Like you say that’s a lot of business in one window.
Even Man U don’t do that much business on so many different players.
If we could sell:
Lacazette
Ozil
Xhaka
Toreira
Kola
Mustafi
Holding or Chambers
we could possibly get around 100m, and almost 1m a week off the wage bill, which would go a long way to getting a top quality CB, as well as a player like Partey, and a DM.
But I can’t see Arteta selling both Xhaka and Torreira so he will have to keep one of them and a replacement for Lacazette won’t be cheap.
I could see either Lacazette or Aubameyang going, along with Kolasinac, Mustafi and Holding but I think Ozil, Chambers and either Torreira or Xhaka will stay as it’s too expensive and too much of an upheavel for our board to comprehend, let alone actually do.
It certainly needs doing but we had, by our standards, quite a big spend last season and we’ve never done big spending two windows in a row.
The buck stops with this guy, his team and KSE. They’ve assembled a team that’s not good enough. No manager could get this team where we want it to be. Ridiculous lack of planning and strategy has cost us dearly
What signing has Raul got horribly wrong since he arrived?
In the summer we wanted a LB, CB, RW and CM and we got all of the aforementioned.
I think he had a damn good summer. His real failing is holding onto Emery and now it looks like gambling on Arteta might well have been a poor decision too.
The other ones were likely more Sven and this past summer I agree there’s some nice signings in there but in the end it’s not that hard for a big club with a massive scouting operation and Francis Cagigao to pick out some young players and go get them, especially when you are a club in our situation who can offer a real path to the first team to exciting young players.
There isn’t a single proven formula for success in football senior management.
As far as I’m concerned KSE and by extension, Raul have done majority of things right over the last 2 seasons. It’s a process that isn’t necessarily rewarded with upward progression at the very start.
Every decision is a calculated risk, I didn’t agree with the Arteta hire but I could see the logic behind it, sadly gamble on Arteta has failed in the short term.
i actually remember people saying the same for liverpool at first, when they were buying firminho and he didnt settle and they bought mane etc people were saying they were meh/good signings but in reality these signings arent gonna get liverpool where they need to be they need top top class signings. I even remember when they bought VVD a lot of people were like ‘well he is a good player but 75m what the fuck are they smoking’ but after a few years and the team clicking they are where they are. At first the signings just dont seem to get the job done but as time goes buy and they start to gel it could look completely different.
Yeah big difference though is the manager had a back catalogue to trust in for the fans, and made two finals in the first season.
Need to get away some of our fans with this ridiculous logic of comparing Klopp to Arteta.
wasnt comparing arteta to klopp i was saying how players on paper may not be that exciting or whatever but when they play together for a while and click and are coached properly they can come together as a whole and be decent.
Fair enough on your part. Others cling to it as some sort of outlier that’s virtually guarantee.
It’s not. It’s a crapshoot appointment with very little logic put towards it.
At the moment he’s a plastic AVB replica in the making.
There’s no real actual contradiction here, I liked the idea of Arteta, and I had enough information available to me to say categorically Emery was a shit hire, but in the end I’ve got about 1% of the information available to Raúl and especially in the case of a total unknown like Arteta that’s extremely relevant, in the end he’s the one doing the interviewing and inside the industry.
Let’s just say that my interview process certainly would’ve involved assuring myself that my candidate had an idea and philosophy that was incompatible with subbing on Chris fucking Willock and Lucas fucking Torreira when needing a goal, without a shot on target, 60-70 minutes in at home against fucking Olympiakos. If I had any doubt in the interview process that that kind of thing wasn’t incompatible with my candidate’s idea/philosophy/disposition/personality whatever you want to call it, I certainly would’ve been looking at other candidates.
I wanted us to wait until summer if we didn’t get Poch, even if that meant persisting with Freddie… I still hope Arteta comes good, but atm not feeling terribly awesome about him either. yeah, he has done the bare minimum I expected of Emery in the first place (basic stabilization of defensive team), but we are still inconsistent, dire going forward, and his reliance on certain players is frustrating - and it isn’t like we’re grinding out points and results along the way either.
Still small sample size and I remain hopeful - I like Arteta… but man, feel like this is going to end in tears again…
Rinse and repeat the “wait too f*ing long and then panic” pattern of this club.
That’s a very long winded way of avoiding admitting that you’ve made yourself look like a bit of a wanker.
You don’t get to slate the club/executive board for a year and a half for not employing Arteta and then change your mind five minutes into his reign, not without a massive mea culpa anyway.
Though I will credit you for switching Basque God around to read Basque Dog, that was clever.
I slated the club for signing Emery. I said Arteta was a better choice, one of many. There’s a big difference and you’re either being disingenuous in putting that way or I dunno what…
I haven’t changed my mind about a thing. Arteta was an unknown for me just like he was for you guys. I perhaps wanted him to succeed even more than others/had more faith in him succeeding than others, but so what? There’s literally no contradiction in this, go back and read my posts, I always said Arteta was more a thing of the heart and that it’s not exactly a vote of confidence that the guy hiring him is Raúl, and that if I was operating just with my head I’d pick Poch.
I didn’t get to interview him. I was praying for our sakes that he was our Pochettino, but fuck me, the signs are bad.
from me, no thanks