I get that but strikers are difficult commodity to acquire. Despite him not being the best option, he has still turned out better than recruits like Lukaku, Morata etc.
If we sell him and when Auba starts feeling the effect of crossing 30, we will end up with another need for striker, who will cost us much more.
Unless we have some young gun waiting, I don’t feel confident selling Laca
Problem is that Laca aint no spring chicken neither…but i would wanna keep him, love the guy.
He will be 28 next season which imo is just about the prime years for a striker.
No Laca? Falling out of love with :unai:?
He does mine :unai:
siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Unai knows.
I did a short analysis on our transfer activity since the Wenger era until the present day.
I think this clearly shows that our transfer activity went south after the 2010/11 season, became quite clearly bad after the 2014/15 season and royally fucked us in 2015/16 and 2016/17. (not that we don’t know that).
A lot of these shit investments have already been moved on - Squillaci, Santos, Gervinho, Park, Ox, Podolski, Giroud, Gabriel, Debuchy and Perez. Some still remain - Mustafi, Xhaka, Chambers, Welbeck and Elneny are equal to ~£125m spend on players that need to be re-sold and reinvested in proper players.
Disclaimer* - I’ve used Walcott, Nacho, Sokratis and Arteta as successful purchases loosely. Particularly with Walcott I’ve only listed him as a success because he has always remained a marketable asset, we could always sell him at a big profit (why didn’t we is beyond me) and he still fetched a decent transfer fee in the end.
Good post.
When you look at the incoming players that have been good for us, it would seem that our windows have been quite successful.
But if you included all the inadequate players that we bought, the list for them would be a lot longer.
Also, a lot of those successful players were bought in to replace top quality players that had left, rather than to to play alongside them.
So we were always constantly two or three top level players short of being a genuine title challenging team.
We certainly need a massive transfer window to give everyone a lift and for us not to fall further behind our rivals.
The bare minimum would be a top quality CB and winger, as well as a replacement for Ramsey and possibly Ozil, if he leaves.
Is Eduardo there because the injury that ended his Arse career wasn’t his fault?
He was a quality player and after the injury ruined him we resold him at minimum loss. Can’t list him as a bad transfer.
Eduardo was a top quality player and one of the best finishers I’ve seen at the club.
I would have also included Chamberlain on that list.
I think he could still be a very good player.
Rabiot just fired his mum. I have a feeling it’s not the last twist or turn with him before summer transfers begin
So every club he deems worthy of his presence told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to hire proper representation haha
That must’ve been an awkward situation.
A WINGER
We’ve been linked with him quite a lot for the past two seasons now, I believe.
Ligue 1 has some fantastic wingers in that league!
Yeah need to be raiding that… If Ozil and Ramsey leave, Nelson returns, we are still pretty light on wing. I would rather Iwobi be spot starter and given some chances as more of an AM as an experiment, with Nelson rotating in out wide. Auba can give us the spot start out wide too, but we so badly need top wingers with guile and pace (and f*ing intelligence - so tired of our braindead players).
Ideal would be:
I’d love if we could get 2, but I think we have needs elsewhere that need addressing as well (defense and CM)… people saying Laca should be sold are insane unless we are getting shedloads of money and Nketiah explodes into a top player. Laca to me is worth more than the 50 million we might get (for a variety of reasons). Striker is actually the one position we have properly sorted.
Sarr is a top young prospect, and in case u hadn’t noticed, players with that profile don’t go cheap nowadays. He’s gonna cost us upwards of 30m. That’s our entire summer transfer budget my dood. Good luck finding a buyer for Mesut on that contract. We need to raise funds to rebuild this team homeboy, realistically where are they coming from?
We don’t know what our budget is for one… our average net spend per year last 3 years is higher than 30m, a lot higher.
Given that we know we are shedding a lot of wages in Ramsey, Welbeck, and a few others - plus sales (god I hope people like Moose are gone), we will have likely 60+ million to spend gross and some good wage wiggle room - I think we are encouraged to increase our base wages by x% (whatever that stupid limit is) so that our base doesn’t start dropping below potential increases…
Anyway, obviously we have way too much work to do for one or probably even two windows, especially with the age of some of our core players, but I think getting a top winger and a defender is doable, then we have to see about CM.