Originally Posted by
I am invisible
Transfers are on Edu - he's made it clear that he's the man you go through for all recruitment and contract matters. Arteta might help draw up the list of targets, but his responsibility is training the players, tactics and team selections.
I get the frustration - I want someone to rage at too because it feels like we're woefully unprepared for this season to start - but tbf I'm not sure how much you can really blame any of the current management team for how the window has gone? They've had their hands well and truly tied by previous regimes who have saddled us with a squad full of overpaid shit and, surprisingly, there's no market out there for them in a pandemic-devastated Europe. Our owners won't put their hands in their pockets and we have to free up space in the squad before we can add to it - that leaves us with very little room to manoeuvre. I think / hope we'll see some things start to happen as we get closer to the end of the window, but I'm starting to brace myself for maybe having to lose some of the players who we'd probably prefer to keep in order to land our key targets (not our best players, but not the unwanted crap either - I'm starting to look at in-betweeners like Willock, Holding, etc).
Unfortunately, I don't think we can just let Xhaka go for nothing - it looks like his replacement is going to need to be (at least partly) funded by his sale, so Roma's offer of a rubber band and a paperclip is no good to us. Unless someone comes in and meets the asking price that we need to achieve in order to fund his replacement he's more valuable to us as a player.
Much as I wanted him to move on (for symbolic reasons as much as anything else), he really is the least of my midfield worries. The fact is he was our best midfielder last year - that may be a sad fact, but it is still a fact - and him and Partey were actually a decent pairing on those rare occasions that Partey was available. Sure, we could raise the ceiling of our midfield by upgrading him, but the more pressing issue for me is that we desperately need to raise our floor. We can't roll into another season where the next available options are players like Elneny and Ceballos - that's what has really killed us. Looking on the positive side, Ceballos is gone, Lokonga looks the absolute business already, and there's been talk of keeping Azeez around the first team this year - personally, I'd rather make another CM signing and send Azeez out on loan for a full year of first team football, but anything that pushes Elneny further away from the starting XI is an improvement for me (love him, but he really is nothing more than an extra body on the pitch).
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