It's funny, but I noticed how Keaton said "trust the process" after our first game. That's exactly what Edu and Arteta were saying a year ago when Arsenal were in a similar position after losing the opener to Brentford. Being a Gooner, it caught my eye immediately.
This may be our squad for the next few months. I'm not sure the budget is there to bring Santi back without using a DP, and I don't think we want to burn it for him rather than a striker. It would be great if I'm wrong, of course.
We'll see. Something tells me Santi is looking for some money. If we can get there on TAM, great. But his ask might be somewhere beyond our constraints, and he may be able to get it (or at least a lot closer to it) elsewhere.
Small nitpick, but I think I would list Gray as RB/CB
Agree, but the dual position thing has gotten so pervasive with this roster that it's undermining the utility of the list.
I get the too-early-to-tell idea. But I also think 2021 is a poor data point. Remember that the 2020-2021 offseason was still pre-vaccine. What the season would look like was very uncertain. Teams were losing massive amounts of money with no idea what ticket sales would look like in 2021. Very hard for me to see that as early indication of a generalized strategy rather than randomness of the transfer market and/or anomaly of COVID.It's hard to say because I don't think they were doing this from year 1 so the sample size is small assuming they only started recently. Looking at the end of seasons releases table you posted previously 2021 possibly supports this idea.
In 2021 Mitrita was released at the end of the year and not replaced with Magno til July. Our two other largest salary expenses for 2021 were also delayed til July (Santi signing and Taty extension).
2022 is less supportive as Medina left at the end of the year and Martins arrived in time for the season so the DPs are a wash. I still think the Martins signing was less about team need and driven mostly by some type of CFG need to either shift his costs away from Yokohama or fix a situation where Martins was unhappy in Japan. From a non-DP standpoint, we shed large contracts of Thorarinsson and ITS and only took on Pellegrini who I assume was cheap as he was a buyout.
Very inconclusive but I don't think the recent data rules the theory out I think it's more of a too-early-to-tell situation.
I’ve always said I might be the internThis is hilariously excellent timing, don't you thinkadam ?
