a few general thoughts:
once you pay a transfer fee for a player, its a sunk cost. you can recover some of it (sometimes more than you paid, obviously), but it is what it is. we spent £70m to acquire pepe, and that is now largely inconsequential as to whether he plays every game, every other game, or once every 15 games.
we cannot afford to let players leave on free transfers, because our budget is a lot less than our competitors for the top prizes on offer. would it suck to sell auba for £20m this summer if he isn't going to sign a new deal and he isnt deemed integral to our plan for the next 5 years? yes, it sucks, because we know how good hes been. but £20m to spend on players you can sign to 4-5 year deals is worth more than keeping him for one final season and then letting him leave as a free agent with no compensation. even £20m received can't be viewed in terms of "we can now use this to buy one player to replace him"....every pound adds up. we cant afford to waste opportunities to bring money back to the club to fund future purchases, especially as we languish outside the top 4
we cant afford luxury players on world class wages to fill backup roles. very few teams, top teams, play with 2 strikers as a Plan A. we have both auba and laca, we've tried shoehorning them into the same XI and it does not work. neither is suited to winger roles, neither is suited to a false 9/support role. both should be leading the line. having both is a bad use of our resources. if we swapped £45m laca for a £45m center mid, it would provide much better balance in the squad. it would also allow an easier path to first team minutes for our younger players who need the minutes to develop. in one respect we fucked ourselves by not having an established left winger here. on the other hand, we've seen martinelli play there, probably ahead of schedule, and seen that he is maybe 3-4 levels above what we thought we were getting. it would be even better if we had an established LW he could be learning from, like a pires, who could mentor him and teach him. likewise, ozil is obviously a luxury player, albeit a poor one at this stage of his career, chewing up massive wages with no resale value, and he requires us changing our shape and moving other pieces around to fit him into the team. that is poor squad management. but we've beat that horse dead over the last 2 years, so whatever
we lack suitable replacements across the board. we have no proper backup right back. chambers is too slow to play fullback, AMN is not a defender. kola is not a defender. so when our first choices in those positions are hurt or not fully fit, we again compromise the entire team by having to play square pegs in round holes. we're not man city and cant have both cancelo and kyle walker to fill one spot, but there is a big gap between having one of those guys as a backup and having a competent, quality player we can sign for £6-7m who can reliably play 20-30 matches a year without our entire structure crumbling.
the squad is poorly constructed. it was built without a vision. we changed formations every other match. when we wanted to play with 3 CBs, we didn't even have 3 credible CBs, let alone suitable backups to allow for rotation. when we switch to 4 ATB, we don't have suitable fullbacks to fill in for our injured fullbacks. we try to play 4-3-3 and dont have a suitable leftwinger, so we stick our expensive striker out there and predictably get nothing from it. in an ideal world, or at least one grounded in reality, the manager determines how the team is going to set up, what is required, and the squad is constructed to match that vision. that means you have 2 actual options at each position, and one or two players who can be your swiss army knife types and fill in multiple blanks. we dont even have suitable primary options, let alone backups.
this is going to take 4-5 transfer windows to fix. and the way you make it worse is to make rash decisions on your own players, and incoming players, without first deciding on a vision for the squad, an identity, and a formation/system of football. the board previously talked about how letting players run down their deals (less than 2 years remaining) would not be acceptable. well, time to act on it. the players who arent part of the long term plan should be sold, we should be targeting younger players like saliba and spending our funds there, and then spending smaller sums to acquire suitable backup/rotation options. no one should be allowed to run their contract down, and no one should be bigger than the squad itself.
