Unfortunately you are probably right but not all transfers are a success and if they are not, it's quite difficult to get rid of them again. Every club has them
Most clubs wouldn’t give them 5 year deals as standard though... Given contracts of reasonable length and they’d be close to off the books by now. For what it’s worth, I do actually think we will do some business before the window closes but I think it will only be one, most likely Sarr. I think Prodl will be kept as that extra CB and Okaka likely as the backup striker and then he will get no minutes and shipped out again on loan in January. So Dawson would be the Britons replacement and Sarr would be the Lukebakio replacement. Stronger than last season? Yes. But I think most of us expected more. Fingers crossed however...
Are we though? If you take into account personnel, then perhaps. But if you actually look at the beginning of last season then I don't think so. That 1 year really creeps up on you in your late 20's/30's. It makes a big difference. Will Cathcart, Foster, Holebas, Capoue & Deeney be as competent this season as last whilst being another year older? And have other teams strengthened more than us and their core players matured rather than aged? Of course I don't know the answer to these questions but I don't think we can say that we are certainly stronger than last season with or without Sarr.
Well my predictions are usually rubbish so if I say we are doomed we'll be top 10 easily! On a serious note think we will have to get lucky with injuries again as certainly don't think some of the squad members are good enough over a long season - we won't get much with Sema,Success and Okaka starting games if they have to!
He wasn't trying to sell the club last year but looking to bring in a partner with new money to invest. Pretty sure if someone with a big wallet came along and was the right person then he would sell a share of the club. This would allow the club to move forward quicker. As it is I still see the club and the team improve incrementally each year.
We have areas where it’s blatantly obvious we need to improve and we haven’t. The forward line needed improvement. We lost so many games last season where our forwards couldn’t finish the job. Andre Gray is our prolific scorer. GD is very hit and miss, roberto P gets worse as autumn approaches. The defence is old and needs freshening . Players we never wanted to play for us again eg Isaac, Ken, Okaka, Prodl don’t seem to be going anywhere....yet. One winger may come in but I’m not convinced he will. Even if he does he’s not going to start until probably the end of Aug. If we stick with the same old squad then we will have to rely on 3 teams being worse than us. I think we’ll see us more in the bottom half this season than the top half. Others maybe right, perhaps the Pozzos are looking to either sell or get another investor in. Mavis got a tough season ahead of him and it doesn’t look good when, if true, GD is demanding to play through the middle, when he is more of an asset on the wing.
We will always be on the list for relegation. Could it be this year? The lack of signings this Summer makes it look like we are going to have one last blast with a very old squad in the Premiership. Which month will our slump begin? It comes earlier each season. October? September? The struggle for survival begins in August, always has.....
It is well known that Silva and Richarlison left because Everton are more committed to Z Cars than Dux & Gino are.
Honestly bemused by some of the comments in this thread. Do some of you not read the club's financial results when they're released? It's not like the owners are sitting on hundreds of millions instead of reinvesting. If they were, there'd absolutely be a case to answer. As it is, we're barely managing to break even. Unless the suggestion is that we go into debt to improve the squad, I'm not quite sure people are expecting to see. The club's clear focus at the moment is staying up while it buys up every young prospect in site, moving away from the academy model. It'll take a few years for us to start seeing the results of that. In the meantime, what data we have makes it clear that we can't afford to running around throwing 20 million at signings.
I’m honestly bemused when giving contracts to a bunch of cast offs is classed as “buying up every young prospect in site (sic)”
There seems to be a lot of heads in the sand from what I read online and on social media about our transfer window. I don’t rate Dawson, I’m afraid. From the admittedly very little of him I’ve seen, I have no reason to believe he’s anything better than what we have at the moment - and possibly Kabasele aside, that’s not saying a lot. My opinion is the last 6-8 games of last season and the cup final showed us we have at least 3-4 players who quite simply cannot be relied on when the chips are down and you need a big performance. How are we ever going to improve if that’s the case? Even with that collapse, we massively overachieved last season. Where is/was the inclination to capitalise on that? We’ve been left a million miles behind by the teams who finished around us last season. If we fail to bring in two or three players that will improve the first team by the deadline, I think we’re going to have a very difficult season. More or less every other side in the league has improved their squad, and the newly promoted sides have done some fairly decent business. Of course, if we sign Sarr and Gracia/Pozzo pull a few rabbits out of hats we could be having a very different discussion this time next week, but from what I’ve seen it feels like they’re happy to settle.
