verlaine1979

A 25m CB and a 25m striker would probably be older and have less potential financial upside when sold (since the likes of Broja and Scamacca appear to have their sights set higher than us already). Like it or not, stockpiling youth and hoping to sell them on for profit is the business model of the club. If we spend 50m on two players and only get 50m or less back, the club is in trouble.

I've only seen Aouar play a few times, but he had a Payet-esque ability to hit through balls. Would love to have someone in the team who brings their slide rule to training.

I actually found the Athletic analysis a bit concerning. Lots of shots, not a lot of them very accurate or effective sounds a lot like Adam Armstrong. Hopefully if you could compare Mara's stats from the start and end of the season you'd see a big improvement as he got more game time.

Thanks for the tip - I laughed out loud a couple of times watching his highlights video. Ridiculous skills and audacity. Will no doubt be off to one of the very biggest clubs if he has another good season at Leipzig (10 goals and 9 assists in 45 games and only 21 years old).

I'm hoping it's just what we're playing right now to account for not having a first team left back able to play. There's no point having two strong mobile centrebacks and then putting them in a back three with a lead-footed donkey who can't possibly hold the same line as them without getting caught.

Carillo was a 5m player all day long. How we ended up paying 4x that is still among the biggest mysteries of my thirty+ years following saints.

If a player like Scamacca is going for 30m plus add ons, Broja should be significantly cheaper than that. I'd go no higher than 20m before looking elsewhere. For 30m+ you should've had at least one season in double figures in a top-tier league.

Scamacca looks annoyingly good. Some great finishes last season and a bit of a beast physically.

His mum is apparently a news presenter on French national TV, so he's probably got access to a decent team of advisers.

Karlsson got more league goals and assists from the same position as Sinisterra (also same age) who just went to Leeds for 25m. He's not going to be a cheap option no matter what Transfermarkt says.

There's no way that a 23 year old with those numbers and several years on his contract is leaving the Dutch league for 12m.

Cornet seems a decent shout on paper for someone who could play as the left-sided AM while also doing a job as a striker. Didn't watch many Burnley games aside from the ones against us though, so very little idea of how good he really is.

Oof, I wish. He looked fantastic during the euros.

Why are we, a club with only one demonstrably good CB, currently preparing for the season by playing a back five?

Only caught the highlights, but pretty obvious gulf in class between the two teams. RBL much more naturally incisive passing and movement. We really, desperately need a no.10 who can pick a pass and a striker lively enough to anticipate it.

Are you sure? It's not like Ralph has shown much faith in our youth. Smallbone and Tella have both had a handful of games since they turned 20, but I think RH is more conservative than you might think. Not youth-related, but the decision to play Long ahead of Armstrong at the tail end of the season doesn't speak of a manager who gambles on the unknown all that much.

The proposed business model of the club relies on decent scouting, so I'm taking that as a given.

Eh, I don't like the idea of missing out on high potential young players when they're available, just because we already have some mediocre crap jamming up the squad. The buy-to-sell model needs a seamless conveyor of talent to work - you can't rely on doing all the buying and selling in one window every year.

Che's finishing isn't going to improve now. Some aspects of his all-round awareness and decision making might, but he can only hit the ball hard and straight with no finesse or placement.

No chance of Hudson-Odoi surely. He'll get better loan offers than us if that's what they want, and the likes of Newcastle could blow us out of the water if they're selling.

Justified or not, the media buzz around both Wan-Bissaka and White was higher than we've seen around Walker-Peters. In the same way that Declan Rice has been declared a 100m player for a few years now. It just happens for some players and not for others, and market perceptions matter.

It's not impossible that SR have budgeted for a year of reinforcing without major sales. After all, it's much easier to get top dollar for your players after a season of good performances and positive media coverage than it is selling your crown jewels after surviving a relegation scrap. Solak sounds like he's wealthy enough to be able to bridge our debt repayments for a year (could even do it through a loan himself).

Depends - three potentially high-resale value young CBs are better than two. The Dortmund model doesn't involve only buying just as many young players as you need for the first XI - you have to have a couple of spares in case they don't work out/succession planning. Buy to sell to buy is a really precarious strategy if you're doing it on a 1 to 1 replacement basis (as we have seen the past few years). Hopefully the new owners have enough of a financial buffer to allow us to move to the buy a few to sell to buy a few model. Oh, and Elyououssi is mediocre. Was hoping he'd be on the way out.

Fair enough, 6 million is nothing in this market.

Based on what others have done in the SPL, Aribo doesn't sound like the answer to our midfield creativity problem.