brite blu sky wrote:At the moment I'm not looking forward to the summer transfer round. I think City have a lot of tricky shit to sort. Getting shut of Ade and RSC for starters, then seeing what happens with Tevez - if he is playing well with Aguero and co he may end up wanting to stay and the Argie national team influences will be advising he does. If he is team playing and not dicking around then City would keep him yes?
Then the clown.. will he do the right stuff to get out of the last chance saloon ? If not we have to sell another tricky one to offload and find replacement.
Finally Dzeko. A decision has to made on whether he is going to hack it, at least he should be easy to sell tbh. But then that also means another new player found, brought in and gotten up to speed.
Bottom line is it is about as messy as you could get it. Can we get messy?
An excellent post and one which echoes my own 'fears' about the summer transfer merry-go-round.
Given the FFP threat hanging over our heads like a veritable Sword of Damocles, I think the Manager (whomsoever he [or she ??] may be by the start of next season) has to do a lot of hard thinking about how the team should be set up and how it should play next season, before acquiring any new players. For instance, one completely horrible way would be to re-inforce the defence so much that we hardly ever concede any goals, if any at all; working on the premise that if we drew every game 0-0, then we would acquire 38 points for starters.
If we could then score a minimum of one goal in each of our home games in order to win all our home fixtures (not an impossibility, given this season's record to date), we would then amass a further 38 points, bringing our total up to 76 in all.
Appreciating that our away record this season has been indifferent (would that be a suitably euphemistic way of phrasing it ??), if we could grind out 1-0 victories in, say, seven of our away fixtures (not unrealistic), that would garner a further 14 points bringing the grand total to 90 points in all which, in many/most seasons, would be enough to win the title.
Such a 'Mourinhoesque' approach would be a nightmare to watch but it would only mean we needed to buy Neven Subotic at centre-back and perhaps another defensive midfielder (to partner Big Nige) which would not break the Bank unduly in FFP terms, provided we cleared out all the dead wood from the squad.
The converse could also be considered i.e we were set up to play all-out attack in the Keegan mould, on the premise that if we were to concede four goals, we would score five to claim the points. Under such a philosophy, it wouldn't matter about buying any new defenders as anyone - even Neven Subotic - in the back line would look pretty poor, given such a wide open approach and 'luxuries' such as defensive midfielders would be totally unnecessary in such a system. However, the squad would need five or six top-class forwards (three or four of them would be playing in every game), so we'd probably have to go after Lavezzi and Cavani for starters, which might have an adverse on our FFP prospects. Under such circumstances, it might be financially more prudent to make peace with Adebayor and retain him in the squad rather than trying to buy someone else.
Between these two sets of extremes (the boringly pragmatic and the heart-attack inducing exciting), there is the middle way of retaining the correct balance between defense and attack but, if at any time we were to lose the services - through injury, illness, suspension or any other reason - of any (or all) of players such as Hart, Kompany, Silva and Aguero etc, would we have adequate replacements immediately available in the squad, or would we need to buy big again in the summer ??
All in all, there are some really difficult choices and decisions to be made this summer and I can't say I'm relishing the prospect overmuch......or, instead, should we just thumb our noses at FFP and go out and buy whomsoever we want ????
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