I agree with those who say we need to gut midfield and finally sort the left back and striker(s) out. In order to do that, we need a big chequebook as the quality of player we need is not cheap. We need to bring in 3 or 4 world class players - we're talking Mbappe, Benzema, Griezman, Felix etc here not more players for the future.
However, there's a big elephant in the room for me in how we've let the squad evolve.
For the quality of the players we've had over the last decade, we've made next to nothing on them. Obviously there's been the poor signings like Mangala, Bony etc who didn't work out, but the top class players we've had have mainly left for nothing or for pitiful amounts:
Hart - free, Kompany - free, Lescott - free, Zabaleta - free, Silva - free, Yaya - free, Nasri - £3m, De Jong - £3m, Barry - free, Fernandinho - likely free, Aguero - likely free. Balotelli - £18m, Bellamy - free, Dzeko - £10m. Milner - free, Tevez - free, Clichy - free. Johnson - £10m.
That squad now would win the title today, no problem and is better than the one we have now. But we made less than £50m or so from them once they left the club. It's not sustainable. We either have to make other clubs pay more - not easily done because of the wages - or we look at selling them before they go too far over the hill. Players like Walker and KdB are 30+ or so now and at the moment we could probably get £160m now for the pair... or nothing in 3-4 years time. Bernardo Silva was probably worth £100m a couple of years ago, but we'd not get anywhere near that now.
Now I'm not saying we should be selling players in their prime, but we have to start planning all this a bit better. It's no good holding on to a player until they retire as they play less games and lose their legs. We need to look at moving them on to bring some money back into the team so we can reinvest in their younger replacement.