Little better but not quite there - 2020 Summer Transfer Thread

And why Chelsea won the league the following year, and a big reason why France won the WC in the following year after that. There are always players who are gems who are undiscovered, underdeveloped and underutilized. As a scouting, technical and player personnel department you must be able to identify, secure and then nurture these talents to be a consistently high performing club. We have lacked this trait for the last 5 years now.

 

The problem is not identifying these talents: Wenger tried to sign a ton of the "we should have signed X" players. Wenger tried to sign Kante the summer he went to Leicester.

The problem was executing the transfers.

It feels like we've gotten past this, but given that we've done this by giving Mendes and Joorabchian the run of the club, the cure is worse than the disease itself.

 

Yup. Prior to 2014 we had financial constraints that hampered the acquisition of talent and nurturing of it. I was a massive fan of Wenger even in the late years and I feel like he did alot with a little definitely overachieved with average squad after average squad. But let's look to the future I do think we have turn a corner in some aspect but still have a way to go.

 

Agreed and I do believe Dortmund and Arsenal are much different clubs in terms of expectations and pedigree and overall scrutiny. We seem to be lacking in the areas I spoke about. But I will give Artrea time and many transfer windows before I'm critical. I always support the manager unless the vision, results and performances are so egregiously bad (Emery).

 

We were treading water for a little white. Flipping Adebayor and Nasri was ok, and getting money for Sagna wasn't bad. However the club whiffed completely on the inflation era. It's hard to underestimate how much the money from Gareth Bale completely changed Tottenham. It's been since Nasri that we're brought in a young player that other teams were competing hard for. However, Martenelli may become the player that reboots the finances for us.

 

That's funny and I agree with it to a fairly significant degree.

But TBF if Arsene was having a debate with you, he might mention the names of Henry, Sanchez, Cazorla, Reyes, Nasri who all we're not exactly bargain buys at the time I think... and all came pretty good in the end, to varying degrees of course.

Oh, and there's Ozil, who no one can ever criticize for being a bargain buy!

Shoot, he might even bring up Auba & Laca, although we now see these as desperate acts in what turned out to be his final season.

Or if you you go back another year or two there's Mustafi, who may end up rivaling Ozil as our biggest overpayment, considering what the player ended up bringing.

 

I really want to know why we missed the boat on player values. We were consistently 18 months behind on how much players cost.

 

You are hung up on his contract, not his transfer fee, which happens to be the topic of this discussion. Considering the fact that he is third in career assists for Arsenal behind only TH14 and Cesc and ahead of Bergkamp, while he may not be worth the contract they gave him as he was entering his 30s, he has clearly been worth the fee Arsenal paid in 2013.

 

I actually don't think we've done a significantly worse job at some of the things you note than our competition in the PL over the past two years, Liverpool notwithstanding. When you look at:

Torreira
Leno
Tierney
Martinelli
Guendouzi
Likely Saliba

These are all good purchases for solid prices that have significantly appreciated in value since transfer date (excepting Tierney and probably Saliba). They could either be good core pieces of our team going forward or sold for profit.

We are still whiffing at the top end of the market. 100m spent on the combo of Auba and Laca is a back-breaker to this whole squad formation to this day. 70m for Pepe is looking extremely suspect.

The main problem as I see it is we're still paying off the debts of the club being in an inexplicable "win-now" mode for the five years before 2018, peaking after the Ozil transfer. The moves we made for transfers since that date until Wenger's departure kept on compounding the problems we had with wage scale and age profile in our squad. We sold or let go of how many players over the past two years? And we still have significant dead-weight left: Mustafi, Mkhi, Elneny, Ozil contract. We have a load of money tied up into players that aren't moveable, and it meant losing Iwobi, a player who would be helping us right now, to fund a move for Pepe, because Mkhi and Ozil were not able to be sold instead. When you get locked into aging, expensive players, it creates a series of cascading effects that end up affecting your

There was also the problem that under Wenger, Arsenal didn't develop a single teenager (or even young twenty year-old) into a consistently good player after Ashley Cole--basically fifteen years of no development. I agree with you on that front--our player development has been horrendous for a long time. As AOC's dad pointed out recently, Alex got basically not development at all after joining the club from Southampton, at age 18!!! I'm optimistic that getting even marginally better at this process under Arteta/Mertesacker et al will reap huge rewards for our young players.

 

The progress is defensively which he said he would address first because we were hemorrhaging there. The attack Is lackluster and the midfield is still an issue especially when Guendouzi is playing.. but i will support the boss and gove him ample time. Klopp finished 8th his 1st year. This is still an Emery team.

 

No I got ya. You were saying "bargain buy" not necessarily "cheapo".

 

Actually I wasn't focusing primarily on his wages, but that is certainly a huge factor in the Ozil deal. His transfer fee was about 50million IIRC which in the context of this discussion, or the compared to other prices around that time, didn't seem a "bargain buy" price to me. Of course the valuation of players is such a subjective crap shoot.

And the debate about the value we got from the money invested in Ozil is one that will live long I suspect. I'm one who thinks it wasn't a good deal for us. I've thought that ever since somewhere around his 2nd or maybe 3rd season. But at the time of his signing I was just about as pumped as anyone, and I thought he + Alexis showed such a statement of intent. The air has been fairly steadily leaking out of that balloon since not long after those 2 arrived.

 

It will definitely hurt but I feel like if we don't get our midfield sorted we wont have the service to take advantage of good attackers and will waste them as assets like we are doing now. At some point we have to suck up the idea of the rebuild and looking long term like Liverpool did. Then we can look back on it and say it was worth it.