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It's 2013 again..

Who should Arsenal have signed in the summer of 2013?


  • Total voters
    40

GDeep™

League is very weak
Again though, how can Arsenal with a billionaire owner pull out of the race for Higuain against Napoli? Why couldn’t Stan Kroenke help out Wenger and the fans? Imagine you sign Özil and Higuain?

No ambition.
 

Notorious Big

Drunka In Friend Zone
Reus would've been one of the top 5 players in footie if not for his constant injuries. Definitely on par with e.g. Bale and Hazard.

Yeah,think that Reus is more complete than Hazard.Better shot,quicker and very good vision.Hazard is better at dribling and more tactical player.Count that Hazard played in better team for most of the time than Reus.
 

Oxeki

Match Day Thread Merchant
Trusted ⭐

Country: Nigeria

Player:Saliba
I don’t know why? Raul is meant to be some transfer guru. Him and Vinny also said they won’t let players enter their final 2 years, which Mustafi has done.
Majority of those players Won't leave because of the massive salary they're on. So can't blame Vinai and Raul there.

Aren't you the one who always says that you can't force a player from a club.

Most of the players are content to just coast and take their paycheck
 
Last edited:

goonerfamily

Active Member
To be honest, Özil was kind of a panic buy. As crazy as that sounds.

Higuain would've made much more sense from a squad-building standpoint at the time. However, think it's a bit of a stretch to assume we win the league in 13/14 or 15/16 with Higuain in the side. Higuain, while comfortably better than Giroud, is famous for bottling the big games. I'm not sure Higuain alone makes up for the other deficiencies in the side at the time. Off the top of my head, we always seemed short of CB to partner Koscielny and a good defensive midfielder. Suarez, may have been that game changer to be fair.
 

Oxeki

Match Day Thread Merchant
Trusted ⭐

Country: Nigeria

Player:Saliba
To be honest, Özil was kind of a panic buy. As crazy as that sounds.

Higuain would've made much more sense from a squad-building standpoint at the time. However, think it's a bit of a stretch to assume we win the league in 13/14 or 15/16 with Higuain in the side. Higuain, while comfortably better than Giroud, is famous for bottling the big games. I'm not sure Higuain alone makes up for the other deficiencies in the side at the time. Off the top of my head, we always seemed short of CB to partner Koscielny and a good defensive midfielder. Suarez, may have been that game changer to be fair.
He wasn't really a panic buy, but an opportunity buy.

I don't think we went into the transfer window with a plan to buy him. But we bought him because he became available on the market because he wasn't on Ancellotti's plan
 

RacingPhoton

Established Member
He wasn't really a panic buy, but an opportunity buy.

I don't think we went into the transfer window with a plan to buy him. But we bought him because he became available on the market because he wasn't on Ancellotti's plan
That's exactly what we were doing around that time. We never bought players to fill our squad weaknesses. We were just looking for opportunistic buys and then we try to insert round pegs into square holes. No wonder we ended up with probably the most unbalanced squad.
 

goonerfamily

Active Member
He wasn't really a panic buy, but an opportunity buy.

I don't think we went into the transfer window with a plan to buy him. But we bought him because he became available on the market because he wasn't on Ancellotti's plan

Fair enough, maybe 'panic buy' is maybe the wrong term. But you've hit the nail on the head. There was no cohesive strategy that summer (and for most summers). If I remember at the time, it looked like we had a chance of either getting Di Maria or Özil. FWIW, I rated Özil more highly than Di Maria but you'd have to say Di Maria made more sense at the time with our abundance of creative midfielders but lack of natural wide men.

I know Di Maria flopped at Man U, and we were perhaps fortunate to go for Özil instead but the Di Maria clearly made more sense at the time.
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
Moderator
Btw for me the 2011 summer window is the worst.

Sold Nasri, Fabregas, Clichy and Eboue for roundabout 70m € and managed to spend that on Arteta, Mertesacker, Ox, Gervinho, André Santos, Chu Yong, J. Campbell, Jenkinson. Failed to sell Arshavin, Almunia, Denilson. Loaned out Carlos Vela - who could've gone on to be a valuable player I think - with a release clause. That's just one clusterfuck of a window.

Arteta and Merte were great signings for ~ 20m, but on top of that the club had another ~ 50m to spend - and decided to waste it on a youth project, the wrong player from Lille and absolute dross, at a time when the likes of Juan Mata were available, the club was in contact with Eden Hazard and Marco Reus was still playing for Gladbach.

