Re: The Official Summer Transfer Rumours Thread

[Rev]

Decided to post it here, interesting stat comparison between the two although Per is a way less agressive type of defender. The aerial duel row is suprising though.

[Sri]

Musti is an aerial beast

[urbaNRoots]

Need to ask my man Artan Muhaxhiri about all this Mustafi stuff.

[Sri]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157347292850038&id=885285037

[Sushi Master]

Decided to post it here, interesting stat comparison between the two although Per is a way less agressive type of defender. The aerial duel row is suprising though.

You have to take into account Per had 14 less games, though. The interceptions are due to him having a decent enough pace.

I would not judge Per on stats... he's just not that sort of defender.

Mustafi is very solid. Great potential signing (no, not calling it unless it's official )

[Sri]

on if the fee for John Stones has inflated the market…
Well yes, we know that in England the transfers are very high because there’s an influx of money. When you go outside England, it’s very high because you’re English. So you’re not too surprised about the transfer amount because the clubs don’t need the money in England and maybe that’s why they only weaken if the price is high.

on if it’s becoming harder to find bargains…
Not so much, but I think it’s harder than ever to convince people that you can buy good players at a reasonable price, and that the quality is necessarily linked with the amount of money today is in everybody’s mind. Most of the time it’s true - good players cost a lot of money - but you can still find players of top quality at a reasonable price sometimes.

on what he can say on possible Arsenal signings…
Look, today my focus is not too much on that, because we play a very important game in 48 hours. Transfers will not help us now to do well in this game because we have a strong squad. We have to deal with the game on Sunday with the squad we have available. But of course we lost basically three centre backs, because we have [lost] Mertesacker and Gabriel and Koscielny, who is not ready. Most of the time, the injuries happen in the same sector. But I believe we are equipped to do well and I’m confident we can do well. Transfer-wise, as soon as we do something, we will inform you.

on Shkodran Mustafi…
No, I cannot tell you [anything].

on how many players he needs to add…
I don’t count in numbers because otherwise our squad will be too big. Like many teams, if we find the top quality then we will still strengthen our squad.

on which other areas he’s looking at other than defence…
There’s no other specific area that we need. It will depend on the quality we find. If we find somebody who strengthens our team in any position, who gives us a superior quality, we’ll do it.

on whether he gets tired with the inflated prices…
It’s not so tiring, it’s just surprising more than tiring. We knew that would happen. It was not difficult to anticipate that. Of course it was difficult to imagine five or 10 years ago that it would go to that level, but maybe that’s the consequence of the success and popularity of the Premier League. After that you can discuss. I said the other day that the price of a player normally depends on his talent, on his expected strengthening of the team, on his age and on his resale value. After that, we are in a system where we are in competition as well and if your opponent pays £40million, then if you want the player you have to pay £45million.

on the big clubs buying big players…
You focus on your squad and your quality and you try to strengthen where you can. We were not specifically [competing] with Man United on a player, so we have done what we wanted and we want to do more. We try to compete at our level with all the assets we have and we try to compete with them. We showed that last Sunday [against Man City].

http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/20160812/wenger-s-latest-es-on-transfers

[Sri]

[Rev]

ffs

[Sri]

Hypothetically, how would you guys feel about Lukaku?

[urbaNRoots]

Hypothetically, how would you guys feel about Lukaku?

Ecstatic.

[Eman]

It depends on the price. I'm not trying to just spew Wenger-talk here, but if Everton want 70mil for him then there's no point discussing it. He's worth about 40-45mil in today's market imo.

He's still young enough and he's a consistent goalscorer, but honestly he has not really progressed in the last few years as many people would suggest. When he was on loan at West Brom 4 years ago he scored 17 goals in 38 games. The following season at Everton he scored 16 in 33 games (an improvement overall), then he upped those numbers to 20 and 25 in the last two years respectively but that required over 45 games to do so each year.

Make no mistake, those are strong numbers, but they don't indicate to me actual improvement. He seems to have reached a good level and is stagnating there, although he could always take another step up. But that's the thing - paying 70mil for the potential that he might actually become worth 70mil (as in, a truly world class, Higuain-esque level) in a few years is pretty unreasonable. Also he has developed an arrogance about him that he's already world class; if he starts really believing that then he could become just another talented striker who ruins his potential.

Ultimately I'd definitely be happy with signing him, but the fee Everton wants just wouldn't be worth it. At 70mil we might as well start bidding another 15-20mil for Griezmann or Lewandowski...

[McAgger]

Lacazette scored a hattrick today btw.

[Sri]

Yeah, but we ain't signing him. Pretty sure about it by now.

