want then they will rather make do. Previously we ended up with a load of âmake doâsâ and that worked as well as having no-one
I think Bav was only using that figure because I tossed it out there.
I plucked that number out of thin air based on the rumor that Waxtap wanted 50m for Mudryk. My point was that maybe we do have targets further down the list but that those prices are inching up or arenât coming down in the way we might have hoped. So do you stretch your budget for a guy who is fourth or fifth on your target list?
Sounds like Danilo would be a coup.
I hope that can go through