Yeah, I’m highlighting your point.
It’s only 3 youngsters, and their stocks now are significantly higher than back then and some credit has to be give to Arteta, Edu and co for it.
Fair enough, 670m is the amount you need to compete.
However, you shouldn’t come out of that spending with a need for a winger, a striker, a backup winger and a backup goalkeeper.
If Partey & Jorginho leave, add one or two more positions of need.
We spent 105m on a single player when we have gaping holes in multiple positions. We spent 28m on Raya when we could have used that money on a winger and improved ourselves by a greater margin. 75m on Havertz is another one.
We made luxury signings before fixing the squad.
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Tierney won Arteta the FA cup.
It’s as much Arteta’s desire to play football a certain way that made Tierney a non-factor as his injuries.
Same goes for Leno.
I like him, but I don’t see teams lining up for Tierney now that he’s been of barely any use to us for almost 2 years.
He’s now going back to Celtic once his contract runs out.
I think that says a lot.
The question was - What good players did Arteta have when he joined? Tierney was pretty solid player at the time.
What Arteta had was not that bad of a squad to build upon. He could have held onto some of these players longer.
Leno, Elneny, Mkhitaryan, Torreira, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Nicolas Pépé, Joe Willock, Matteo Guendouzi, Emile Smith Rowe, Sead Kolašinac, Eddie Nketiah
And Arteta managed to use him quite well while he’s was still decent, but even so his availability was a problem for us during certain periods, and it did cost us at times.
And we knew of his injury concerns before we signed, we signed him injured after all.
My bad, I went up - the question was who are still remaining. In that case, Tierney is a non-factor.
So what are you saying? That £670m is enough to build a competitive squad of 21 players and should leave us with no holes whatsoever and there is no leeway in that figure for sometimes making the wrong signing (as all clubs do)?
I would say if I spend 670m which includes paying 105m, 75m on individual players; the gaps that would be left will be in the squad depth, not in primary attacking & starting positions.
We don’t have a good starting midifielder to pair with Rice & Odegaard, We don’t have a starting left winger. As good as Havertz is, he shouldn’t be our first choice striker. Come on.
I know the math is not like that, but it is like averaging 31.9m per player.
We spent 100m and 72m on Rice and Kai, so which means a few players were even cheaper than that.
Arteta did a major overhaul on the squad, but our squad is not expensive really.
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I definitely like that he’s pushing for more signings, but he can’t really say we have been investing far less than the opposition since he got appointed. We have been one of the biggest spenders in the league in that period.
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So you think £670m is enough to build a competitive squad with no holes in it? Is that what you’re saying?
No
Alright, let me give an example
We paid 28m for Raya and 42m for Calafiori.
If there is a financial constraint (which there will be because of PSR)
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Don’t buy Raya, stick with Ramsdale
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Don’t buy Calafiori (deal with one gap of backup LB & backup CB - Kiwior & Zinchenko are still here and Calafiori ended up injured anyway)
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Spend that 70m on a starting left winger.
This squad will be in much better shape with Ramsdale + LW than Raya + Calafiori.
We have limited funds and Arteta has been needlessly liberal with it.
Lol this doesn’t even make sense. So what you’re saying is that in order to build a better squad we needed to have not signed two players that we needed in order to sign one player?
Everyone thought we needed a left back last season and Raya has been a huge upgrade on Ramsdale.
So it’s a crappy opinion and all it would mean is we have a starting left winger but an average goalkeeper and holes in the LB position.
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You are just vehemently defending a stupid opinion.
No you’re just an idiot and you always have been. You accept that £670m isn’t enough to build a competitive squad with NO holes in it yet you’re trying to find ways to defend the point anyway by building a squad that still would have had holes in it lol.
You were dumb yesterday and you’ll be dumb tomorrow.
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You are speaking out of your ass. What a bizarrely idiotic stance
Nahh. I don’t mind Raya even though I was one of the biggest opponents of his move at the start.
Looking at what he gave over the last year or so, I think it was actually a great deal. You don’t find keepers of that quality for that price so easily.
If the injuries don’t ruin Calafiori there’s no doubt he’ll be a very important player long term.
Overall there have been a few misses no doubt (many will disagree but I still have the biggest question mark over Arteta’s biggest signings - Rice&Havertz and how effective they’ll turn out to be long term), but I don’t mind Raya and Cala.