Winter 25-26 Transfer Window - hopes, speculation, rumours etc.

[London Villan]

Blooding our own kids and giving them PL minutes also adds millions to their value.

[VancouverLion]

Why not try and tempt Alex Scott from Bournemouth? - he'd provide excellent MF oomph...

Good shout, looks a cracking player.

[PeterWithesShin]

We definitely need another midfielder that misses loads of games.

[OCD]

By that token, we shouldn't be interested in Wharton either.

[N'ZMAV]

we don't really blood many youngsters that stay in the team - Bogarde has done well, surprisingly better than most imagined

[paul_e]

I don't think so. I suspect what really happened is we signed him 6 months before he joined and in the meantime our U18s won everything and Routh in particular was very impressive in that run I guess he just leap-frogged ahead of Ozcan and we ended up not really having the same need we'd identified this time last year. We did seem to try him at left back more in pre-season which suggested we wanted to see if that could be another plan but in the end we seem to have decided he wasn't what we needed. It's not great but I can see how the academy performances will have changed our thinking. Since then we have seen 4-5 of that team on the bench so there's clearly some plan to give these youngsters a chance to make it with us.
! thing I've noticed with Emery is that he does seem to look at some players and decide he wants to see them in training with his players and then if they don't fit he'll quickly move on from them, there have been a fair few like it now.

There's Routh, TJ and Feeney at CB; all with potential (and the latter with significant experience).

Yep, all 3 look like good talents but, for me, Routh looks like he's got the physicality to handle it as well as the talent, I'm less sure on the other 2.