Donyell Malen

[Stu]

It’s quite frightening how many of inherited squad are still here.

We're in 2nd place..?

It’s that we won’t be able to replace them like for like when the time inevitably comes. There’s no room for poor signings to keep the team performing as well as it is.

[paul_e]

I wish the transfer windows in both the summer and January were much shorter because some of you really struggle with them, every window for years we have this 'sky is falling' period in the middle where the only transfers we're going to complete and whichever of the rumours you consider to be the weakest and we're inevitably going to fall further behind the clubs we're trying to compete with.

I get why people get worried but we're 3rd int he league and have consistently competitive for the top 4 since the day Emery arrived, if you can't relax and just enjoy the ride now then what are you actually getting out of all this?

[ozzjim]

I think as with every club there is elements we've done well, and elements we've done badly.

We have though massively improved in the buy someone on huge money and have to let them go for feck all 2 years later under Unai. Most of the ones we've bought and sold have been pretty much cost neutral. The problem we have is that with so much less money to play with replacing good experiences premier league players is fraught with difficulty on our budget. Other clubs have spent massively more and failed in spectacular ways, at least we seem to be breaking even ish with the odd real hit in there. From the moment we qualified for the CL, most of our buys have either contributed, or left at cost or profit. I accept we need a higher hit rate for sure, but we also need to be able to shop in different ponds. Depending on the fee, Abraham is a fairly low risk buy.

[Stu]

I wish the transfer windows in both the summer and January were much shorter because some of you really struggle with them, every window for years we have this 'sky is falling' period in the middle where the only transfers we're going to complete and whichever of the rumours you consider to be the weakest and we're inevitably going to fall further behind the clubs we're trying to compete with.

I get why people get worried but we're 3rd int he league and have consistently competitive for the top 4 since the day Emery arrived, if you can't relax and just enjoy the ride now then what are you actually getting out of all this?

Sorry for being a pest, Paul.

[Percy McCarthy]

Re: transfer hits and misses, are we better or worse than most clubs? I read something a few weeks ago in which an astonishingly low ‘hit rate’ of big transfers was being discussed.

Sorry my memory isn’t up to providing more detail.

Edit:here’s something I googled:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PremierLeague/comments/1p8tk5i/the_top_20_premier_league_transfers_of_all_time/

[Toronto Villa]

It probably isn’t that different. Just that clubs lower down the food chain or up against financial limits like us need to make sure there are more hits than misses. The cost of failure is greater. By comparison Man U can absorb those mistakes or write them down/off easier because their abundant revenues mask the mistakes. We’ve been lucky in a way that we’ve been able to flip a number of our signings making money or not losing as much as we might have. It’s just an odd policy we’ve employed during Emery’s time signing many players who’ve simply never featured at all for a decent chunk when we really should have managed that better.