I do agree with that. I would only keep Rose. Sandro would be a loss, but with the amount of CM players we have, his injury record...if the right bid came in, you could let him go
Levy will always trade if it looks like a deal. A good deal. We do need to sell/ loan more players than we buy however.
I guess we'd have to end up like chelsea and start loaning out promising players more. Townsend has only spent one full season here, but would be destined to be loaned out or sold. Id love to see Chadli shed his introvert style and smash though. But if we can get this kid, of course we will, as it sounds like he'd improve our first team.
That's a truth we'll have to accept. Still, in my ideal world, the squad would consist of at least one or two youth-teamers in the first eleven, one or two on the bench and the entire team beyond the starting 11 + 7 subs (save for maybe one or two exceptions) being academy graduates vying for a spot on either the bench or in the team. And the thing is, we're not that far off having that scenario at the moment. Okay, we've got no first-teamers who've come up through our ranks without a lot of loans (Walker comes closest, I suppose), but we'll likely have Townsend on the bench, and we've potentially got five or six players who are certainly good enough to be in the 25 if given the chance (Carroll, Fryers, Kane, Falque, and Ceballos just off the top of my head). And given the improvement we've seen in Kane's game over the last few months (he looked very intelligent against the Sounders, and in my opinion has been developing very well over the course of 2014: well enough, in fact, that I wouldn't mind him being our back-up striker), there's certainly a case to be made for retaining a large contingent of youngsters in the squad beyond the first 18 and letting them use the training and occasional games to grow. I mean, our squad after the window could potentially look like this:
First eleven: Lloris, Walker, New CB, Verts, Davies, Schneiderlin, Sandro ( [-o< ) , Lamela, Eriksen, Griezmann, Soldado
Subs: Vorm, Naughton, Chiriches, Dembele, Holtby, Townsend, Ade
Subs not used: Friedel, Veljkovic, Fryers, Chadli, Carroll, Lennon, Kane
Sure, the first eleven is sparse, but nearly the entire squad outside the matchday 18 is from our academy, and I'd argue that overall, our squad would be about as strong as it is now with all our expensive buys crammed into it. It is achievable to set up a progression system running from the 25 man squad to the bench to the first team now, given the talent available to us. It just requires the trust of the young lads (convincing them to stay and learn, wait for their chance), which in turn requires a resolution from our board and our manager that this window (or perhaps January at the latest) will be the last one where we look outside our academy/loanees for expensive first-eleven players for at least a period of five years. And we do need to do this if we're to have any hope of utilising the talent that our academy is producing: right now we have the likes of Pritchard, Veljkovic, Kane and Carroll available to us, but in the future we'll have the enormously talented teenage players we've apparently transferred in like Yahaya and Azzaoui coming of age, and we must take advantage of their talent if we've managed to develop it sufficiently.
