They were dog turd for most of last season. We should be aiming at four points minimum from this lot.
As much as I like Sarr, he is our best player, however in these difficult times if offered £40 million I would take it and look for the next Sarr!
They have been clear that they will no longer hold on too long to stars that are ready to be moved onto a bigger club, as they did most notably with Doucoure. So there is no doubt if they get a decent offer he will go and, in theory, that money will fund new hungry players to develop and sell on.
We already have Dennis, Zinckernagel, Sema, Pedro, Cucho, Baah, Hungbo and Success capable of playing the wide attacking role. Cut him loose asap.
Dortmund can. Chelsea can. City can. Arsenal can. PSG can. I agree that they won’t most likely. But there are clubs who can afford him.
Indeed. The challenge is keeping the conveyorbelt running so that we constantly have a few £5m players developing and reaching £20m+ values.
Yep we are where we are. Huge debt built up by Pozzo followed by relegation and Covid have left us by far the weakest club from a financial perspective this season. All incomings are cheap punts out of necessity.
Not convinced that this story has any credibility but we have to accept we are fundamentally a selling club. We currently have one major asset in Sarr. If Gino gets an offer north of £40 million I wouldn't blame him for taking it. If we do get relegated I can't see Sarr being persuaded to stay on again (and who can blame him) and then we will be lucky to get £20 million for him. In the current financial climate I wouldn't surprised if Gino cashed in given the chance.
Sure, absolutely, and you're definitely not wrong, but at the same time, exactly how far does that run riot? He's both on a long contract, and actually only really fully proven in the Championship. Is that me for one second suggesting he's 'a Championship player' or 'not very good' or anything else anyone might want to come in and screech? No - but I wouldn't necessarily argue that, taking all context into account at this exact moment, he is utterly ineffably enough of whatever he is, and Champions League contending clubs want, for his ascension out of the bowels of London Colney to be one of those fait accompli, you know?
I don't think the debt is exclusively a Pozzo issue though. Plenty of clubs are up to their eyeballs in debt especially after the last year.
Also this obsession with 'hungry' players is kind of amusing - apart from the canteen expenses to consider, we can't have every player being a ravenous young pup of totally unproven provenance but who really wants to give it a go and will definitely knuckle down and work hard this time, miss, I swear. We need some talent, and some experience, and in the right combination, and a lot of the whispers and reports coming out of pre-season, as well as our signings to date, suggest that we are in danger of seriously lacking it.
Rose and King certainly have experience and in the Premier League as well. Louza, Etebo and Dennis undoubtedly have talent but we'll have to see if they can perform consistently and show it at this level. Fletch is a god. Pollock and Baah are exciting signings even if they might not be used straight away. I don't think this window is the car crash that people are making it out to be, especially with the budget we currently have (or don't have).
My point was that we didn't specifically keep him last season to fire us to promotion in the same way that we won't keep him this season to try to keep us up. We aren't keeping him or selling him for strategic reasons, we are just keeping our #1 asset until someone offers Gino's magic number, be that £30m, £40m or $50m.
I don't think it's a car crash but in the same way I don't think we will be strengthening in a way that means we are likely to stay up. I don't think a significant investment in the starting XI was ever likely.
We were up to our eyeballs at end of cup final season though. In theory that should have been a lucrative season in terms of league prize money and gate receipts and still we had mortgaged everything. Starting from such a weak position has left us in a very poor state post Covid. Pussetto type nonsense clearly doesn’t help either.
I think, though, we also have to take into account the fact that as it appears presently, we are going into a Prem season with a Head Coach who has never had any top-level experience as one, full stop, and who I think pretty much everyone here or anyone else would agree has not been successful up to this point because of his great tactical flexibility and accumen, nor his team's brilliant, incisive playing philosophy. Realistically, if we want any chance of success (survival) many of us would probably assume (or me, clearly, at the very least) that we need some other USPs to give us a fighting change of making up for that. As it is, we haven't managed to bring any in, which may or may not be alarming to you depending on your disposition - we did that, and upgraded our squad with several significant players, last time we went up, and that time around we were about to be coached by a Europa League final-reaching manager who had previously been in charge of Atletico Madrid and Valencia. But to add even to that, we seem to be hearing now multiple suggestions that that final potential USP - the fabled utopian wonderland dressing room with every player loving each other and running through brick walls for the collective to the tune of Sweet Caroline - is in danger of being broken up/the players who contributed the most to it not necessarily being here and, at the very least, actively playing in the team at the beginning of the season. For me this is why, with the window as it stands, it's quite hard to say what USP we are going to/supposed to be relying on to enable us to do better than at least three other teams in this league. That's why it (the window) seems pretty disappointing/dismal (AS IT STANDS/AT THE MOMENT) to me - I don't really see which of the possible approaches we can say we are furnishing ourselves with the required tools to adopt.
I'm completely the opposite I like that Gino is giving Xisco a chance I like that we've built a squad that has absolute mental levels of pace - Sarr, Etebo and Dennis are all crazy levels of quick, whilst King, JP, Fletcher are far from slow I like the fact we've realised spunking money up the wall on players like Welbeck is not the way to go I like the fact we're investing in the future with players like Baah
I think it’s going to be a very grim season. The elephant in the room is that Munoz is highly likely to be massively out of his depth, magnified by also having amongst the weakest squads in the league, which many decent, proven managers would struggle with anyway. He’ll be sh1t canned with us rooted to the bottom of the league and we’ll be fishing from the pool of out of work managers again. Last season we went for the one who’d managed a handful of games in Georgia, so lord knows where you go from there.
Unusual for posters on this forum to divide into two opposing camps in this way. Perhaps someone could invent names for each of them?
Almost three months is a life time on these forums! I also think you'll find very few at the time who didn't think several steps needed to be taken either way to maintain a positivity/prepare for a successful season, chief among them being to break the Pozzo habit of a life time and get the centre forward recruitment clearly right in an unambiguous manner - something very few would claim we have subsequently done. Obviously, I hope my instincts for what has happened as they stand are wrong in all sorts of ways, and all these constituent parts come together in a million lovely and spectacular ways, but right now I'm sounding pessimistic because that's literally what I am based on witnessing everything that has been said and done, or indeed not done, up to this point. I'd love to be optimistic, but I don't feel we've been given any particular reasons to be so far. That's a matter of opinion and interpretation as much as anything else, and, of course, I don't begrudge anyone having the opposite view (within reason).