Other players on the market in 2011 who would've been interesting and affordable for Arsenal:

Jerome Boateng, 22 (~15m €, City to Bayern)
Papiss Cissé, 26 (12m €, Freiburg to Newcastle)
Ricardo Rodriguez, 19 (8m €, Zurich to Wolfsburg)
Kevin De Bruyne, 20 (8m €, Genk to Chelsea)
Arda Turan, 24 (13m €, Galatasary to Atletico)
etc.

There were a lot of possibilities.
 

Notorious Big

Drunka In Friend Zone
That's exactly what we were doing around that time. We never bought players to fill our squad weaknesses. We were just looking for opportunistic buys and then we try to insert round pegs into square holes. No wonder we ended up with probably the most unbalanced squad.

Yeah,that was problem of our management.Just like in summer 2016 when we spent so much on Xhaka and Mustafi.
 

Riou

In The Winchester, Waiting For This To Blow Over

Country: Northern Ireland

Player:Gabriel
Apart from me and @Hunta everybody on here was massively happy with Mustafi.

I was happy with Xhaka at the time, got that wrong...was very unhappy with Mustafi and ****ing fuming with Perez.
 

Macho

In search of Pure Profit 💸
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
I was excited for Xhaka tbh. He was making waves and was national team captain before he came here if I remember correctly.

There were a lot of raised eyebrows from UK and especially la liga when we signed Mustafi for that amount, so can’t say I shared that enthusiasm for that one.

Lehman kinda shat on Leno when he first joined so thought he was a dud also lol.

On topic, I voted Higuain was gutted when it didn’t happen and I remember that mammoth thread we had it felt like he was basically here.
 

YeahBee

Terrible hot takes
Higuain. He was what we needed and I actually think he and Giroud could have played together in the right formation if needed. I don't recall us struggling to create chances so Özil wasn't the priority in that scenario. Ramsey in beast mode for half the season made a massive difference. It was just unfortunate that quality wise, we had the worst leading striker we'd had in a while. I did like Giroud though simply because he did all he could to maximise his game. He's just not top, top quality.

Higuain needed a better team behind him. Especially for the more physical PL

Suarez is grittier
 

Rex Stone

Long live the fighters
Trusted ⭐

Country: Wales
Btw for me the 2011 summer window is the worst.

Sold Nasri, Fabregas, Clichy and Eboue for roundabout 70m € and managed to spend that on Arteta, Mertesacker, Ox, Gervinho, André Santos, Chu Yong, J. Campbell, Jenkinson. Failed to sell Arshavin, Almunia, Denilson. Loaned out Carlos Vela - who could've gone on to be a valuable player I think - with a release clause. That's just one clusterfuck of a window.

Arteta and Merte were great signings for ~ 20m, but on top of that the club had another ~ 50m to spend - and decided to waste it on a youth project, the wrong player from Lille and absolute dross, at a time when the likes of Juan Mata were available, the club was in contact with Eden Hazard and Marco Reus was still playing for Gladbach.

Other players on the market in 2011 who would've been interesting and affordable for Arsenal:

Jerome Boateng, 22 (~15m €, City to Bayern)
Papiss Cissé, 26 (12m €, Freiburg to Newcastle)
Ricardo Rodriguez, 19 (8m €, Zurich to Wolfsburg)
Kevin De Bruyne, 20 (8m €, Genk to Chelsea)
Arda Turan, 24 (13m €, Galatasary to Atletico)
etc.

There were a lot of possibilities.

Also could have gone for Jordi Alba after Clichy left, he’d started for Valencia by then and would have cost about 5M.

Aubameyang and Dante would have cost about 10M total that summer and really we should have spent the Ox money on Zaha who was playing a lot for Palace at the time.

Rakitic would have been very gettable from Schalke the January before. He went for 1.5M ffs.

Vidal probably would have cost 10M that January as well.
 

Gooner Zig

AM's Resident Accountant
Trusted ⭐

Country: Canada
One of the most damaging transfer window. The most damaging being the 2016/2017 window where we signed mustafi, Xhaka and Perez for £100m and we haven't recovered since then

Cause and effect IMO - we don't panic buy the next window (Mustafi, Perez) if we actually sign players in the previous window. I've said it multiple times on this site - the period from 2013 - 2016 will go down as one of the most negligent periods in Arsenal's history given the circumstances and external factors.
 

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