There is (understandably) lots of frustration about at the state of our squad – still very small, still very limited.
But there are still 44 days to go of the summer transfer window and still a lot of players about, rumoured to be on our radar (in fact, almost none of our rumoured targets have gone elsewhere). So here’s an optimistic take on what our squad might look like come the end of the window with the rumoured £100M left to spend.
There are a couple of different scenarios below – each of which remain realistic because I have only used players credibly linked to us in the rumour mills.
I have put versatile players in square brackets [ ] to indicate that they cover multiple positions – and parentheses ( ) to indicate those who might be loaned or sold. New players are shown in bold.
Anything of this nature and we will have the best squad available since the 2020-21 season – possibly as far back as the 2018-19 season.
Scenario 1: cost circa £85M or so
Strikers: Barry, Beto, (Chermiti)
LW: Ndiaye, McNeil
RW: Hutchinson or Kubo, [McNeil]
AM: Alcaraz, [McNeil]
C(D)M: Gallagher, Gueye, Garner, (Armstrong)
LB: Mykolenko, Kusogi, [McNeil], [Branthwaite]
RB: Coufal, Coleman, [Garner], [O’Brien], (Patterson), (Dixon)
CB: Branthwaite, O’Brien, Tarkowski, Keane
GK: Pickford, Travers
Scenario 2: cost circa £95M or so
Strikers: Barry, Beto, (Chermiti)
LW: Ndiaye, McNeil
RW: Doak, Fellows
AM: Alcaraz, McAtee, [McNeil]
C(D)M: Soucek, Gueye, Garner, (Armstrong)
LB: Mykolenko, Kusogi, [McNeil], [Branthwaite]
RB: Wesley, Coleman, [Garner], [O’Brien], (Patterson), (Dixon)
CB: Branthwaite, O’Brien, Tarkowski, Keane
GK: Pickford, Travers
And you’ll note that I’ve made very little use of free transfers and no use of the loan market – something which I expect we will do in practice. If, when the dust settles, we have a worse squad than this, then I’ll be the first to complain. But anything of this nature should give us speculative hope for the season to come – and serious hope that good foundations have been built for the future.