Quote Originally Posted by HCZ_Reborn View Post
To a degree, all managers go with what they know. Wenger bought a lot of French players because that was the market he knew and more specifically he knew Manu Petit from his days managing Monaco. Mourinho brought a load of his Porto players with him to Chelsea. I care less about how imaginative it is than if it works.

Now Sociedad weren’t setting the world alight when these three were playing together but an excuse can be made that they were quite young, from what I could see from heavily edited video clips a lot of passing triangles. But the other question to ask is where does Rice fit into things with this trifecta.

The other factor with Partey is whilst no one knows for sure, there’s a distinct possibility that he’s the player being investigated for sexual assault claims. Whilst I don’t want to sound cynical about a serious crime (or more precisely serious allegations) if he is the guy and we’d frozen him out whilst he was still anonymous he would have cause to sue the club under employment law for unfair treatment. It kind of would help to have him be some other club’s problem (assuming it is him, and there’s no confirmation that it is)
Good point about Rice. if we are buying Zubimendi then this suggests that Arteta is not plannning to play Rice in what in my view is his most effective position (6).