Summer 2016 Transfers Thread

So according to Ornstein, we aren’t doing much at the moment except for playing friendlies. Sounds about right.

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Some Arsenal fans freak out because they read too many sensationalist articles and take them to heart. If Arsenal brings in a center back and a striker they’ll have done roughly as much as the others. United has brought in Ibra, Mkhitaryan and Eric Bailly (who probably won’t even be in the starting XI). There’s been talk all summer about Pogba, but he’s not there yet (and even if they sign him it will be at a ridiculous price). City have bought Gundogan, Sane and Nolito (who won’t be a regular in the first XI). In other words, the Manchester Clubs have each added two players to their starting lineup. So how can anyone say that Arsenal is way behind with almost a month to go in the transfer window? And it should be noted that Arsenal did finish ahead of both of those clubs last year, so maybe those clubs need more work.

Honestly, I wouldn’t give a crap if they didn’t bring in anybody else if everyone could just stay healthy (Per and Welbeck’s injuries being the reason a center back and striker are needed). So if Arsene brings in a good striker as an alternative to Giroud and a solid veteran center back to go along with Xhaka (the studly DM Arsenal has needed for years), I think it will be a highly successful transfer window.

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If everyone could just stay healthy our current squad is not good enough under Arsène Wenger’s management. Last season we had the good fortune to have the best player in the league fit throughout the season, and a decent injury record aside, and we finished on 71 pts.

City have added a young Brazilian striker who was wanted by Barça and Madrid, and is considered the premium Brazilian talent since Neymar. That on top of two strikers that are already better than anyone we have, IMO, in Agüero and Iheanacho. They’ve added one of the biggest European talents, too, in Sané, who is ready to contribute now, and would likely be better than anything we have on the right side.

Most importantly, of course, they’ve added Pep. City have had pretty much a dream window with Gabriel Jesus, Sané, and Gündogan, and they’re set to add more, it’s not like the window only continues to be open for us…

United don’t scare me as much because of their manager and because they were starting from a lower starting point than City, but there’s no denying they’ve done more than us in signing Ibra, Mkhitaryan, Pogba. Those are three players that would upgrade us.

I have no idea how bringing in the bare minimum in a striker that is better than Giroud without being anything especially exciting (Lacazette), a CB needed to plug a glaring hole, and Xhaka (the best signing of the lot, no doubt), could be considered a highly successful transfer window. But there you go.

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But they’re paying a ridiculous price for Pogba, so that negates the quality he adds to their side.

Also despite what articles like the recent Statsbomb one suggest, I’m still not entirely convinced that’s a given. Still believe Michy would have been the better option and neither are good enough to be starting regularly for us.

Wouldn’t be mad if Wenger tried to secure the best young 9 he can find and signed a starting CB, competing for the league is a reach anyway.

Xhaka will be as good if not better than Pogba and he cost a fraction of the price. If anything they would cancel each other out in terms of measure your penis transfer edition. We still have to do a lot to match their window which we won’t but I see his point.

Decent injury record? You certainly must have been watching some team other than Arsenal last year. Wilshere, Welbeck, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Cazorla, Ramsey, Alexis, Mertesacker, Coquelin, Walcott and Debuchy all missed significant time with injuries last year.

And, again, United has not signed Pogba. They might. They probably will. But that transfer saga has been dragging all summer (Arsenal fans would be fuming and accusing Wenger of dallying if it went on that long). If you’re going to give United credit for players they haven’t signed, then you should be putting Lacazette in Arsenal’s column. Yes, Ibrahimovic and Mkhitaryan will probably be good signings for them, but what have they done to improve their defense? I can assure you that Xhaka would improve United a helluva lot too.

And there you go: Manchester City is “set to add more.” Well, Arsenal is set to add more as well. Why does City get credit for rumors but not Arsenal? Gabriel Jesus won’t even be playing for City this calendar year because he’s staying in Brazil until the end of the season in December. Plus he’s 19 and has never played in a top league. Nobody really knows how he will work out. Lots of guys with the same hype don’t. Lots of young guys who are wanted by Barcelona and Real Madrid don’t. Let’s wait and see before we canonize him. City’s roster is filled with big money guys and a lot of them didn’t live up to the hype.

Also, what has City done to improve their defense? (And don’t tell me they’re signing Stones because at this moment they haven’t). They have two thirty-something fullbacks who used to be really good at Arsenal. Kompany (now 30) has had trouble staying healthy and when he’s not in the team they’ve struggled. Joe Hart is coming off what wasn’t really a stellar year. They’ve got nobody back there as good as Cech, Koscielny and Bellerin.

And Pep Guardiola is not God. He’s been very successful at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, two clubs that were fantastic and highly successful before he got there and which gave him pretty much unlimited funds. City fits that profile in all ways but one – they don’t have a long history of success. Whether or not he can be as dominant in the Premier League remains to be seen. The idea that he is some sort of managerial wizard and Arsene Wenger is some sort of amateur is ridiculous.

