This is the obvious answer: we have to let these old contracts go but our acquisition management seems to believe that we have to swallow these turd sandwiches in order to get access to the good stuff from agents. The motivation for that reasoning is highly suspect and the end result is we're just cycling shit contracts for newer shit contracts. Out goes Koscielny, in comes Luiz, as one example. All of the weird loans are another example. There's just no reason we should have squad or depth players who aren't youth players, given the overall quality of our squad. Backfilling a squad with Lichtsteiners and Soareses is affecting the timeline for our youth players and costing a ton of money that we could be using elsewhere when we should be committing to a blow-up rebuild funded by the likes of Auba.
And it is unduly influenced by agents now. We’re going to be mediocre at best until Sanllehi is gone.
I hope you're wrong, but it definitely scares me. At this point I'm in agreement with Clive P from the Vision podcast: "Blow it all up and built it back again." But I don't know that Raul will let us go that route.
Mustafi on his hands and knees watching the ball while Foden ran for the rebound said everything you need to know Arsenal right now.
I think I would be ok with that. You can keep a few vets (maybe Leno, Holding, Bellerin, Xhaka, Pepe) for leadership, etc... and then git rid of everyone else over the age of 25 and bring in guys that want to compete.
Someone want to start the next thread so we don't have to revisit this tire fire? I'd do it, but I'm not going to be able to do any threads for the next couple of weeks.
How is there anyone in the world that thinks that David Luiz is a centreback? He's been found wanting, ludicrously so, at every stop. He's like the Orioles' Chris Davis, except that no other MLB would be stupid enough to take him on. How is Luiz still playing?
He's won the Prem and the Champions League playing a significant role as a CB for Chelsea. I think he's hit the physical cliff, and I hope the club cuts ties with him, but "ludicrously wanting ... at every stop" is hyperbolic.
By far his best days as of the last five years have been surrounded by other world-class defenders, or in the middle of a 3 CB system a la Conte. Otherwise I don't think it's unfair to say he's been pretty bad.
In no way can we blame this on you but when NBC faced the decision between 2 simultaneous matches at 1pm Thurs, they chose to air Burnley-Watford ahead of Soton-Arsenal. More evidence of how the once mighty have fallen?
Luiz is trying to over-impress, show management he's still a classy player worth his weight in gold. Arteta needs to calm him down so they can at least get a more reliable player out of him and make due until the season finishes. After that I think Luiz can be a good mentor and back-up to someone like Mari, but that would require Luiz to accept the likelihood of limited playing time and a pay cut.
Interesting, no indication of which players were involved. And now David Ornstein in The Athletic claims that ‘an extraordinary situation behind the scenes’ disrupted Mikel Arteta’s preparations for Arsenal’s trip to City in their first game back after the season was halted. Ahead of the fixture with Pep Guardiola’s men ‘three squad members ended up missing three days of training’ after ‘Arsenal received untimely news that one of their players had tested positive for coronavirus’. They were given the news at the ‘end of the preceding week’ with the player told to self-isolate for seven days as expected by the Government guidelines. The report adds that two players had spent enough time with their team-mate socially to be classed as a ‘close contact’ and they too had to self-isolate. The Athletic claims that ‘Arsenal strongly suspected this was likely to be a “false positive”’ with none of the three players displaying any symptoms. Arsenal ‘took private samples’ from the player who had tested positive ‘to double-check whether or not the player had the virus (the antigen test) or had contracted it in the past (the antibody test) and both came back negative’. The report continued: ‘Government rules allow people to stop self-isolating earlier than seven days if they get a negative antigen test result but as this was an in-house process it could not be approved by the Premier League. ‘The three players, therefore, took part in the next round of official testing last Monday and each received good news 24 hours later. The league was satisfied and, thanks to a green light from the government, the trio were cleared to rejoin training in time for a 5pm session on Tuesday.’