Whilst I respect Duxbury and others are hardly going to state the aim is ‘to just stay up’ every season, I think quite a bit of it is the repeated claims that we want to ‘Best of the Rest’ and that it’s just the start of competing against the big boys. European qualification has been mentioned as well so I think it’s justifiable that’s fans look around the PL, see what others are doing and think we are in danger of losing ground. Claims that ‘Gino comes alive during the transfer window’ and player trading ‘being his main assest’ fall on deaf ears when there’s little activity going on to address the obvious weaknesses in the squad. You say as it is, we just about break even - fair point. Then it’s right and fair that fans discuss outside investment or even Gino selling the club. That’s not criticism of his ownership and it’s certainly not my opinion - but it’s a fair topic of conversation. It can be dressed up and excused in whatever ways people want - but the truth (as it stands) is that this window so far has been far too quiet. And we are often told that Gracia is a manager who likes to work on the training field and be over-prepared etc - then the players we needed should have been delivered quicker so he could work with them. The deficiencies with the defence have been there for the past 2 seasons (some would argue beyond that) and we have failed to do the necessary recruitment. Dawson is a decent enough addition but given how bad we can be at the back, I think many are concerned there’s a far greater chance of him falling to the level of our current defensive abilities, rather than them rising to his. It feels somewhat like a signing thats treading water. It doesn’t feel sufficient. If the clubs clear focus is staying up as you say, why so they say the aim is something so much more than that? As far as I can see, staying up is the minimum and when that has been only scraped to in some seasons, the manager has paid the price. So I’m not sure that’s the aim.
What good would Gino selling the club do? It's not going to make us suddenly have more money available, and FFP bars owners from injecting money into clubs willy nilly. We have to stand on our own two feet and thus far, the owners and C-level staff are doing a good job at ensuring we do just that. The stadium is being improved, investments are going into the youth players, we're buying up a number of promising young wonderkid types and in the meantime we've been comfortably clear of relegation every year, despite the usual suspects predicting our inevitable demise every single preseason. The owners have done exactly what they said they would since taking over, and they've earned the right to be shown a bit of trust as far as I'm concerned. Frankly, there are shades of Stoke about some of the comments starting to creep in. I've got no desire to replicate their path.
FFP has watered down scope to middle/lower premier league clubs. That’s why we are currently financially handicapped compared to our peers.
PL is the weakest it's been for years, we'll piss our way to safety and will probably have it wrapped up by Christmas.
After setting the galactic record cup defeat at Wembley last May we’ll struggle this season and get relegated. To make it worse, that lot up the road will pass us on their way up, they’ll win the FA cup and the media will love the rags to riches return of a true giant.
This is a rubbish thread that requires cheese puns or oasis songs or at the very worst Hogg loan quips to rebalance its total banality. I know what you are thinking. Stop crying your heart out.
Regardless, a "bottomless pockets" Elton style sugardaddy isn't a good strategy, even if you don't care about potentially avoiding sanctions. When the backer loses interest, things go south fast. I'd far rather have a club that stands on its own two feet. Give me safe hands over reckless gambling any day. We've had the latter before, something I think many forget.
I was just thinking the same, some of our fans our becoming what everyone feared when we were initially promoted.
Dahlberg Wilmot Quina Hughes Chalobah Bashiru Cucho Pedro. We initially relied on experience to stay up but are already growing our next gen.