[Sri]

Let’s look at how this summer began. Having signed Granit Xhaka on May 25th, a nice start to the business, Arsenal activated Jamie Vardy’s release clause on June 3rd. This was the striker that everyone knew we needed, and that the club had moved so quickly to fill that gap was very encouraging … for a few days. It seemed unthinkable that Vardy would turn Arsenal down, but he did, probably much sooner than we knew about but still pretty quickly. By mid-June that deal was dead in the water.

Yet here were are over two months later, that’s 8+ weeks, 60+ days, and we went into yesterday’s game without a striker. The Vardy bid was tacit admission that we needed somebody in this position, but we start the season playing an uncomfortable looking Alexis Sanchez there. Are we to believe a club with the resources of Arsenal can’t find another Jamie Vardy level striker in that period of time?

And then there’s the defence. Arsenal played Lens in a pre-season friendly on July 22nd during which Per Mertesacker picked up a serious knee injury. The club knew right away it was bad, by the time official word had been given, the BFG had had surgery back in Germany and was ruled out for five months. At that point alarm bells should have been ringing. We knew Koscielny was coming back late, and that meant Gabriel and young players like Calum Chambers and Rob Holding were all we had to kick off a new campaign (As an aside, the Holding signing is also informative. Bolton rejected a £1.5m bid back May, why did it take two months to increase it by £1m so it was acceptable to them? Maybe we didn’t want to pay a player’s wages for two months, or maybe we’re just really inefficient).

The decision not to make a signing after Mertesacker’s knee knack – and it can only be a decision – was compounded by the injury to Gabriel last weekend against Man City. We still haven’t made a signing, and it’s simply not good enough. I felt sorry yesterday for Holding and Chambers, both of whom tried hard and who were left exposed during that dreadful spell in the second period when Liverpool looked like they were going to run away with it. It wasn’t necessarily the rawness of that partnership that cost us, but a more experienced duo would have held things together a bit a better and I don’t think we’d have been taken apart like that.

http://arseblog.com/2016/08/arsenal-3-4-liverpool-chickens-indecision-prevarication-come-home-roost/

[Jay29]

I sincerely hope Arsenal aren't thinking they can save a few quid by leaving it late because we have zero leaverage right now. Everyone knows we're desperate for a defender and a striker and nobody is going to sell cheap.

[Sri]

Souness also made a very good point. Any decent player is going to cost even more now, because the selling club has lesser time to find a replacement.

We've done a great job of yet another transfer window. Kudos, Wenger. Well done.

[Rev]

Let’s look at how this summer began. Having signed Granit Xhaka on May 25th, a nice start to the business, Arsenal activated Jamie Vardy’s release clause on June 3rd. This was the striker that everyone knew we needed, and that the club had moved so quickly to fill that gap was very encouraging … for a few days. It seemed unthinkable that Vardy would turn Arsenal down, but he did, probably much sooner than we knew about but still pretty quickly. By mid-June that deal was dead in the water.

Yet here were are over two months later, that’s 8+ weeks, 60+ days, and we went into yesterday’s game without a striker. The Vardy bid was tacit admission that we needed somebody in this position, but we start the season playing an uncomfortable looking Alexis Sanchez there. Are we to believe a club with the resources of Arsenal can’t find another Jamie Vardy level striker in that period of time?

And then there’s the defence. Arsenal played Lens in a pre-season friendly on July 22nd during which Per Mertesacker picked up a serious knee injury. The club knew right away it was bad, by the time official word had been given, the BFG had had surgery back in Germany and was ruled out for five months. At that point alarm bells should have been ringing. We knew Koscielny was coming back late, and that meant Gabriel and young players like Calum Chambers and Rob Holding were all we had to kick off a new campaign (As an aside, the Holding signing is also informative. Bolton rejected a £1.5m bid back May, why did it take two months to increase it by £1m so it was acceptable to them? Maybe we didn’t want to pay a player’s wages for two months, or maybe we’re just really inefficient).

The decision not to make a signing after Mertesacker’s knee knack – and it can only be a decision – was compounded by the injury to Gabriel last weekend against Man City. We still haven’t made a signing, and it’s simply not good enough. I felt sorry yesterday for Holding and Chambers, both of whom tried hard and who were left exposed during that dreadful spell in the second period when Liverpool looked like they were going to run away with it. It wasn’t necessarily the rawness of that partnership that cost us, but a more experienced duo would have held things together a bit a better and I don’t think we’d have been taken apart like that.

http://arseblog.com/2016/08/arsenal-3-4-liverpool-chickens-indecision-prevarication-come-home-roost/

It’s as maddening as it is predictable as it is woeful. That excitement of the new season obliterated in 90 minutes

This hits the nail on the head.

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http://www.goallegacy.net/viewtopic.forum?t=39767

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