summer '22 transfer craziness and stupidity

[IBK]

At the time I think Arteta just had too many fires to put out and had inherited so many problem players that he just couldn’t afford to keep devoting so much time to Guendouzi and his nonsense.

This issue of professionalism isn’t so much about whether players have a rush of blood to the head when they’re on the pitch - it’s about how they conduct themselves around their place of business. Who can be trusted to listen and get on with their jobs without needing constant supervision? And who is a constant distraction who takes way too much time and oxygen away from work you should be doing with the group? We all know the types - I’m sure we’ve all had them at our respective jobs.

If you were just talking about one or two of the latter type in an otherwise professional group then I think we may have been able to work with them, but as it was I think we had so many of them that there was no choice but to break them up and move them on. They’d formed a clique and were feeding off each other’s shitty attitudes, and unfortunately we didn’t get to Guendouzi in time before he’d been become too absorbed into it. In that respect I feel a little sorry for him because I think, if he’d come into this current Arsenal, where the culture and attitude is much improved, then we might have been better able to work with him.

(Incidentally I suspect this is an important secondary reason why we were keen to get Saliba away from the club - there were a couple of early warnings signs that he was gravitating towards that clique and I think think we wanted to keep him as far away from it as possible until it had been dismantled and the club was a better environment for him to be in.)

This.

[selassie]

Problem is though that it is revisionist and inaccurate to look at how well ex players may be perfroming since they left Arsenal, and then make judgments on the wisdom of letting them go. Whether a player succeeds is down to a multitude of factors - of which perhaps the most important (more than individual talent) is how they gel with their team mates; manager; system and ethos of a club. There are countless examples of players thriving at one club when they were not the right fit for another - in fact this is almost the norm. For whatever reason Guendouzi was not right for Arteta's Arsenal, and we need to accept that and move on. The player himself did as much or more to devalue himself as an asset for us as the manager did, and like MO I think Arteta did the right thing by letting him go. Same goes for Auba - albeit that I think his departure was due to more nuanced issues of him no longer being right for our sysyem, and an impediment to the team spirit and ethos that the manager is trying to instill.

Oh I agree IBK. No room for either player in the current squad or Arteta's Arsenal. For all the grumbling of Arteta, he is doing a good job this season and him and Edu bought well in the summer. I trust them in the market on the back of what they did last summer, we are in relatively safe hands with them replacing Guendouzi and Auba so to speak.

[Mac76]

Good article about Rashford - doesn't mention us as a potential buyer but if we make top four i think the Kroenkes will get the chequebook out and I'd like to see him come to us, it feels like a good fit

Yes he's lost a bit of form but Man Ure is a basket case atm and I reckon he'd love playing with Saka, ESR, Odegaard etc

https://www.theguardian.com/football...-dream-souring

[Mac76]

Your last line shows me that there is no point debating this further with you.

That seems like an easy way to avoid the rest of the points I'd made, I might be pretty anti-Xhaka but it's all based on fact, in terms of what we've seen on many occasions

[I am invisible]

I’m pretty sure you’ll get your Xhaka-wish this summer, Mac - he’s wanted out since telling the fans to F off, and he’s ended up stuck here because of the pandemic and the dead post-pandemic market. Chuck in the fact that we’re transitioning to a system that clearly doesn’t suit him and I think these next couple of months will be his last in an Arsenal shirt.

[Mac76]

I’m pretty sure you’ll get your Xhaka-wish this summer, Mac - he’s wanted out since telling the fans to F off, and he’s ended up stuck here because of the pandemic and the dead post-pandemic market. Chuck in the fact that we’re transitioning to a system that clearly doesn’t suit him and I think these next couple of months will be his last in an Arsenal shirt.

Well we could have sold him to Roma last summer but Arteta gave him a new contract, still I'm hoping Arteta will finally start to see how sub-par he is compared to the rest of the side, it was very obvious yesterday because as you say he's not the best in that more forward role

[I am invisible]

Well we could have sold him to Roma last summer but Arteta gave him a new contract, still I'm hoping Arteta will finally start to see how sub-par he is compared to the rest of the side, it was very obvious yesterday because as you say he's not the best in that more forward role

There was always willingness to let him go last summer - maybe not desperation, but certainly willingness. I think that move was just contingent on being able to bring in a specific replacement, and either Roma didn't bid enough for us to be able to afford that replacement, or else the move for that replacement fell through so we called it off.

(I also wonder whether it may have come down to the squad not quite being ready to move away from 4231 and the double-pivot at the start of the season, and needing an extra 6 months to fully transition to 433? If you're planning to make his role redundant by the second half of the season, but you still need someone to do the job for another few months until you're ready, then the best solution may have been to keep him around for another year and gradually fade him out, rather than going for a sharp change at the start of the year and having 6 months of disruption as we find our way?)

Whatever the reason, though, the contract extension always felt more like a bribe to me than a 'this is my guy' vote of confidence: the player gets a tidy little pay bump to keep him happy and in return we get another year to find his replacement, whilst retaining his value. It's cost us in some moments here and there, but overall, when you look at where we are now, you can't say it's worked out badly.

I just can't be bothered getting wound up by it any more. It's only ever worth getting stressed about things that you have the power to change, and there's nothing we can do about this until the summer now. It seems pretty clear to me that he's on the way out - 433 is clearly the way Arteta wants us to play, and he's already commented that Xhaka isn't really suited to that left 8 role, and is just doing the job because that's what the team needs. There's an upgrade coming there, so at the very least I expect Xhaka will lose his place in the starting XI when that player comes in. More likely, though, he'll want to move on for a fresh challenge and a guaranteed starting role somewhere else.

[Mac76]

i certainly hope so, he's a weak link and given the stakes we just can't afford to go into every game not knowing whether we'll finsih with 11 men or not...

[Marc Overmars]

Bit of talk about us going for Rashford in the summer.

Interesting one. He’s gone a bit stale now but I also think he’s been poorly coached considering the ability he showed from a young age. I guess he fits the profile of player we’d be after and he’d probably benefit from a change of scenery.

[fakeyank]

Bit of talk about us going for Rashford in the summer.

Interesting one. He’s gone a bit stale now but I also think he’s been poorly coached considering the ability he showed from a young age. I guess he fits the profile of player we’d be after and he’d probably benefit from a change of scenery.

Not looking forward to the English tax on him.. think we should look elsewhere.