Eze and Esse at Palace!
el Janny Tranny
Lee Kang-In links are interesting
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Exactly the type of player we need! Get Elneny to put in the call!
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Hope we don't waste all of January chasing Nico Williams like we did in the summer, need to move on quickly if it isn't possible and get someone this window.
HomeSteak on what report you read. Add the sign on bonus, agent fees. He won't get that from anyone bar Barcelona. Not even Chelsea will pay that for him, as he is simply, not worth that much, I mean we are talking about a guy that Gabriel Magalhaes smokes when it comes to scoring rate
I think for Williams he had his heart set on playing with Lamine Yamal rather than just the money. Seeing how they can barely register Olmo might make him reconsider whether he wants to stay or not.
He ain't worth paying monster wages for, we've worked hard to create a proper wage structure and he needs to fit in that.
Coombs seems to me it's more like sending an email, being told no, and giving up.
Don't forget getting a WyScout subscription, sorting by X and filtering by Y. This is hard labor.
I've always wanted a goal scoring left winger to add balance to the team but the more I think about it, and the more I look for that player (there aren't many out there), I've started to come around to getting a prolific CF like Gyokeres or Vlahovic and then opening up the options for recruitment on the left wing to more of a creator/1v1 player like a Nico Williams. We just need more chance creation and a prolific CF would clearly add more goals but probably also add more gravity that would give our players more room to work. I love Havertz and I think he can be a title winning CF but the issue is he needs a goal scoring LW to complement him IMO since he's not going to create a ton of chances for himself. It's not going to solve every issue but hopefully bringing in someone like Nico Williams this window is feasible since he is a long term target and would eliminate another need we have for the summer. If we can't pull forward long term targets, I'd be up for a short term solution like Kang-in on loan but nothing that's going to hamper our long term business.
I don't really buy into the whole idea of chance creation. Players who take more shots and score more goals make it seem like the players who pass it to them are creating chances. When Jesus receives the ball, skips into the box, then touches it 20 more times and passes it backwards or loses the ball, it isn't recorded as a chance. I think it absolutely is a chance, though, in the more real sense of the word.
It seems to me that chance creation goes up when you have a forward line that is balanced between players whose instincts are to retain possession and look for that extra pass, and players who can't help but try to score at all costs. Obviously, high level of skill and physical attributes is required for both, which can still result in problems, but the balance feels off.
A separate but related issue is competition in depth. There doesn't seem to be a single signing that would solve both the balance and depth issue in our forward line, but we need to address one of them. The key to a depth signing would be that it is genuinely competitive in our squad, so it has to threaten the minutes of Martinelli, Trossard, Jesus, Nwaneri, etc. This is what Williams likely represents, rather than redressing the balance issue.
Claudius have you ever hired anyone at your university? Think about how tedious it is to find the right person. Why should hiring people who make £10m a year be easier?
1) Sports are extremely quantifiable in a way that is extraordinarily unusual in most jobs.
2) The higher the level of the position, the fewer potentially qualified candidates there are. It is higher leverage, but it should certainly be "easier".
Overall, talent is going to be power-law distributed so scouting for Celtic is going to be more difficult than scouting for Arsenal since the people you're sorting through are going to be more difficult to distinguish between. However, at the level of Arsenal, I really think just sorting by Fotmob rating and applying an age filter will get you pretty much everything you would want.
Its 3 years since Aubameyang left, so we should have been looking for a striker since before then because it was obvious Arteta didn't want him. So its been conservatively 4 years that we've been trying to add another striker who's good enough for the job and we still don't have him.
DiabyKungFu okay. You go online, spot the players, add them to a basket and press buy?
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DiabyKungFu The higher the level of the position, the fewer potentially qualified candidates there are. It is higher leverage, but it should certainly be "easier".
Look at early-stage venture capital here. How it works (almost without any exaggeration) is that a VC takes a look at the cofounders' resumes and other funds that have committed money and if they see enough brand names that they like then they write a check for many millions of dollars. Otherwise, they pass. The idea that higher leverage situations necessarily call for more complex strategies is a fallacy. It is usually the opposite.
Claudius You go online, spot the players, add them to a basket and press buy?
I think the question of allocation of funds and negotiation of prices is more complex than the question of identifying which players are good. If that was your point, then fair enough.
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I don't think the problem is identifying good talent per se, I think it's increasingly becoming difficult to identify talent that hasn't already been swooped up by a major club. Have a look at our greatest players over the past 25 years, almost to a man came from a similar or bigger club than ours. Go through the whole list. That's not really a market you can rely on.
The big clubs are hoovering up talent right across the age groups, so a club like ours who doesn't have a financial or reputational edge, signings those players who make the difference between second and first is increasingly difficult. We've been in this situation before with Wenger where we were 1-2 elite attackers away from getting over the line.
daredevil I'd say this is just reflective of player price inflation. If you look at our current squad and look at the best players therein, they all came from "smaller" clubs. Saliba, Gabriel, Timber, Raya, Rice... Basically our entire starting line-up other than Odegaard and Havertz are either from smaller clubs or homegrown. Same holds true for Liverpool - Alisson, Salah, van Dijk, Diaz, Gakpo, Jota....basically everyone except Gravenberch. I think you are referring to Henry, Vieira, Bergkamp etc being signed from Italy but I think that was an exception rather than the rule. Since then, the only really successful transfer I can think of from a "similar" club is Aubameyang (briefly) and Partey (briefly). The bigger issue I think is that the difference between first and second is often idiosyncratic (Salah having a stormer and VVD's resurgence) or extreme financial might (City) - hard to put a point on it. If Liverpool's creaky defense had played like they did last season (41 GA), even Salah may not have been sufficient to get them to where they are now.
It's more an issue to find elite attackers, the one's that make the difference, than defenders and midfielders where the talent pool is relatively bigger. For example, there's a whole bunch of good French defenders out there and it seems like everyone has one (Saliba, Konate, Kounde) but French attackers? Not many. It's a similar theme in other countries.
Don't forget Ozil and Sanchez.
Liverpool are a good example, they've picked up Suarez, Salah, Mane and Diaz in the past 15 years all of whom are top quality and were from smaller clubs. So there's definitely something to be learned from them.
what?