I doubt Poch is gonna say "No some of these players have no futures and we don't give a **** about them, they can do one" is he? What Poch has said is what all managers will say when asked about their players. I wouldn't read too far into it, I'm pretty confident we'll see some changes in January.
The only sensible course of action with any squad is to sell players where others will pay more than you think they are worth and buy players who you think are available cheaply. If Poch thinks the players are worth their market price then there is no advantage from selling them. What you paid for them is irrelevant (except for the rather obvious point that the Club must have thought they were worth more than that when we bought them so what has changed).
What has changed is that players have either not developed at the rate we hoped (Lamela) or proven to be not as good as we thought we were getting (Paulinho) or just not adapted at all well to the league/club (Soldado, yet). I agree with you largely though, except that it is also wise to sell disruptive players at all costs. There is a reason we got Ade for £5 million when, based on pure ability when he can be bothered to turn it on, he's was probably worth at least 3 times that. He has decent goalscoring records at City and Madrid, and he went to City for £25 million after all. We also have quite a large squad, and players like Paulinho and possibly Dembele are taking up places that could be filled by players that Pochettino would actually want to use in the registered squads. Selling such players, even at a loss or for not as much as we could potentially get (due to their fees now being closer to/maybe even below market price, when we paid above those prices in all likelihood) is worth it if we can use the money gathered from the sales to get players the manager wants. We have so many players in that CM position that are much of a muchness that a '2 out, 1 in' policy might not even go amiss. We offset the cost of buying those players with the money made from selling others before, so technically speaking any money we make on them is profit anyway, right?
Agree mostly apart from the last line: profit is irrelevant. We could have sold Bale for £40m last year and made a huge profit but it would have been very bad business because he was worth much more than that. Even if the manager 'wants' a player it is very bad if we overpay as that just wastes money. However valuing players is a very inexact science as several recent signings by us and others seems to demonstrate. Some would have sold Bale on for a loss at one point. I've always said that if 4 out of the 7 we signed in 2013 eventually came good that would be a good result. It would be a real disaster if we sell those four at a loss and keep the other three!
But that is already taken into account in their value. They won't move for a pay cut so any money we save on wages comes out of the transfer fee to make the deal palatable for the new club.
What I meant about profit is that we are in a situation where undercutting the value based purely on footballing ability of, say, Paulinho won't damage our long-term finances (even if we're losing money on the player if we take his buying and selling fees in isolation) because the Bale sale and other outgoings in that transfer window more than made up for the money spent on the incoming players, in purely financial terms. We didn't have to take money from other revenue streams to buy Paulinho et. al. so selling them for less than we bought them doesn't damage us financially. I was never saying we should accept the first bids that come on for Eriksen and our other best players just because we'd make a bit of cash from it as it stands. What I was trying to say is that if we sell the 3 that don't come off (or whoever else we sell) for less that we bought them then thats not a disaster by any means. I think we're saying broadly the same thing but are getting our wires crossed talking about market value and profit Market value and value based purely on footballing ability are two very different things it seems. And I completely agree with you that we have to be careful when letting managers have complete control over transfer funds, but it is a two way street because it means that you sometimes get half-baked players coming in that are sort of alright, but not quite the top grade signings that perhaps the manager really wanted. I think a few of the summer signings were like that - Stambouli instead of Schneiderlin, Fazio instead of Musacchio. But we don't have the money to throw around to buy lots of those players at those fees unless we sell a Bale every year and we don't do that. The DoF system I think is in part supposed to be a series of checks and balances to stop a manager throwing £30 million on a single player that doesn't work out, or that a new manager won't rate, but it cuts both ways when the club starts penny pinching regarding spending on players coming in, which Levy is known to do, and the manager is left short of what he really wants and needs.
My thought is if a club has about half a dozen players not performing the manager must get rid of them somehow. If your working place has a lot of do nothings,isn't your boss going to sack them? Of course he is! If Woolworths can't sell something they will have a fire sale and,baby,we need a fire sale!...and quick!
Call me old-fashioned but I've always seen the job of the boss to improve the performance of staff not just to hire and fire.
This was on the Arsenal pages - a rival to Audrey? [video=youtube;YJMr6nrl7c0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMr6nrl7c0&feature=player_embedded[/video]
