So, what happens now?

a forward and a defender but I think we’ll be alright when players come back.

I agree with you both that rosterbation is irrational (though I do it, like pretty much everyone), and that we may need to make some deals in order to not totally suck the rest of this year. There are some extenuating circumstances that give problems though.

1. We have a ton of players already. Some of them are making a bunch of money. All of them are taking up spots on the roster. The latter is relatively easily solved, but I don’t know that we’re really in a financial position to just stock up on players, so we’d likely have to sell to buy. The problem there is that if we don’t want these players, other teams aren’t all that likely to want them either, and you can’t just force teams to buy your dead weight.

2. Good players may prefer to go somewhere else. I’m an Arsenal fan so obviously I’m biased, but when I take that out of the equation I’m really not sure why a player would want to come here. We’re not that good this year, the fans are all pissed off constantly, we don’t pay particularly well, and we may not have Champions League football next year. What’s the draw? I know there’s history, but we don’t exactly have the market cornered on that. It would likely take some convincing, and more cash than usual.

3. Teams won’t want to sell good players. When we look at the names being thrown around, they mostly come from non-awful teams. What incentive do Dortmund have to sell us Mario Gotze now, for example? Unless he demands a move out, it’s really only money, and honestly at this point Wenger would shock me if he spent more than 15m on a player. If he did, maybe it would work, but unless there’s a pretty monumental change in our transfer strategy I don’t know why a team would sell to us in January, unless a player’s contract is up in the summer.

4. Players take a while to bed in, if at all. So say we convince a team to sell us a player, and convince him to actually come here, and trick some sucker into buying Squillaci and Almunia. What happens if it doesn’t help? If we’re buying outside of England, it’ll probably take a little while at least for the player to acclimatize to the league, and even if not, at most of the positions we have need for (like playmaking midfielder) it’ll take the player a while to bed in with this team. And if you’ll recall, our current record purchase is Arshavin, who’s now (less than three years later) worn out his welcome, and he’s one of the deadweight players who would need to be cleared out to buy. This could happen again.

So in short, we have to sell players nobody wants in order to buy players who may not want to come here from teams who won’t want to sell, and even if we succeed they may not help. So yeah, it’s more complex than just spending money, shockingly enough. This isn’t me saying we shouldn’t do it – on the contrary, I think we should if we can – but my point is that complaining each day that we haven’t bought anyone yet! isn’t really rational. I hate to be that guy, because I love the game, but it’s harder to buy players in real life than in Football Manager. It’s not a quick fix, or an easy solution.

http://arseblog.com/2012/01/squad-inefficiencies-require-decision-making/

It’s not that one has to agree, but he raises a good point. To use a baseball analogy, we’re giving a lot of roster spots to players who have massively negative WAR.

I don’t feel like explaining it or arguing it, just wanted to say it…

I hope that Arsenal conduct some sort of review or evaluation of their training and medical staff in the next year or so. I have done no quantitative study of this, but it seems like Arsenal are a very injury-prone team, and the injuries they get are not insignificant; I would be very interested to see if any of that responsibility lies with the medical staff (and if there’s anything that can be done to decrease the rate/severity of injuries) or if Arsenal just like to recruit players made out of glass.

I think we need to bring in a couple of players, not any high caliber players, but one’s that will push the likes of Arshavin and Djourou into having to play harder to keep a starting role, and that’s why I think we picked up the likes of Arteta and Santos and Mertesacker, to make sure that Gibbs, Ramsey, and Koscielny had to play better and harder to keep their role at Arsenal.

Unfortunately, to use the LANS term, it does make sense this time around in the event that Wilshere and Sagna return, because they will no doubtly make our team stronger, I’m not sure the same could be said about Gibbs at this point though.

And finally, you always have to have faith in your team. Anytime anyone (like Liverpool for example) goes though a complete overhaul, it says to the current players that obviously, they aren’t playing good enough, or they just aren’t good at all, and that can kill the morale of some players (like a Fernando Torres…). I don’t think Arsenal have this issue though, even with their silverware-less streak currently running onto seven years, Arsenal is still a great place to be at.

I think we have a weakness at left back, and in central midfield.

As said above, we have only 5 offensively-minded midfielders; one of whom, Diaby, is perma-crocked, another, Rosicky, who’s injured a lot, and is gone at the end of the year, a third who is injured right now from playing too much (Jacques) and a fourth, Ramsey, who is a year away from a severe broken leg.

We don’t have any constant backups for them. If we were to lose (touchwood that we don’t) Aaron Ramsey for a month, would we be confident with only Rosicky to replace him?

Not to mention left back, where I think Kieran Gibbs is useless at this point. He could get fit, again, but at this moment in time, is it that much of waste to spend £8m on Aly Cissokho? We don’t have Santos until April anyway, plus, we could always use him at left wing. Yeah, maybe next year it becomes difficult, but I think you can always sell players you don’t want.

Crunchsports.com said we gonna loan teh Kaka!!!