Who is on the bus?: Page 19 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Who is on the bus?

Claudius

I’d keep enough. But I also know that we have a lot of other players graduating. Need to make space. They can count double as kids and homegrown players.

BWooley

I'd rather keep AMN than HB as a backup RB and get a first choice in the summer. If we don't see a path to selling Bellerin, sell AMN by all means for 25M or so.

Claudius

If AMN does well on his loan, you can sell Bellerin and get Hakimi. We need a transformative talent as starter. AMN won’t be it.

Claudius

[Twitter]

Masters of player trading. The fruits of not having a plan. This is specially players who came and left

Klaus

My take on this is that while we should definitely have done better, big clubs aren't primarily concerned with player profit. They're concerned with what they're getting on the pitch. That's why we didn't sell Aubameyang at peak value in the summer of 2019 for instance, which I'm sure is what a small club would have done in a similar situation.

Our biggest failure has been that we've lumped so much money on players who gave so little back on the field. Just look at Mustafi, Mkhi, Xhaka, Pepe, Willian, and so forth. Have they had ten really good games between them? When people say that we need to spend money better, this is what they mean. It's not about squeezing a couple of million out of endstage Mustafi; it's about signing players that we don't want to sell again.

Klaus

I notice that Arteta has been put down as an 11 million loss in that breakdown for instance, because he retired with us, but 11 million for a player who gave us what he did is an incredible piece of business. Same with the 10 million we spent on Per in the same window, also marked down as a pure loss. We'll probably end up taking a £60 million loss on Aubameyang once he goes, and it will have been one of the best pieces of business we've made in modern times.

We have to stop counting pennies and start putting more emphasis on the actual football, because it's what really matters. That's the end goal, not better finances. If guys like Partey and Tierney end up having stellar Arsenal careers and choose to retire with us, or eventually leave for free well into their 30s, then that's an ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned.

Pepe LeFrits

Klaus wrote:
We'll probably end up taking a £60 million loss on Aubameyang once he goes, and it will have been one of the best pieces of business we've made in modern times.

Not sure that'll prove true.

That swissramble table isn't exactly surprising, we've bought and sold exceptionally badly in recent years. Usually clubs, when faced with competing with richer rivals, opt for a strategy of buying low and selling high. We've done the opposite.

Claudius

You have to do both. At the end of the day, we are a self sustaining entity. We need to be able to turn over players and build value to win. The end objective has to be to win. Always. A large part of what you see going wrong with Arsenal is we lack a clear plan. It’s like if I said cook me and you didn’t have a recipe. You’d waste a lot of shit. That’s Arsenal. Trial and error club with lots of waste. If we had a plan that we were executing against with clear player requirements, a few things would happen. First, we would sell players we don’t need immediately. Second, we would stop buying players we don’t need. Third, if players reach point that we think they are more valuable to us sold, we would sell them. We aren’t able to do these things because we have been winging it with 3 managers and multiple DoF types. It’s wasteful financially and emotionally

Klaus

Claudius wrote:
You have to do both.

To some extent, sure, but our main source of revenue isn't, or shouldn't be, player sales (this is where the European cups that you want us to drop out of come into play). That's a telling difference between us and a small club that will always struggle to defend the decision to keep a great player for too long. Same as the wage bill really: people always seem so eager to cut it down, but the ability to support a big wage bill is the de facto line in the sand between top clubs and small clubs. It affects the type of players you can sign, the type of players you can maintain, your budget for contract negotiations in accordance with FFP... You should never willingly cut it down, you should just strive to reallocate it to better players.

Our main issue goes back to making really lousy signings for a long period of time. There's nothing wrong with buying high and selling low when the player is actually good. I don't think too many are bothered by signing a 27 year old Partey for £50 million in cash last summer for instance. The trick is to make more signings like that. If you have to actually sell Partey again in order to repeat it you're doing something wrong.

speedy

Pepe LeFrits wrote:
Klaus wrote:
We'll probably end up taking a £60 million loss on Aubameyang once he goes, and it will have been one of the best pieces of business we've made in modern times.

Not sure that'll prove true.

That swissramble table isn't exactly surprising, we've bought and sold exceptionally badly in recent years. Usually clubs, when faced with competing with richer rivals, opt for a strategy of buying low and selling high. We've done the opposite.

