You make a very good point…also the chance of signing Manolas would increase significantly if Monchi signs on for Arsenal in the summer.
I don’t see how we could have signed a better CB in the summer for less than the £18m we paid for Sokratis…personally I think this was an excellent deal bringing in an experienced CB who is easily the best CB we have in the squad. We can build on this in the summer.
I’m not going to judge Leno on his first season - I don’t disagree with what you say but you have to give players some time to establish themselves. It is no different in our day to day jobs - you wouldn’t expect to be written off after just starting a new job.
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Wasn’t Evans available for £3.5m? Certainly could have done worse if we needed an experienced Europa league level stop gap. We can’t build on the Sokratis signing, we’ll be lucky if maintains a decent level as a starter beyond year 2, he’s a player with very little resale value so we have to secure CL football to justify the initial outlay. Honestly seems like Sven did his old club a favour with this deal tbh his replacement Diallo seems to be playing alot but has lot of upsight. That’s the sort of deal Sven should have been sourcing for Arsenal
Like I said I wouldn’t have signed Leno last summer either. For me it’s about quality over quantity, I would have put the money towards a major CB signing. I can’t help but feel Manolas would have been an interesting player to bring in last summer at a reasonable fee, Juve and United rumoured to be interested now with Roma looking to remove a release clause with a new deal.
I’ve seen and read enough about Leno to know an elite keeper isn’t waiting to come out tbh. He lives in the average to slightly above average category. Not worth what we paid.
My major concern about these two is if, by some miracle, we find ourselves in the CL next season Leno and particularly Sokratis will be proven not to be good enough at that level.
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People would have lost their collective shit if the face of the Arsenal rebuild was Johnny fucking Evans.
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I’d rather have Evans over Mustafi
Personally, I know that Roma fans are delighted with the news. Apparently Monchi is fully responsible about their demise. It’s not like they’ve been having this shit for years, a thousand tranfers in and a thousand transfers out, per transfer cycle.
Anyway, Roma was in a false state last year. I dunno how they managed to knock Barca out but they somehow did. 9 out of 10 times Barca goes through with ease.
I completely believe the 50m figure as our budget (especially now with no CL) Please someone correct me if I’m wrong but the only time in recent memory I can recall us having spent serious money, was the window we brought in Sanchez and Debuchy. We spent well over 100m with no outgoings. Since then, we’ve spent money in the market maybe like 50 - 70m a year, but heavily offset by outgoings as well. We offloaded over 100m of dead wood a couple years back.
Looking at the way we’ve spent our money is shocking tho, all these mediocre guys that have 5th or 6th place written all over them. We need youth with large upside.
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People need to calm their horses then. Getting proven personnel in should never be considered bad, especially at that price. Nothing beats a smart and calculated acquisition. Fergie was the master at sniping these guys.
I disagree.
We got a 30+ defender in from BvB, and we got another 30+ defender who just had 7 seasons at fucking Juventus and everyone hates him lol If we got yet another 30+ Man Utd reject on top of that this place would be in flames because we still would’ve probably had more goals conceded than Newcastle, Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton at this point lol
Evans would have came in and became our best defender the same way Sokratis did. Arsenal fans can’t rate defenders to save their lives, hell most never fully appreciated how good Per was, I lost track of how many idiots I saw on Reddit who thought Mustafi was better.
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The summer we purchased Xhaka, Mustafi and Perez ?
Yeh true, but that was after the summer we bought only Cech so those two windows together averaged 60m spend and we had CL back then.
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It’s a bit exhausting reading through a lot of it tbh. Everyone is out there trying to push their agendas and the overall feeling of the place is really quite negative.
And then when you have accounts like RG and mediocentro acting like footballing savants, it concocts a weird vacuum of opinion. I think people take this all way to seriously.
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Evans was demanding a huge sign on and wages IIRC and West Brom fans thought his defending was full of errors in his last season there.
Sokratis is definitely a more solid no nonsense defender over Evans although Evans ball playing ability is pretty impressive. We could have done with signing them both and shifting Mustafi
Also since when is a defender necessarily done at 32? Centre backs can play upto a good standard into their mid 30s and Sokratis hasn’t had the injury problems the likes of Kosceilny has
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mediocentro is hilarious tho. 
Flip-flopping by the hour. Cut-throat that guy.
that guy is a fucking idiot.
but he only does it to troll. Only guy that rivals @BigWeng_4LYFE in terms of that tbh
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Yep.
Much like the club themselves then 
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The only question I have with all this; what the fuck is Raul Sanhelli doing here?
I feel like with Roma he fell a bit more into ‘lazy’ scouting. Or those were Roma targets and hadn’t a lot to do with him. They got some players from the Eredivisie (Karsdorp, Kluivert) and Italy (Cristante, Schick, Pellgrini). Plus a bunch of older rejects. I wonder if here what he will bring to Arsenal.