please log in to view this image Spotted this elsewhere and thought I'd post it on here to see people's opinions. Firstly, who on this list needs to be kept and have their contract extended and who needs to to? Secondly, what do you think of this situation being allowed to happen?
I raised this topic in the beginning of the season: http://www.not606.com/threads/expiring-contracts.335297/
Honestly Ramsey, sanogo, Gibbs, jenkinson, szczesney are ok by me to be let go. Mertesacker I believe has talked about signing a one year deal, so not sure he counts. Campbell looks like he will be let go. But still...embarrassing when you show it like that. Is anyone at this club doing their job?
Other than the obvious three, i wouldn't lose any sleep over losing any of them. But i guess we'll need to retain some of them otherwise we won't have much of a squad!
Sanchez, Ozil, Cazorla, Oxo and possibly Ramsey to stay, the others should be sold. Why the hell the club leaves these things to the last minute, I cannot fathom. They just seem to invite trouble at times.
Well, that's the point I'm making. Do we really want to take the risk by handing him another long contract, when we could sell now ?
What exactly has Wilshere done to justify getting a contract, seriously? The guy is 25 and people still talk about potential? Haven't we learnt from the past of persevering with players that aren't good enough and injury prone? He isn't the player we thought he'd be and is nowhere near the hype he's been tagged by. There are better and cheaper alternatives from Spain.
Wilshere is simply not great at football. He'quite good but that's about it. His 'meh' performances at Bournemouth illustrate this perfectly. Not only is he not deserving of a contract at a big club like ours but he's also not going to raise us much transfer funds if we sell. Because he's not very good.
What it confirms is the general hype all our youth players got. Our best youth player at the moment and that will be a future success is Bellerin, a product of the Barca youth system. Wilshere is the best that we've produced and he can't get into our first 11 or top PL team. What does that tell you.
I'd say our best 'significantly developed by us' players who are still currently playing football are Fabregas, Gnabry and Bellerin. Two of those three don't even play for us anymore. Ergo our youth development seems to have been an abject failure as it's produced largely mediocre players and/or a small minority of quality players who generally don't stick around with us for their career anyway.
I agree, our youth system has been a failure, no one has made the "English Core" that Wenger's promised years ago http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/wenger-english-core-is-no-coincidence. "It is… not by coincidence, it is down to the work that we have done that we have more good English players," said Wenger. "We look first at quality. If the quality is local, it is of course even better because it gives you more guarantee of stability because the players who are English who play for Arsenal are more likely to stay for a longer term than foreign players. "But we look first at quality, that is the most important thing." So Wenger, how is that working out?
Big disappointment looking at that roll call of names. The only ones in the team now are Ox and Walcott, but neither have really reached the heights that we'd hoped.
It has been a big disappointment. The other question is should English players be given preferential treatment? Take OXO, clearly not good enough and his poor stats back it up but Wenger persists with him. Is he really better than the likes of Gnabry, Campbell and Perez? Even Walcott has been given a lot of chances but sporadically delivered. How comes Wenger hardly gets pulled up on this, is it because the players are English? He's got no choice now but buy foreign, even at the expense of developing younger players.
I rate Oxo, but I would play Welbeck ahead of him. We can't really take credit for Welbeck as he was nurtured by Utd, but he's a good quality English player. Also, do not know what Perez needs to do to get a start. He's been good when he's played, I guess Wenger sees him as a left sided player, so Sanchez starts ahead of him.
very tough situation. Wenger used to be all about youth development from 2005-2011. Unfortunately players left / others were not good enough. Nowadays we no longer invest in youth at all. Apart from Bellerin and Iwobi, I cant think of a player in the last 5 years to move up to the first team? (and I firmly believe Iwobi is not good enough) At least back in the late noughties our team had an identity - young and exciting. Now we seem to have given up on that, but the players we are buying arnt exactly world beaters either apart from Sanchez and sometimes Ozil. Wenger keeps getting pressured to buy, and instead we buy mediocre players that dont really improve the team. (almost panic buying, if you will). We keep getting told 'players arnt out there' but Higuain was available last summer. Instead of Xhaka and Perez I would have just got Higuain for the same amount. Its as if the pressure IS getting Wenger to change a bit, but the resulting outcome isnt very good. We need a head of recruitment, or someone to do a better job of finding, and buying proper players.
It's all a bit of a mess now. This is what happens when your manager becomes too involved in everything, especially the finances. We need to make some major changes at the club and that means a complete regime change to replace Wenger's failing ideologies. In an ideal world this would include replacing our CEO and getting rid of Stan too. They are too risk averse and focused on profit only. We need a a Board that targets success as well and maybe taking a risk or two. Things may get a lot worse before we see any improvement, especially if Wenger's signed a new contract.