There's a little truth in both. But I'm far mor in line with Pepes thoughts. Wenger did it best when he bought players when their value was low, extracted the best years of their careers out of them and sold them for decent fees to idiot clubs. Vieira was completely finished when we sold him for 20M he played something like 60 minutes in his first 6 months in Italy on monster wages.

We'll never have a complete squad if were buying players at the peak of their values. We have to work towards building something. Nobody is suggesting we sell every star, just that in general we pick them up early so the squad value is increasing as they develop so when they do leave(some or hopefully most of the time) we get a huge fee to replace them rather than nothing.

Klaus

speedy wrote:
There's a little truth in both. But I'm far mor in line with Pepes thoughts. Wenger did it best when he bought players when their value was low, extracted the best years of their careers out of them and sold them for decent fees to idiot clubs. Vieira was completely finished when we sold him for 20M he played something like 60 minutes in his first 6 months in Italy on monster wages.

Wenger also knew we had to move because we were losing money the final years at Highbury despite selling guys like Vieira. He realised the importance of having big revenues not mainly connected to player sales and sacrificed a lot so we could get to that point. The ensuing wilderness years is when he had to make 30 million every season to pay back loans before spending anything. That's when he sold players he didn't want to sell and we suffered on the pitch for it.

Pepe LeFrits

It makes more sense to splurge on established players when you're close to winning titles and you just need absolute top quality in a small number of positions; if anything that was Wenger's issue because he was brilliant at developing players, but he'd develop us to within 90% of a brilliant team and then faff about for a few seasons trying to develop players in the final key position or two. By the time he'd finally found a solution to those positions, the team would have developed new problems in other areas due to players forcing their way out or ageing out.

That's why I think the merit of signing Auba is still tbd. Awesome player but if his Arsenal career ultimately turns out to be an FA cup and 3 or 4 seasons mid-table before ageing out and going for nothing, maybe in the long run the club might have been better off investing the cash in a few prospects and coming out of those 4 seasons with some valuable players in their prime instead.

Qwiss

Klaus wrote:
Our main issue goes back to making really lousy signings for a long period of time. There's nothing wrong with buying high and selling low when the player is actually good. I don't think too many are bothered by signing a 27 year old Partey for £50 million in cash last summer for instance. The trick is to make more signings like that. If you have to actually sell Partey again in order to repeat it you're doing something wrong.

There has to be a recognition of what a player is worth though. We could have sold Sanchez the summer before he left for €50m to City. We didn't get €50m worth of football out of him after that. Same goes for Ozil, there was a point where we could have sold him but we gave him a contract he wasn't worth when we could have used that money to get a better player. Ramsey was let walk away on free. Now even turds like Mustafi and Kolasinac have been held onto until they've no value any more. Thats not acting like a big club, its acting like idiots.

Klaus

Absolutely. I definitely think we got Sanchez wrong, but probably more because he only had a year left and really wanted to leave than anything else. We should have sold him to City that summer. Ramsey we should have extended with, not driven from the club.

Coombs

Driven? He ran his contract down.

Klaus

No he didn't, we took the offer off the table.

Clrnc

Klaus wrote:
Absolutely. I definitely think we got Sanchez wrong, but probably more because he only had a year left and really wanted to leave than anything else. We should have sold him to City that summer. Ramsey we should have extended with, not driven from the club.

It's actually quite funny our 3 best players Ramsey Sanchez Ozil, players we thought we couldn't live without all became pretty much nobodies after they left at other place. Would have been better served staying here instead of chasing cash.

Claudius

LOL. I'm just glad we didn't re-sign Ramsey. We'd be stuck with millstone around our necks. Edu's doing an admirable job cleaning up Wenger and Raul's mess.

Coombs

Klaus wrote:
No he didn't, we took the offer off the table.

You said it yourself, the offer was on the table.

Anyway, he was never that great of a player, but he was certainly a scorer of great goals.

Klaus

Coombs wrote:
Klaus wrote:
No he didn't, we took the offer off the table.

You said it yourself, the offer was on the table.

And then we took it off.

But yes, there's no point to start a back and forth here. I think he should have been extended with, some people think he should have been sold. We should have made sure to do either before he entered his last year at least, that much is clear.

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