Not a problem - just stand mad Jens behind our goal on match days until he's not shit. I find nothing keeps you focussed quite like a healthy fear of having your face stoved in with your own water bottle.Originally Posted by The Emirates Gallactico
Not a problem - just stand mad Jens behind our goal on match days until he's not shit. I find nothing keeps you focussed quite like a healthy fear of having your face stoved in with your own water bottle.
Dortmund's only real problem was not being able to keep hold of the players that they found, so they were rarely able to gain any traction from year to year when building teams. Worse, their best players usually ended up going to their biggest rivals!
Hopefully our Dortmund 2.0 project (if that's what it is) will have a little more financial muscle behind it, and we'll be better equipped to resist moves for our players in future. Plus, the more we can save through clever scouting and solid development, the more we'll be able to chuck at genuinely big moves when we need to.
Agree with all of this!
It concerns me that we seem to be going for a lot of players in their late 20's. Sokratis isn't even a great CBr...he had a couple of very good seasons at Dortmund but has been very average for two seasons now, I really don't get why we are going for him. It worries me....
Same with Leno, he was touted as the natural successor to Neuer when he first broke through but he has stagnated for a good few seasons now. He makes a helluva lot of mistakes too, don't want him!
That Sessognon kid is out of our reach, City and United are apparently scrambling for his signature, he will go for a lot of money IMO, looks a real talent.
We’re not in a great space for transfers. We never have been to be honest but you sum it up in your post. The high profile players will cost too much and most likely go to the bigger CL clubs so we’re having to take risks. It’s question of whether we can find those unglamorous players, polish them up and get them looking like world beaters.
Not too far off to how we got players like Bergkamp, Overmars and Henry. We’ll have to take risks on players with blemished CV’s but may turn out to be top quality and just need a change of environment.
Re: Sokratis, I'm wondering if we're (at least partly) looking at him as one of those Remi-Gardesque signings that you bring in when you're trying to implement new standards, and want to let the other players know how shit is going to be done in training from now on? We certainly need an injection of experience somewhere at the back with Kos and Merts gone, and Mustafi doesn't seem to add much beyond chaos?
There's a massive job to do on the back 5. Maybe the first step they are trying is to get solid, if unspectacular, and cheap journeymen in that haven't been exposed to Wenger's defensive weirdness and make a start there. Shoring things up. And then reintroduce our prospects like Chambers and Holding in the proper manner and over time.
Couple this with the Arteta appointment and this seems to be more about undoing the Wenger era rather than pressing on to the next one. And maybe it's necessary. We could be seeing many departures in the summer.
This could also be about getting the wage bill in control, or realigned, where average players on big money are replaced by average players on realistic money. That too would be a sensible move it it frees up cash on the wage bill, which is another factor in determining summer activity. No point having transfer budgets if you can't afford the wages.
This is a new kind of waiting period I guess. We'll know soon enough, the pre-season will come around quickly, especially with the world cup to boredistract us.
Für eure Sicherheit
IMO we shouldn't be messing about, we should be bringing in quality players now to create a strong spine to the team, keeper wise, Oblak, if he cost 70 million he cost 70 million, at the end of the day he'll be there for years and we've seen the difference a top keeper makes.
Likewise CB and DM, I'd sell off the likes of Mustafi, Xhaka, Welbeck, Cech, Chambers (he's a no hoper IMO), Iwobi, I'd even consider selling Bellerin to raise funds. This signing ageing players is a false economy, buy cheap buy twice as they say, just look at Aubameyang, he's come in for big money but scored plenty already.
We've been buyig 2nd rate players for years and that's one of the reason we are where we are.
Thing is you're not going to polish ageing players, they are what they are, the likes of Bergkamp and Overmars we top notch, they'd shown that, they were just having a rough time at their new clubs at the time, the players we're being linked with don't fit into that category tbh.
Got to admit if this stuff is true and we're going for Arteta and then looking at the likes of Leno and Sokratis it's a bit disappointing, real chance for a fresh start and instead of trying to build a team we're just trying to bring in players who you just know aren't the answer (as we were with Wenger).
Makes sense. The immediate problem we have with the defence is that we can't actually say with any certainty just how good / bad any of the individuals are because they haven't been playing with any real plan or structure. First job is going to be get that plan and structure in place, maybe augment it with a couple of solid, old pros to shore things up, as you suggest, and then run with it for a few months so we can see what we're really dealing with.
I guess one thing we have working in our favour at the moment is that City and Pep are so dominant right now that we can afford to take a bit of time to assess things properly without it really costing us anything. We're already out of the top 4 so that can't get much worse, and we're unlikely to topple City straight away, so might as well use this time to get some new foundations in place while we have it...
This!
It makes no sense to have to go through some kind of transistion again in a few years time when a lot of our best players will be in their 30's!
We should be targeting players in their early to mid 20's to supplement some of the experience we currently have, experience as in (Kos, Ramsey, Ozil, Mkhi, Auba etc).
Last edited by selassie; 17-05-2018 at 01:17 PM.
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