mdgoonah41 wrote:
goon wrote:
I mean reducing 700k of the weekly wage bill for players who do not play is just good housekeeping.
no, its humiliating. we watch other clubs sell their nothing players for £10m+ and we let players leave on a free, after everyone on earth was saying we should have sold those players one or two windows ago and tried to recoup something.
its horrible asset management, and its nothing new here.
I mostly agree, with the following caveat.
Under normal circumstances, at the moment a match day substitute who hasn't been getting minutes is sold, the value that player has had to his club as backup is inevitably wiped away by the discussion. But you always need backup, so the argument "He hasn't played in six months, we should've already cleared him out!" isn't ironclad.
This is why you must rotate the selection even when it's not urgent. If you rotate, the speculative value of the backup player becomes more tangible, which feeds into the player's motivation, relationship with the club, and transfer value. This is a serious weakness of Arteta's at the moment, which seems to go back to his inflexibility and anxiety as a young manager.
To me the main problem with the situation we're in with Pépé, Maitland-Niles, Nketiah et al. is that we haven't been playing them, not that we haven't sold them.