Here’s the problem with some Arsenal fans (particularly the ones who feed off each other’s negativity on message boards): the grass is always greener. Especially over the septic tank.

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This is just insulting, especially addressed to someone who has been keen to call out Arsenal fans for just this (when it actually applied). Repeating nonsense like this when it doesn’t apply in the least is just as bad as the bullshit that others repeat on the other side of the spectrum.

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Don’t tell this.
Apparently truth is an excuse.

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I won’t argue against the value of adding Pep but I think you are falling for the hype a bit in terms of City’s other additions, at least in terms of their near-term value. Gabriel Jesus looks like a talent but he is super raw and inexperienced. We are talking about a guy with less than 3000 minutes of first team football whose reputation has substantially been made during a recent two month stretch that could be just a purple patch. Neymar, in contrast, had dominated Brazilian football for 3+ years before moving on to Barcelona. I certainly don’t think he’ll hit the Premier League and start tearing it up right away when comes over next winter. Sane is a similar story - great potential but I’m not sure he is better player right now than Nolito, Sterling, or even Nasri.

If anything, I find Pep’s moves so far this window kind of perplexing. He seems to have signed four wide forwards in Nolito, Jesus, Sane, and Moreno, three of them very young and very talented.* And beyond that he has signed one injured passing midfielder in Gundogan who probably needs another defensively adept midfielder playing beside him. Meanwhile, his FBs are old and shitty, his CBs are not well suited for Pep-ball, and Fernandinho is really the only other decent midfielder on the team (and may end up playing CB if Pep is to be believed). He could be building a juggernaut for the future but I’m not convinced that the pieces currently assembled are going to fit together that well. Of course, he also may not be done yet.

I don’t really see why we couldn’t compete with this team if we added a CF who offered more than Giroud (or a really dynamic RW with a lot of end product like Mahrez) and a very good CB to pair with Kos, having already added Xhaka.

*I know people talk about Jesus as a 9 but as far as I can tell he is 9 in the same way that Neymar was a 9 at Santos, playing there for the time being but with a game and body type more suited for the wing once he hits Europe. I have a hard time seeing Jesus as a lone striker in the Premier League.

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Better than past season it may be, but it’s still a terrible rash of injuries. Whether or not it’s endemic is immaterial. It is not in any way, shape or form a “decent injury record.”

The Vardy deal was “done” too. Except it wasn’t. It’s dangerous to assume something is done just because it’s being reported in a wide variety of sources. You know what happens when you ass/u/me, right? Most of you won’t believe Arsenal has signed anyone until it’s on the Arsenal website, but with other clubs it’s a done deal if everybody is saying so.

My point was that this is exactly what you’re doing. You’re acting as though other clubs have solved all their problems and will have perfect squads, but you won’t even wait until the end of the transfer period to judge whether or not Arsenal has filled its needs (the same Arsenal that finished two or three spots ahead of the clubs you’re wanking over and that arguably need more work). I’m willing to wait and see what happens with all of them. You are engaging in a double standard.

Again, I’m not the one who is assuming anything. You are. I’m advising patience. Let’s wait and see how it all ends up. You’re the one who is freaking out about the spectacular transfer periods these other clubs – again, clubs that finished multiple spots behind Arsenal in the table last season – are having (even giving them credit for transfers they have not yet made), while bemoaning that Arsenal has no ambition and acting like the club is in danger of a relegation battle or something (to make a point by exaggeration). And you’re doing it when these clubs have filled two spots in their lineup while Arsenal has only filled one.

I wouldn’t be saying anything. I don’t engage in hyperbole over young players. There have been half a dozen “new Neymars” – and Neymar himself is only 24! Think about how many “new Messis” are running around out there. And I’ve been around long enough to remember the “new Peles” and “new Maradonas.” The kid would still be 19 if he signed with Arsenal and I would still wait to see how he worked out. And he still wouldn’t be available for the first half of the season, so what damned good would he have been doing Arsenal between now and January? Maybe I’m just getting too damned old to understand this obsession with “the next big thing.” But I don’t care if he becomes the greatest player of all time someday, he’s still an inexperienced 19-year-old kid in 2016. And that’s the year we’re talking about.

That’s quite a bold prediction. Maybe he’ll do it. I didn’t say he couldn’t. I’m just saying we should wait and see. Every league is different and there is no guarantee of success in any of them, but the Premier League is a bigger challenge and endowed with more parity than the leagues in Spain and Germany. He’s not taking over a team that just won the Champions League like he did in his last stop. This may be a little tougher.

How is it insulting? It’s an old saying – the grass is always greener (on the other side of the fence). It means people always think things are better somewhere else because they tend to overlook the good qualities of where they are and the bad qualities of other places.

What has happened to you Cuellar? You used to be one of the more positive posters on this site. What has turned you to the dark side?

We have waited more than four seasons to get a top quality striker, so filling three positions that are desperate to be filled seems unlikely.

