He’s gonna want to be number 1 then we need to
do all this shit again in minimum 1 yr
- He’s cheap.
- He’s far better than Neto.
- Setford is nowhere near ready to be no.2 but maybe he’ll be ready in 2026/27.
- He’s already an excellent keeper, we won’t get better for the anywhere near the same money.
Is that enough?
2 Likes
Fair enough but I much prefer having a slightly worse goalkeeper who is content with being backup for a few seasons.
Garcia wont be happy being #2 and is to good to be if he so highly rated
4 Likes
1 season Garcia #2, 1 season Raya #2 then worry 
It’ll be a Raya/Ramsdale situation again but on a higher level, keeping Raya helps with our ECL “Home Grown” quota next season. Then next summer we sell Raya when Setford is ready to move up from the U21s.
Or if Garcia hasn’t dislodged Raya on merit by then we have two good goalkeepers.
This has Leno > Ramsdale > Raya vibes all over it.
Arteta loves to change his goalkeepers lol.
It would be great if Arteta spent as much effort on buying a striker as he does on GK’s. 
1 Like
It isn’t one or the other though is it, there’s no reason we can’t supplement the squad with better quality (especially having seen Neto this year) in that position and not also sign the striker we need this summer. There’s a fine line between having a backup GK who’s too good to be on the bench and having one who if god forbid he needs to play important matches it costs us. Let’s not forget that nightmare Runnarson experiment from a few years back.
If we don’t sign a striker this summer it will be a disaster but it’s not going to be something that’s determined by what we do with our GK situation, unless our finances are in a much worse state than it seems.
1 Like
I get what you are saying but with everything we need to do in the summer, personally I don’t think we should be spending big money on another GK when we already have Raya. We need a decent backup GK but our focus needs to be on attack and securing Zubimendi IMO.
I also think we need to go into next season with the squad complete and fully focused on winning the league. I don’t want the distraction of an internal fight between Raya and Garcia to be our No.1 GK.
We have to buy or loan in a new keeper this summer. That part of the squad build is unavoidable.
Neto is crap. Setford isn’t ready. I’m open to suggestions for a better, cheaper solution to this issue.
David de gea, alex meret, walter benitez all out of contract in the summer might aswell get one of them to be back up to Raya
