Well, it seems like we have managed to tie down WIlliam Saliba till 2027 for now. Ornstein broke the news about the agreement and it’s going to be a 4 year deal. Saliba has moved on from the one of the best talents to one of the best defenders in the world, and it was very important to not let him go.
So, Edu and the club has managed to tie down Ramsdale, Saka, Martinelli, Gabriel and Saliba, and we are sure Odegaard is not going anywhere too. That’s 6 of the important players from our playing XI. Good job from whoever is involved. We don’t let go the best of our players.
Criticize Edu and Mikel for everything but they have managed to keep the important players. You may argue that we are paying over the odds for likes of 21-year olds, but I am looking to win things even if it means we overpay.
Rice will cost us a whooping 80m+ and will demand a salary of 200k+/week at minimum. He plays for a mid-table team who was fighting a relegation battle for the whole season. Do you expect the likes of Saka and Martinelli, who are probably the best in their places in premier league satisfied with anything less than that? It’s not like we are paying huge money for the has-beens and retiring people (like Willian?).
Credit where it’s due. We have 4 years of no worries in 6 places. We have the RB and LB sorted already. Jesus came in last season and we tied down Nketiah too. It’s the midfield which is a worry, but if we are bringing players, we would have a very stable team, where you don’t have to think for at least next 2 years (that’s when these players have 2 years left on the contract and you decide whether to cash out or offer them some more money).
We are in good place. Hopefully we will sort out the midfield this season, pick ourselves up for the fights at two fronts and win something. I’m going to very specific with my demand as a fan – win Premier League and have a good run in Champions League and I will be happy.
It’s not too much of a ask when we stayed on top of the table for like 90% of the season. It’s not too much when it wasn’t City who won it from us, but we gave it to them. It’s not much when Arteta is in his 4th full season, having spent in the north of half a billion and have a team of his own.
Short one today, hope you are having a nice weekend!
KP-anything is possible, but history would suggest that we still lack the backroom nous to get business done in a timely fashion…now if this was simply a due diligence issue, which had enabled us to unearth gems, save on fees and ultimately win the day when it came to highly coveted targets, then it would be difficult to argue the method to their madness, but considering that we’ve excelled in none of these aforementioned categories, makes it all the more difficult to come to terms with…let’s face it, minus the 11th hour Partey get, we’ve bought like a team vying for a Wenger Cup…just imagine what this project would look like if MA hadn’t inherited the likes of Saka, Marts and Saliba…with this in mind, there’s no way this team should still be sorting out their midfield and not be employing a clinical finisher up top, considering the monies made available to him since arriving, which includes those players who could have been sold for considerably more if they weren’t handled so fucking poorly
on a side note, it appears as if Romeo Lavia is becoming our 2nd choice Caicedo option, which isn’t surprising as he’s a former City prospect with a fraction of the asking price…this isn’t to suggest that he’s not a viable option, but this was the window when only readymade, PL proven targets were supposedly on our “get this window right” wishlist
Did we not get Jesus and Zinchenko done early last summer or am I just imagining it?
Bob-July 4th and July 22nd, respectively, hardly “early” in the window, except if you’re only using our past TW history as a barometer…the interesting part was that Jesus’s siging was exceptionally early for us, as there were supposedly other potential suitors, although none submitted an official bid, only “proposals”…important to likewise note the more nuanced components that aided our cause, like they were both deemed as expendable, from our manager’s former team and neither had another “serious” option, minus claims that were used to get us up from our original 30M bid…frankly it speaks to your inherent bias, in that of all the issues you might want to hang your provebial hat on, timely business dealings should be near the bottom of any such list
Just out of curiosity what rating does anyone give A&E for the transfer business they’ve done?
I only ask because today I’ve seen we’ve released AMN on a free having turned down a £20 million plus bid and then hardly played him and stuck him out on loan at a team that got relegated?
They really do piss money up the wall like a lefty council.
