Was it London hanging out with Matty G

Very enjoyable highlight reel. This guy would go straight into first team and play a part. He will need to bulk up, but the footwork, acceleration and boldness to take men on is worth investing in. Too early to say what he will become, but hugely exciting

Video is also worth watching for the lesser-spotted Guendouzi assist around 9:50

Yep he’s on the want list

More of these please. Lets stockpile 20years old and below talent at affordable prices

This much more like it. Exciting.

The last Alexis we had didn't too badly for us.

Already in london according to guendos account. For anything under 10m this would be worth a punt

Looks exciting. What position does he play exactly.

He’s a 10. He started deeper earlier on in his career, and then moved further forward. He’s primarily played in the centre but can come in from either wing. Has a decent goal return of about 0,4 goals per game in a new role, and has also gotten a few assists. Initially for us, I’d imagine him coming in from wide in a 433 but might develop into a centre man in a 4231 as well. Very skilled and flexible

I would really rather spend our cash on this guy than Fraser. The profile of clubs scouting him (Frankfurt, Lille, Monaco) are the money doublers we should be looking to bypass going forward.

Looks good, but if this guy, who's a year and a half older than Nelson and still playing on a much lower level, is ready to play for us, then surely Nelson is even more deserving of those minutes.

With welbeck leaving, it really leaves auba and iwobi as our only senior wide players. Plus we're trying to offload mkhi. There's space for nelson if we decide to bring him back, although i think he could use another 12 months on loan

Gazza M wrote:

There's space for nelson if we decide to bring him back, although i think he could use another 12 months on loan

I think he could use that too, which is why I'm unsure of what this guy who seems to be further behind in his development could do for us this season. Then again, Guendouzi surprised me. Weirder things has happened.

The club can't keep extolling the qualities of the young players in the squad and then sign players like this to put in front of them.

He looks a good prospect, nothing special to my eyes, but I really think with Saka, Smith Rowe, Amaechi and Nelson playing in a similar position/style it should be a case of signing someone truly excpetional, or perhaps just ready to contribute with goals and assists from the first kick of next season.

This guy is quite young too. Let them compete to get into the starting 11, the squad needs depth too.

Competitiveness comes from getting the balance correct.

We have already signed Gabriel Martinelli: An 18 year old considered talented enough to be invited to train with the Brazilian national team pre-Copa America.

We have room for a Pepe because he'd be a game-changer, but having six 17-20 year olds competing for two spots in which we already have Iwobi and Mkhitaryan, is not the right balance.

Spend the money on making other positions more competitive.

I think Mkhi will be on his way, for the wide position that leaves Alexis, Nelson, Iwobi, Martinelli and Ozil for 2 more years. With Saka, Amaechi getting loans.

Unbelievably underwhelming options for now.

I support growing the pipeline.
None of these young options are likely to make a significant impact this season. We will still need to buy a senior attacking midfielder (at the very least to replace Mkhitaryan). But we give ourselves options. Nothing is certain with Nelson or Martinelli. Hopefully, 1 or 2 of these guys gets and takes chances in the next 2-3 years and develops into a regular for us. The others can then be squad options or transfer-listed. I’m less optimistic about the prospects of any single 20 year old, but quite excited that having a clutch of high quality youths will help raise competition and increase our chances that with the extra numbers st least one breaks through.

I think the point the others are making is we don't want to stockpile similar players which reduces development opportunities (see chelsea and man city). If this guy is better than Martinelli, get him instead as they will be competing for game time with Mkhi, Iwobi and the youth players already here (Nketiah, Nelson, Saka, etc).

I understand what they are saying, Bold Tone. But I also saw a team that was desperately short for attacking mid talent, and none of these are a sure thing. We will only know once they start playing more here or at their loan clubs what they will yield.
And optionality means we do not even have to have them on board. We could, for example, take someone like Claude-Maurice and send him to Lille or similar for the next year to ensure he gets Ligue 1 game time but as our player.

My belief really comes from the need to go after two types of players primarily

• the most affordable 'stars' we can get our hands on. If we can afford a Pepe, we should buy him.
• cheap high potential players like Guendouzis. Again, if you can get them at 5m before they are worth 30 or 40m in 3 years time, buy them. You have to accept that some of these will flop, but hopefully you're strike rate is good enough to make this more advantageous than buying fully-formed players

Claudius wrote:

I understand what they are saying, Bold Tone. But I also saw a team that was desperately short for attacking mid talent, and none of these are a sure thing. We will only know once they start playing more here or at their loan clubs what they will yield.
And optionality means we do not even have to have them on board. We could, for example, take someone like Claude-Maurice and send him to Lille or similar for the next year to ensure he gets Ligue 1 game time but as our player.

My belief really comes from the need to go after two types of players primarily

• the most affordable 'stars' we can get our hands on. If we can afford a Pepe, we should buy him.
• cheap high potential players like Guendouzis. Again, if you can get them at 5m before they are worth 30 or 40m in 3 years time, buy them. You have to accept that some of these will flop, but hopefully you're strike rate is good enough to make this more advantageous than buying fully-formed players

TBH i don't know what the best strategy is as we are dealing with potential but we are paying Sanllehi good money to make this decision.
There are merits to both approaches as developing our own helps our "home-grown" quota but is the slower approach. I'm mindful that very few of our youth players have managed to elevate the first team with Iwobi and Bellerin the recent cases only maintaining the status quo at best.
Signing the right player is a shortcut but we should leverage the contracts in a similar way to spuds who pay low rates so they can get rid of non-performers easily. 

