Who is on the bus?

Claudius

It's time for us to have a roll call for who is along for the ride next season, just as they did in Spike Lee's "Get on the Bus". (watch it if you haven't)

Based on what I have seen, the players, I would like back next year are

Goalies
Leno

Defense
Bellerin
AMN
Luiz
Chambers
Saliba
Tierney
Saka

Midfield
Guendouzi
Torreira
Willock
ESR

Attack
Pepe
Nelson
Aubameyang
Nketiah
Martinelli

Out
Martinez
Sokratis
Mustafi
Mavropanos
Ozil
Lacazette

On the waitlist
Macey
Soares
Mari
Holding
Ceballos
Kolasinac
Xhaka

Don't know enough about the first 5 names on the waitlist to make a call now. I've put Kolasinac on waitlist depending on what we want to do with Saka. And Xhaka might earn his way back

lorddulaarsenal

Leno, Saliba, Saka, Martinelli, Aubameyang get the back row

Xhaka, Pepe, Guendouzi get a seat

Rest can walk

kamikaze

Leno, Saliba, Saka, Martinelli, Auba, Pepe

Ok as squad players
Guendouzi, Willock, Torreira, Bellerin

Everyone else is expendable. In particular:
AMN needs to go. His insistence that he is some sort of attacking player or CM reveals a real lack of perspective. If he wants to do that, he can try in League One.
Ozil for obvious reasons.

And if we're honest, selling Auba is the rational thing to do. It's the circle of (transfer window) life - you have to keep recycling/reinvesting transfer fees. We can't afford to do this again after Ozil, Alexis, and Ramsey.

Clrnc

Wont change things too much. Everyone stays except Sokratis, Lacazette, Ozil and of course our grand man Mustafi. Ceballos and Cedric loan will end. Xhaka can stay if he is happy as a squad player. Mavropanos and Holding remains to be seen but theres a good player in those 2.

I think Auba is a good poacher kind of striker so he can stay way past 30 even if he loses abit of pace. His natural instincts in the box will make up for it.

Spend big on Grealish, Partey, Aoaur and buy a young striker like Osimhen. If Mari comes good and with Saliba coming in we might be fine for defence.

yuv

Depends who comes in.

For a long time I’m hoping to see our midfield get a real boost, and so in principle I’d actually let all of them go, if I knew better players come in. But realistically speaking, Joe and Douz are promising talents, and Torreira is useful. I’d love to send Xhaka, but again it depends on his replacement.
If joe and douzi up their game significantly, we might be able to settle for what we have. But as long as our mid looks like that, we’ll be a mid table team.

Easy out: mustafi, papa, ozil, ceballos (but even Xhaka).

Certain: Leno, Bellers, Tierney, Saka, Saliba, Marty, Pepe, Auba.

All the rest are in the balance.

Claudius

https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/10902022/aubameyang-lacazette-arsenal-ozil-arteta/

No sourcing, and the headline is at odds with the article content, but basic story is Arteta considering his options on Aubameyang, Lacazette and Ozil.

It got me thinking, there is a lot of discussion in Football Talk about how Liverpool are cheating and lucky. I think if we take a step back, we just have to admit that we are badly run in comparison. We never should’ve wasted £50m on an adequate striker like Lacazette. We should’ve just gone all out for Aubameyang. And then once we got Aubameyang, we should’ve been ruthless and eliminated Lacazette quickly. Lacazette does two things: he keeps our best striker on the wing, and that’s the money that could be going into a Partey or Upamecano; and we would have We end up with this disorder because there is no plan. Living on Bon Jovi’s prayer.

jones

That's pretty short sighted analysis imo Claude. Aubameyang wasn't on the market for us when we signed Lacazette, he was still flirting with Real Madrid and wouldn't have signed for us until January when his relationship with Dortmunds bosses went sour.

And people love to forget all the times Laca performed when Auba didn't, there's a reason Laca got POTS last year even though Auba outscored him. That he's in poor form now doesn't mean he always was, had we sold him immediately after signing Auba we would've been in an even worse position last year

jones

Also I'm not sure what Liverpools players being juiced out of their minds has to do with us. Might be just me but I already have to look at Klopps toothy mug in any football related media all day it'd be neat if we don't have to read in every thread here how great those cheating fucks are.

