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.

[PeterWithesShin]

High end transfers have a pretty poor success rate for all clubs, but so do all transfers. We just notice the high end ones more. We're successful on the selling side, we tend to get high prices for players that do smeg all of note after leaving. We're struggling to be siccessful bringing in starters better than we already have, but that's the case for many clubs at the top end. It's one thing to buy better players when you're 17th as the odds are many are crap, hence being 17th. But when you're top 3 your players are very good, so buying better than them is harder.

[ChicagoLion]

Recruitment is difficult in all professions.
So hardly surprising it is hit and miss in elite football .
A friend of mine worked where they were hiring and headhunting for people offering PL type salaries and the best they ever achieved was a 1 in 3 success rate.
Joining a club is not moving into a stable environment, it is a huge change in circumstances ( training tactics team mates management culture) and the stuff we don’t see ( home family friends lifestyle )is often the reason why they turn out not to be successful.

[Dante Lavelli]

Interesting.  A while back, on the football weekly podcast (Euro version) they said that German clubs see buying players as a sign of failure.  Success is developing players through coaching and a youth system.  The PL have forgotten that approach probably because it doesn’t provide headlines or content for SKY.  As fans, we’ve been suckered into it too.

Luckily we have Emery, who is absolutely the right man to adopt the German approach.

[Pat Mustard]

High end transfers have a pretty poor success rate for all clubs, but so do all transfers. We just notice the high end ones more. We're successful on the selling side, we tend to get high prices for players that do smeg all of note after leaving. We're struggling to be siccessful bringing in starters better than we already have, but that's the case for many clubs at the top end. It's one thing to buy better players when you're 17th as the odds are many are crap, hence being 17th. But when you're top 3 your players are very good, so buying better than them is harder.

I do wonder with Emery is that the goal a lot of the time is about rotating players rather than necessarily replacing them with 'better' ones.  As you say, when you are top 3 it is by definition going to be very difficult to replace the players you have with better ones, and we are unlikely to ever be able to carry the size of squad that, say, a Man City are able to simply because of the financial rules put in place to prevent it.

For Unai, it seems to me that his option then is just to be able to change personnel regularly so opponents can never become too comfortable facing us.  He has his core of 7 or 8 who are largely irreplaceable, but then the fringe players become more expendable and subject to rapid turnover.  It's why we utilise the loan market in the way we do, and why we've had a number of players who come in for 1-2 years and are then moved on, on at least a cost neutral basis.

[andyh]

Officially gone !!!!!!

https://www.avfc.co.uk/news/2026/january/16/signing-malen-joins-serie-a-side-roma/

[jwarry]

Officially gone !!!!!!

https://www.avfc.co.uk/news/2026/january/16/signing-malen-joins-serie-a-side-roma/

No mention of a loan in that