[quote=“Powderfinger, post:239, topic:310”]

I know everybody is frustrated right now but its kind of ridiculous if spending 100M net and filling three first team outfield positions with high-level players aged 23-25 (while also adding some intriguing talents like Holding and Nwakali) is viewed as a massive disappointment. Would it be better to have Mahrez as well or to have landed a world class striker like Higuain? Of course. But lets not make out like spending 100M on three first XI players in our spine is some kind of slap in the face of the supporters.
[/quote]It would be great if we did that, but realistically, it’s not going to happen.
The reason a lot of supporters feel that we should be signing at least three more players is because we signed no one last season, apart from a GK, we have needed these positions filling for too long, and all our rivals are strengthening significantly while we have gone stale.

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[quote=“Moondoggie, post:243, topic:310”]
Honestly, I wouldn’t give a crap if they didn’t bring in anybody else if everyone could just stay healthy (Per and Welbeck’s injuries being the reason a center back and striker are needed).
[/quote]Are you serious?
You must be the only Arsenal supporter that doesn’t think we need a new striker.
Are you really happy that we are sitting on 200m and still have Giroud as our starting striker, and Mertesacker as a starting CB?

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Yeah thats fucking laughable to be honest.

What’s exactly the reason to be positive and excited about in regards to Arsenal then? This season is not going to be any different than the last three.

That’s not true! It could be worse.

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tbf we knew about Welbeck’s and Wilshere’s injury before the summer window closed and Debuchy wasn’t injured, but just loaned out to France. Ramsey missed how many league games? 6? Alexis? 8? Mertesacker? 5-6? Walcott? a month?

You clearly are mixing last season with the one before, because most of the names you mentioned were not injured for a significant amount of time. Missing Cazorla and Coquelin hurt and not having Welbeck and Wilshere available for a full season, but that would have been really mild if we had done this summer’s business last year and not relied on players that weren’t going to offer anything anyway.

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That’s not what I said. I said. I said the reason Arsenal needs to bring in a striker is because of Welbeck’s injury. The team doesn’t necessarily need a striker who is significantly better than Giroud (who is actually pretty damned good). But they do need an alternative. A healthy Welbeck could be that alternative. But he’s not healthy, thus the need to bring in a new striker. And there’s still about four weeks to do it, so I see no reason to panic and start jumping off bridges.

You should accept that Messi, Suarez, Lewandowski and Aguero aren’t available. I wouldn’t have paid 75 million for Higuain either. And even if I had, that would have been no guarantee that he would have preferred playing in England than in Italy. Many South Americans feel more comfortable in Italy or Spain because there is less culture shock. You can’t just snap your fingers and make any transfer happen just by throwing money. There are many factors involved. So let’s see how things work out over the next four weeks.

Missing 6 or 8 games is a month and a half to two months worth of games. It’s a significant portion of the season. And then it usually takes a player a few games to get back to form (Alexis struggled with that). So no, I am not mixing it up with the season before. I actually researched how many games were missed before I made that post just to confirm my memory. And yes, Wilshere and Welbeck were injured before the season began, but nobody had an inkling that their injuries would keep them out the entire season.

Last year’s business was last year’s business. It’s completely immaterial to this year’s business. But the fact that Per and Danny are injured are exactly why I said that Arsenal needs to sign a center back and a striker. You lot are acting like I said there was no need for these signings, yet clearly I said there was.

Some of you will never be satisfied. You want Arsenal to be Real Madrid, not Arsenal. Even if Wenger signed Messi and Jonny Evans, you’d be bitching because Evans isn’t a big enough name or cost enough money to win the Summer Transfer Bigger Penis Debate.

Nope, I want Arsenal to compete with Real Madrid. Big difference and the other Madrid prove that you don’t need an equivalent budget to do so.

If we signed Messi + Evans i’d absolutely question whether we could have done better. Nothing to do with penises, I just want Arsenal to do everything they can to compete.

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Messi + O’Shea?

6 games are 6 games… it’s 6 games out of 38, which is about a 6th of a season. Honestly if you really want to make that argument you’re not going to have any team in the world with a decent injury record and everyone can be excused, no matter how minor their problems actually are. Other clubs would call that rotation if a player only played 30 games (Alexis) or 31 (Ramsey).

Well, that’s true, but that’s not actually comforting when it comes to positions where we were short in quality options to begin with. We did the same the summer before with Koscielny, where it was clear that he had some kind of injury going into the season and ended up buying Gabriel a couple months later, after it was evident that he wasn’t going to play a lot.

Not, it isn’t. It’s exactly the same business we need this summer that we needed last summer and the summer before actually. Maybe the center-back position is new to the list, but we were looking for a striker last summer too and the same goes with a midfielder, which gladly was finally done now.

I never said I wanted Arsenal to be Real Madrid. I want Arsenal to be a team that doesn’t take fucking gambles every fucking year, because there’s some undone business left over. I could actually live with Johnny Evans as I think our defending problems aren’t as big as they’re being made to be and if the money is put into adding quality to our RW and striker position I’d be all for it, but the truth is that we’re doing business that could have been done ages ago while paying a premium for leaving it late.

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