Claudius

Obviously, it pains me to see Liverpool winning the title. But it’s also strange to see Arsenal fans over-attribute their success to luck and drugs and refuse to acknowledge that we sit with a squad where we have poorly allocated assets and continuously destroy value by letting contracts expire. As Aubameyang and Lacazette’s contracts wind down, the value will diminish, over and above us having wasted Aubameyang’s best years by subordinating him to an inferior player. This is inept management. We shouldn’t dream up drug conspiracies to explain why our rivals are outperforming us. Clean up our homes.

speedy

Claudius wrote:
Obviously, it pains me to see Liverpool winning the title. But it’s also strange to see Arsenal fans over-attribute their success to luck and drugs and refuse to acknowledge that we sit with a squad where we have poorly allocated assets and continuously destroy value by letting contracts expire. As Aubameyang and Lacazette’s contracts wind down, the value will diminish, over and above us having wasted Aubameyang’s best years by subordinating him to an inferior player. This is inept management. We shouldn’t dream up drug conspiracies to explain why our rivals are outperforming us. Clean up our homes.

We all know this, liverpool have been lucky and worked extremely hard to get where they are. You need an element of both to get to where they are.

It's a difficult one with contracts players won't sign unless we do well. They leave and its a struggle to build momentum and do well. Liverpool when they were doing well struggled to hold onto Alonso, Mascherano, Suarez, Torres and only just about held onto Gerrard. So they invested in a crop of very young players who could progress together with a long term vision and built from there and the inversors and thrown money in.
For us to do that years ago get a team of youth players and drop out of the CL and build back up would have been a massive risk and no manager would have survived it. So instead we signed more experianced players in an attempt to hold onto CL football. Since falling out we have signed a lot of younger guys Torreria, Douzi, saliba, Pepe, Holding, Marty, and intigrated some youth players.

Claudius

Speedy, good post. You point out that we are doing some things well, like increasingly building a batch of decent kids. We still have some bad habits that need to be eradicated like corona. I think Arteta will help a lot, just because he can give recruiting some stability. Wenger and Emery didn't help because the former was too near-term focused and the latter was too scatterbrained. So hopefully, after this summer we will be in a much better position to compete. Fingers crossed.

speedy

Claudius wrote:
Speedy, good post. You point out that we are doing some things well, like increasingly building a batch of decent kids. We still have some bad habits that need to be eradicated like corona. I think Arteta will help a lot, just because he can give recruiting some stability. Wenger and Emery didn't help because the former was too near-term focused and the latter was too scatterbrained. So hopefully, after this summer we will be in a much better position to compete. Fingers crossed.

In Arteta (hopefully) we have a manager whos main focus is on improving players, rather than the main focus being on tatics for the next opponent like emery and Jose. Klopp was specifically brought to liverpool as a coach who develops players like young wenger and pep. And they gave him a top young crop to work with.

I think emery was even a bit of a short term fix, fix the tatics get top four, and europa league specalist as a back up plan. The shift is increasingly to a longer term view now CL is dead in the water. Arty is more of a potential longer term fix. Hopefully the press is right about his powers of improving younger players.

jones

Emery was great with kids. How can you praise Arteta for bringing through kids when he's been here a minute, Emery had more pressure on him from day one and he's the one who brought through every single youth player we have.

Claudius

I have said before. I did not think that Emery had a coherent overall strategy. And that was counterproductive.

speedy

jones wrote:
Emery was great with kids. How can you praise Arteta for bringing through kids when he's been here a minute, Emery had more pressure on him from day one and he's the one who brought through every single youth player we have.

I didnt think I did. I just mentioned we've brought in younger players. And the hopefully the press is right about him being great at developing players.

yuv

Lacazette not the one who needs to go even now. He's in bad form, would take much more than this to convince me he's one of the first who need to go. If we want to be a top club, at least two top strikers are minimum (remember Henry-Kanu-God-Wiltord?). Perhaps Gabi will be that in a bit, but according to most he's not yet there, and N-cat is definitely not there (if/where we count Pepe in all this is a big question). For now Laca should be sidelined, but that's not what this thread is about. Definitely agree with Jones on this.

Klaus

Lacazette needs to be sold. I'm not even gonna think about the rest of the bus until we've shipped him.

yuv

😆
Just when I wrote in another thread I agreed with you.

But no.

Though I think we do share an opinion on Ozil, he's one I'd sell long before I'd let Lacazette go. And of course several others.

Klaus

He's almost 29 with no edge to his game, his presence just causes a selection headache, and his peak at Arsenal looked less exciting than what an 18 year old Martinelli has shown this season. Time to get back what we can from that misspent £50 million.

Özil should go too, but our problem there is, as always, that we don't have anything better. We need signings. We have at least two strikers that are better than Lacazette by contrast, and it's not even close.

yuv

Klaus wrote:
We need signings. We have at least two strikers that are better than Lacazette by contrast, and it's not even close.

At this point I agree. But I think on form Laca is a very good player. not ready to dump him yet.

We do need signings. I'm not sure that they are at the top.