Thanks for the Bournemouth goal, Reiss, but it’s time to say goodbye
Still scared that he may end up staying. Useless player. Such a waste of a great first touch and technique. ESR, Nelson and Nketiah can literally be replaced with one quality forward. Between the three, I doubt they notched 20 league starts last year.
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He’s staying. I’m at peace with him and Eddie not being able to move. For all the good stuff Edu has done, I hope this is a bit of a lesson to him to cut players loose. Coaches and managers will always want to hoard talent. It’s up to the Sporting Director or DoF to move some of those pieces around if necessary.
By way of an example from baseball, the O’s recently traded a guy they’d had for years to Philly. This player wasn’t having a good season, hadn’t really nailed down a starting place and was basically a bit part contributor. The problem was that there were other opportunities and more talented players in the farm system waiting to come up and be a bit part player but the manager insisted on using this particular player. The prevailing theory is that the General Manager (the DoF equivalent in baseball) traded this player away to force the manager’s hand to try something different.
We need to get better at that.
Nelson is useful for a number of teams in this league. I think we’d get bids.
What’s the lesson exactly? We have been constrained in how much we have been able to do in terms of incoming players. The fact we had to do Raya as a loan to buy is evidence of this.
I don’t think it was ever a case of “hoarding talent”. We simply lacked the depth and didn’t have the capacity to make a replacement purchase.
Your idea that it was ever a case of just going out and getting someone better is overly simplistic and doesn’t really account for the reality of the situation.
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What are you even talking about? We’ve got concrete interest in Eddie from one of the major French clubs that sits at currently €20m and will likely rise. We’ve had plenty of reported interest in Nelson and it’s likely that he’ll be moved on too.
Tavares has left on an obligation to buy deal as has I believe Lokonga.
We’ve managed to get Fulham to break their transfer record to sign ESR who’s basically been a non entity for two years now.
Elneny has left the club for free, we’re open to offers for Ramsdale and also Kiwior is apparently open to moving for the right offer too.
The business we’ve done so far this summer has been positive and will likely be even better over the coming weeks if we can get the fight number for Nketiah and firm up any interest in Nelson.
The other day you were talking about snapping off other teams arms for €20m for Eddie and now you’re criticising Edu for hoarding talent when we could have lost him for free and now we’re getting at least that fee.
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This is very fair.
Edu (rightly so in my humble opinion) has been in for some slack during his time here, for how he has dealt with the club’s outgoing transfers. Good work has been done so far in this window. He’s a Ramsdale, Nelson and Nketiah sale away from having a phenomenal summer.
You’re misreading what I wrote. I was saying that coaches will always hoard talent and that sometimes DoFs have to figure out a way to move pieces on even if a coach will always claim they can find a way to use them.
That’s not true though. Plenty of coaches don’t want big squads and plenty want players moved on.
Conches generally dont like big bloated squads.
I can’t call the small squad we’ve been running hoarding talent at all.
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One of the criticisms of Arteta was that he was limiting himself to a small squad despite the fact he would have had a hand in both the Eddie and Nelson contract decisions.
And @SRCJJ I think you’re right that coaches generally don’t like bloated squads, but as we’ve seen with Arteta I think he was more than willing to keep players around and then not use them. And I’m not talking about guys who are clearly not fit for purpose. Both Eddie and Reiss have good qualities, they both fill certain roles in a team. Obviously it’s a two way street, the player has to want to move as well and there are only two opportunities per year to move so it’s speculation on my part that there was a lack of desire to move players on from the club-side. It may be that both guys had little chats with the club or club to their agents that the team would accept bids if they came in. We just don’t know.
Yeah it’s a total nonsense point all round anyway. Managers generally don’t like hoarding players because bloated squads are harder to manage for them and we don’t have a bloated squad.
Well then why did Arteta sign off on new contracts for Eddie and Reiss and then not use them?
Eddie appeared in 27 and 30 league matches the last two years and was over 1000 minutes each season.
Nelson hasn’t really been used much but that’s mainly because (a) he’s not quite good enough to get minutes while the guys in front of him (Saka, Martinelli, Trossard) are healthy and (b) they’ve largely been healthy, except for Martinelli in stretches.
Wanting to have a player on the roster that could play at a decent enough level in case of a big injury but won’t play that much otherwise seems like reasonable planning, not hoarding.
Overall, we have one of the smallest first team squads (if not the smallest) among the traditional big six.
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Eddie got a long run because Jesus was hurt, right? He was disappeared in crunch time last season.
Nelson not being good enough is my gripe. If we’ve got guys ahead of him, why tie him down to a new deal? Why not see what’s in the academy if we’re talking about sub 1000 minutes over a whole season.
Having players on the roster who can play in case of an emergency is fine, I’m not arguing with that. I just don’t agree with the way those contracts were handled.
Read @Powderfinger post. You’re literally just saying things at this point.
Arteta has used Eddie in over 150 games. And he gave Nelson a chance to establish himself and he did a decent job but also missed over 100 days due to injury in 22/23 and was never able to muscle his way back into contention last season.
Over the course of the rebuild we’ve found use for plenty of players who we now probably don’t have a use for. It doesn’t mean Arteta was hoarding players. The rebuild didn’t mean we needed to just get rid of everyone and leave our squad bare.
So when Eddie is sold for €25-30m instead of being released for free you’ll still be arguing he shouldn’t have been given a contract?
Nelson will likely bring a €15-20m fee meaning we’re looking around €40m incoming from two players who haven’t cost us €40m in wages over the last two years and have been somewhat useful to us.
Seems like decent business to me.
If we think about the situation last summer when Nelson got his new contract, it makes sense. We ended up signing three great players for big money in Rice, Havertz, Timber but were so close to the line with PSR that we had to loan Raya instead of buying him outright. We didn’t have the money to also buy a fancy new winger last summer. So the choice was either to extend Nelson for that “4th winger” position, promote an academy kid, or just go without. Extending Nelson was pretty much a no brainer if you think about it that way. We didn’t have anybody in the academy good enough - the best option was Cozier-Duberry and he was 18, nowhere near ready, and might not have the talent to ever be a PL player. Going without would have been dangerous, as we’d have been in the shit if we suffered more serious injuries to our attackers. So it was the least bad of all three options.
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It’s an opportunity cost thing. I could pretend that we cut both those guys and signed Player X who was more of a contributor over the last two seasons and we win back-to-back titles. There’s no way to know what we would have done if we were forced to fill some of those spots.
Am I going to whine about banking 40m combined for two guys I didn’t think were good enough two years ago and have shown themselves to not be good enough? Absolutely not but let’s see those deals go through first. I hope you’re right about those numbers. It would be good business.
My point was that we should be doing deals like that faster rather than getting into the second or third contract with players like that. That’s all.
I hate it when people suggest the manager dips into the academy. The vast majority of those players will never even make it in top flight football let alone be ready to contribute to a top PL club.
It’s just fanciful thinking and shows how truly detached from the reality of the game most fans actually are.
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