Marc-I might have understood the whole AMN mismanagement gig if it ever seemed like MA rated the lad, but the player didn’t want to be deployed at RB and the manager never saw him as a DM, so watching him leave several years later with nothing to show for it speaks to both our oft-times piss-poor asset management and talent evaluating acumen…of course, we all know that all clubs swing and miss at times, whether it be from an incoming or outgoing perspective, but this duo are world-class in this regards…just imagine what might have been if we had the ability to recoup even a fraction of the monies they wantonly lost along the way…at the very least they’ve cost us a world class player or 2, or in their case 1 decent player, 2 old farts and a couple young loan candidates
on a couple of occasions I mentioned my skepticism regarding Saliba’s injury status, specifically as it pertained to his potential availability at the end of the season…as first I felt that it might be his “people” who were instructing him to be overly cautious, considering the importance of not making matters worse heading into a very important off-season…it’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen this sort of “shut it down” approach when there’s a big money deal hanging in the balance…so when the narrative went from nothing serious to a couple weeks or so to it ultimately being treated as if it were an obvious season-ending injury from the get-go, it seemed to confirm my suspicions…I kind of get it though, as this manager had already done him dirty, so to speak, so why would he potentially jeopardize his future for someone who hadn’t always had his best interests in mind
my mindset started to considerably shift in the days and weeks following the season when I started to see some rather interesting verbiage being used in some seemingly innocuous articles about the re-up process….things like “the Gunners were reluctant to hand him any minutes throughout the rest of the campaign” had now replaced the much more definitve messages about his obvious no-go status when the title was still up for grabs…maybe it was just a sign that our organizational directives had drastically changed when it came to “rushing ” players back in light of some previous mistakes in this regards, as this was the same manager who had actually pushed an injured Partey back on the pitch…or maybe it was their way to protect those players who might need to be sold off in the summer, which would likewise explain the kid gloves treatment ESR received this season…of course, it could have been a little bit of both, as it’s not like I don’t believe that Saliba was actually injured, and as someone who’s had their fairshare of back-related injuries, I know that it can be rather fluid situation, so maybe as our title hopes started to fade they decided to err on the side of caution…regardless, I believe at some point decisions were made at the managerial level that negatively impacted our title hopes that weren’t predicated solely on the advice of medical personnel…after all, why was there seemingly no trepidation whatsoever by those other interested suitors regarding the potential long-term ramifications of his rather “serious” back injury
in the end, I’m ecstatic that he appears to be in our plans for the foreseeable future, so long as he fully recovers(lol?), and maybe both Saliba and ESR will go on to have stellar careers, thus making this “situation” appear rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I refuse to ignore the level of sketchiness that’s been on display during our present manager’s tenure…I obviously don’t need to provide a detailed list of the multitude of examples as anyone with even a modicum of good sense knows full-well what I’m talking about…maybe it’s just another excusable aspect of his rather infamous learning curve
Marc
They really do piss money up the wall like a lefty council.
Nice one mate. 😁 I spat my tea all over the sheets reading that. Ms Kroenkephobe wants to kill me for nearly drowning her in tepid typhoo and the cat has morphed from being black and white to chai brown. 🙀
Let me just offer 5 words and a rather large number in response to that tired but deeply amusing old canard that leftie governments are more wasteful than the high tax, corrupt PPE procuring fascist cunts who have been running Britain like a fiefdom for the past 13 miserable years…
BORIS JOHNSON’S 250,000 QUID LEGAL FEES.
Keep em coming mate. I got an answer for all of them.
Switching back to the real world, you up to anything exciting this summer such as getting a break from the horrors of Hertfordshire?
Oh, and good point about AMN. It was Wolves who were willing to pay that right? And generally spot on to highlight Tets’s trashing of player values, which is almost Chelsea-esque in magnitude. Add Gunnerdoozi and Torreira (and arguably Leno) to that list and you just know there’ll be more.
Kroenke
Giving Auba a new £300kper week contract and then paying him to leave 6 months later only for Chelsea to pay Barca to sign him 6 months after that.
Yeah Marc. Aubageddon was the absolute worst on reflection. If there was a pie chart measuring the blame though, I think a good wedge of it would be accounted for by Auba’s own attitude, the remainder of course being down to the two geniuses managing and doing the deals.
Insiders at the club must have realised he had psychologically switched off. He turned into the kind of twat you’d play football with at school. The one that made no pretence of ever being onside and who would just wait by the goalposts and bang home some absolute sitters, moaning all the time that he wasn’t getting enough of the ball. I thought when PEA was bought by Chelsea from Barcelona that Kroenke should have fined them both the equivalent of his fee.
Kroenke
I spent a brief period working in recruitment and one of the guys who worked there had a favourite saying “Leopards and spots” based on a type of candidate being unreliable or a waste of time.
It applies to everyone to a degree – people are what they are and whilst they can be on best behaviour for a time they will always fall back to their base personality. If they hadn’t spotted what Auba was like already they had no business offering him £300k per week.
one question, why are we allowing Arteta to lead our most important window in recent memory if behind the scenes he’s talking with PSG over their vacant coaching position???
I know that some reports suggest that he gave them an unequivocal no, but the optics certainly aren’t great unless he’s once again using the rumour mill to get another very lucrative re-up, as his current deal expires next summer…Ode had better get a re-up this summer or it could raise some eyebrows
Trvl, he’s not ‘in talks’ as it’s ‘reported’ or ‘claimed’.
One less thing to worry about, he’s staying. For now.
he was clearly talking with PSG about their vacant position…we both understand what you were suggesting with your “in talks” comment as that would wrongly imply that he was much further down the road from a hiring perspective, which is why I never uttered those exact words…I certainly don’t mind if that were to happen, so long as all of our young talent has signed on for the long-term, but I’m vastly more worried about him being in charge of our recruitment process if his head has been turned
TRVL
Don’t tease me with what would make my decade.
New Post!
Trvl
He wasn’t talking to PSG at all. You said he was. That why I deliberately used ‘in talks’. Not because I was looking to imply anything.
He didn’t successfully get all the young talent locked in to clear off to that circus.
Aitcho-as per usual you couldn’t be more wrong…little wonder considering where your allegiances lie