3. Squad and Transfers
3. Squad and Transfers
Assessing your squad
Firstly, I can't stress this enough!!
Don't assess your squad until you have a good Assistant Manager in place and let them help with your assessment.
Take into consideration, captaincy; fans favourites; and utility players.
Important factors to consider as essentially the players and the fans will decide your future, having a happy squad and players, that can play a few positions are key to success in any competition.
Transfers
Only advice is to sign what you need and not what you want... You don't want to bankrupt you club.
And to use your scouts effectively and take advantage of trials.
I know a few might not like this but, Wenger is the man when it comes to Squad Management, Transfers and effective methods of making profit (because at the end of the day, it's a business, and selling players makes just as much money as successful campaigns)
The Right Method of Squad Management and Transfer Policy
The Wenger approach
As mentioned above Managers often buy who they want and not what they need, at the end of the day your building a team, not just for now but for years to come.
When I say "building for the future", I mean putting aside your relegation battle, or your ambitions for European success and spending a majority of your time investing in young talent.
Young talent is always good.
It is and always will be an effective way of building a good side for a minimal fee, not everyone has the spending power.
Arsene Wenger's Young Guns
If we look at the squad of 2008, The squad is easily split into the three categories of Wenger's success, unfortunately for Wenger, his club is currently going through a transitional stage and he needs time to develop his squad back to this layout.
Experienced players(25+): Gallas, Toure, Lehmann/Alumnia, Rosicky and maybe even Gilberto.
Core of the team(21-25): Van Persie, Adebayor, Clichy, Flamini, Hleb and Eduardo.
Youngsters(U21): Walcott, Denilson, Diaby, Bendtner, Fabianski, Hoyte etc.
Wenger will continuously buys youngsters and some of them will one day fall under the 'Core of the team' category.
The present 'Core of the team' will become experienced players and the present 'Experienced players' will get sold, providing money for the new 'Youngsters', and filling in any other gaps in the category.
Also with this setup, it allows Wenger to use his squad to help build for the future before offloading.
eg. Viera trained Diaby; Henry trained Walcott; Cole trained Clichy; the list goes on... but all of the experienced players have been sold after mentoring their own replacements, effectively.