Coombs wrote:

Are people seriously using the "we don't want to kill _______" argument? Stockpile as much talent as we can. We need to sell them at some point, not foolishly bank on 3 or 4 guys going on to spend 14 seasons with us. That's why we failed at this last time.

We already have talent in the position Claude-Maurice plays. Two of them have been on loan at clubs challenging for Champions League places in the Bundesliga.

Stockpiling is not the right strategy with our resources. Target exceptional quality: Focus all our money on that. Large squads, made up of middling talents or middling players is what's driven our wage bill up so high. Quality not quantity, I can't stress how important I think this is. If we sign talent from elsewhere then we have to be convinced that if their development goes well they can reach the very top. Otherwise, focus on the best quality developed or near developed players you can attract and bolster the squad with academy players.

If the club think this kid is that good then fine. I don't see it--and that's why I have a problem with it, but Guendouzi is a recent example of it being difficult to judge because it's hard to get a proper look at these players that come from smaller clubs.

Surprised you don’t see it. He looks just the ticket. Spring healed

He’s ours

I've not seen more than a 2 minute clip of him.

I wasn't bowled over by the first couple of clips I saw of Nicolas Pepe but have since aeen a lot more and realised he's phenomenal. So not in a position to judge yet really.

We all love Pepe, Ricky. But we can’t hope to survive on buying 6 or 7 Pepes going forward. At £50m or more, only the United clubs can do this. But we have a squad to fill in 2019 and in 2023. If one of these guys turns into a Pepe into 2023, then that’s a good thing. We can sell the rest or send the to the bench.

Frustrating thing is we were linked to Pepe before he exploded

And lille are looking at this guy to replace pepe. If we hadn't effed our money up so badly we could sign the pepes and zahas pretty easily. For the next couple of seasons we have to identify the right people and recruit them earlier in their development

Looks like he plays in the same areas as Fraser so he may be an alternative if Bournemouth stick to their 30m valuation, and perhaps more particularly if we do not regain CL for next season.
So far as our kids are concerned none have played a full season as a starting player at senior level as yet to warrant not making this sort of signing.
Most importantly perhaps the starting XI needs options now, and AC-M could also provide cover at AMC if Mkhi departs.

Claudius wrote:

We all love Pepe, Ricky. But we can’t hope to survive on buying 6 or 7 Pepes going forward. At £50m or more, only the United clubs can do this. But we have a squad to fill in 2019 and in 2023. If one of these guys turns into a Pepe into 2023, then that’s a good thing. We can sell the rest or send the to the bench.

I suppose transfers like these are so cheap: _£8m fee, _20k/week, 5 year contract. It adds a really small amount to our annual player costs. There's no downside.

I'm not a fan of the scatter gun approach but there's no reason signings like these should impact the costly and important signings.

Just get me a dominant centrehalf, a two-way left back, a proper centre mid and a wide man with pace and goal threat, Arsenal, and you can run wild signing all the kids you want.

I’m not one for a scatter gun approach either, but if you think you’ve got the next Dembele or Pepe in your hands, I would rather we go for it than regret missing out on the £70m player a season or two later.

Gazza M wrote:

And lille are looking at this guy to replace pepe. If we hadn't effed our money up so badly we could sign the pepes and zahas pretty easily. For the next couple of seasons we have to identify the right people and recruit them earlier in their development

Most importantly IMO is we need to prioritise the team/squad balance & structure rather than looking to sign the likes of players valued at over 50m such as Pepe or Zaha, unless they are a genuine bargain opportunity.

I recall a comment made some time ago that rather than looking to sign the current bright young things such as Pepe, Malcom, Dembele, Lemar etc, without CL football we should be looking to sign their replacements.  Once we regain top4/CL we can then look to upgrade by looking to sign the talent that made the moves but then stalled, such as Malcom or Lemar etc.

goon wrote:

I’m not one for a scatter gun approach either, but if you think you’ve got the next Dembele or Pepe in your hands, I would rather we go for it than regret missing out on the £70m player a season or two later.

See IMO we should always be looking to make those sort of signings regardless.
I don't see them as being any conflict of interest in terms of priority even if it means then needing to sell to either raise funds for other signings of to provide playing time.

Exactly. We need to sell most of them. Stockpiling is literally the only way to move forward, signing "super quality" isn't going to happen across the whole team.

I think stockpiling is how you end up losing De Bruyne and Salah like Chelsea did though.

We're a long way off having first world problems of that ilk though. We don't have anyone as promising as they were in our first team, let alone on the fringes. If we did they'd start easily

Klaus wrote:

I think stockpiling is how you end up losing De Bruyne and Salah like Chelsea did though.

Nah. Hiring Jose Mourinho is how you end up doing that

Klaus wrote:

I think stockpiling is how you end up losing De Bruyne and Salah like Chelsea did though.

Chelsea had two quality elevens of grown men ahead of those kids. That’s how they lost them.

Klaus wrote:

I think stockpiling is how you end up losing De Bruyne and Salah like Chelsea did though.

I think the overall culture at Chelsea is a more of a problem there. There is no room for development at a club that sacks its manager every time he doesn't win the league or Champions League and sometimes even if he does.