Our bottom line is and always will be to avoid relegation. If we can play good football and avoid relegation that's a bonus. We cant pretend to be something we're not. Complacency and Entitlement are two of our biggest enemies.
Someone should tell the owners then. Because when we sail close to the wind with relegation, they sack the manager. Tells me they don’t think it’s good enough. ‘Best of the Rest’ is the clearly stated aim. If some fans take the same view that the owners vocally do, then they are right to say this summers recruitment isn’t up to scratch. That’s not entitlement.
They want to be best of the rest, of course they do. But they can't fund that so we all know they would accept "comfortable survival". The year end sackings (last year was a one off) were due to the poor end of season runs suggesting a poor start to the following season, not because of our final position alone.
Almost all the points I want to make have already been made. This seemingly endless pot of gold that Gino Pozzo has is a pipe dream. If you rank the clubs in the Premier League in terms of owners' current wealth, we rank 18th. To compete for 6th/7th, we're competing against the likes of Everton (Moshiri and his energy billions), Wolves (Fosun and their billions), West Ham (Sullivan + Gold with their money from Daily Sport etc.) and Leicester (the money from King Power). That's just looking at the teams that finished above us. You then have the teams that finished below us trying to get that 6th/7th spot (or at least a top half finish): Palace (Parish with the billions from the Americans), Bournemouth (Maxim Demin and his petrochemical millions), Newcastle (despite Mike Ashley's Sports Direct being in trouble, he still has a net worth of 2 billion), Brighton (Bloom's billions) and Southampton (their Chinese billions from Gao Jisheng). Heck, even Villa have 9 times more money we have (well into the billions). This is the reality of what we're dealing with. Add this to the financial outgoings that we have and suddenly we look like a chav in a Lonsdale trackie that's walked into a Louis Vuitton store in Monaco. Speaking of financial outgoings, I think quite a few people are underplaying what we're spending our money on (not pointing fingers at anyone). You have the obvious like player wages, transfer fees (which are always in instalments), agents fees (of which we pay one of the most as we feel we need to in order to convince a player to come here/stay here) and first-team coaching staff. You then have other outgoings which are sometimes thought about, like the scouts that we have in this country and each habitable continent (before anyone says Antarctica), Harefield Academy (including their coaches and matchday travel) and stadium improvements (e.g. the new boards that have been installed and the new seats in the south east corner of the ground). There are then outgoings that people hardly think about, like the cost of keeping the ground open on matchdays (from the ground staff to the electricity to the caterers to the police), the cost of us having the training ground (which we're still paying money to UCL for) as well as maintaining the training ground and paying the staff that work at the training ground (from the caterers to the cleaners to the sports conditioning staff), the cost of registration to the Premier League and the Football Association, the cost of matchday travel to the grounds (and subsequently the cost of hotels and the cost of the usage of training facilities if needed), the cost of our kits and related club merchandise being made (for the fans and for the staff, of which there are numerous quantities made), the cost of pre-season (from travel to the usage of facilities (why do you think we've been going to the same place for the last few years) to using the grounds to play the pre-season matches), the cost of travel across the world for transfer negotiations (even something as minute as that will cost- Joao Pedro's family didn't come here using their own money did they...), the cost of rehabilitation of injured players (both here at our training ground and at private facilities in this country and abroad). There will undoubtably be more current costs that I've forgotten. Finally you have the ring-fencing of money for future developments: developments for the ground to increase capacity, developments of the training ground to ensure that the players get better facilities, developments with the scouting network and agents to ensure we can get better players for less money. When you add all this up, you start to realise it's very tricky for us to just spend £x millions on a few players (with likely high wages) that will boost our squad, but could set back quite a few of the factors above. It will just lead to a theoretical short-term gain (theoretical because the signings might not work out) and a definite long-term loss (as everything else will have to be scaled back. It's not easy to compete when your club's owners are worth 400x less than the reported average worth Premier League owners and their clubs.
