I'm kind of keen but I'll play devil's advocate. Every place ins our squad is valuable, so is it a great return if it means we don't sign someone who would be a longer term safer bet?
Yep, that's basically it. We're only allowed 17 non-homegrown players, so we can only afford to take a punt on players if we haven't already used our overseas slots on previous punts.
We currently have:
Ederson
Ortega
Dias
Akanji
Gvardiol
Reis
Khusanov
Nunes
Gonzalez
Gundogan
Kovacic
Bernardo
Echeverri
Savinho
Doku
Marmoush
Haaland
ETA: fuck me, I forgot Rodri. So that's 18.
That's already 17. The two in bold are under 21 so wouldn't count towards the overseas quota for the Premier League, but would for the Champions League, so there's a bit of wiggle room there to leave certain players out of the CL squad, but that's not likely to go down too well. But I'm immediately struck by how many overseas slots are taken up by players who aren't automatic first teamers.
Then you look at who we're linked with, and if we bring in Cherki, Reijnders and Ait-Nouri, for example, we're already over our quota for the Premier League before we've even thought about a new right back. It basically means we need to sell an overseas player if we're bringing these players in, but a lot of the players we'd perhap like to get rid of (Grealish, Stones, Ake) are homegrown. And that, in essence, is why we're looking at someone like Morgan Gibbs-White, and why it might be Cherki
or Reijnders, and not both. It's also why we might see someone like Kovacic, Akani, Nunes, even Doku or Savinho leaving the club in the summer.
It's why I've said on another thread that it's so important to have the core of English first teamers. If rather than Kovacic, Akanji, and Gundogan we had Guehi/Branthwaite, Wharton, and Gibbs-White, we would immediately be in a better position to take advantage of potential deals like this. But the problem nowadays is that a core of decent English players costs world class money for less than world class quality.
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