Arsenal dreaming.......zzzzz...........

I was pleasantly encouraged by a lot that Gazidis said this week, certainly the hints at sorting out the wage structure and working to make financial fair play work have to be positives.  I never cease to be amazed how some fans expect Gazidis, and Wenger for that matter, to reveal all the club's secrets, it is so ludicrous and idiotic to expect this.  These fans would do well to remember that extracting maximum value from player sales revolves around a cunning game of bluff and double bluff, the same is true for buying players, our club officials and manager must not reveal their poker hand, they need to be secretive to to the best possible job for AFC.

Anyway that got be dreaming.  I started thinking of Almunia, Fabianski, Squillaci, Djourou, Denilson, Arshavin, Vela, Bendtner, Park and Chamakh.  That is just for starters, that is 10 players on big wages, they must take up about a quarter of our wage bill between them, somewhere between 20-30million of wages I would guess.  I don't think many fans would argue with clearing out this lot, obviously Almunia has already gone, so that leaves nine to go.  I don't think many could argue with this ten for a variety of reasons, Djourou has never been consistent enough and if the club are being offered what is rumoured, we should bite their arms off.

If some of these players do well at the European Championships, Arshavin, and Bendtner the cases in point, then we could actually extract some decent money for them too, also some of them, such as Carlos Vela, have done very well on their loans and could also attract a decent fee.  Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but if we could clear out this ten, bring in about 20-30million in transfer fees and clear a massive quarter of our wage bill, then it would be half the job done.  We could then set about strengthening a much leaner squad, the reduction in the wage bill would leave us room to bring in four very highly paid players without even increasing our wage bill!

Obviously clearing out a good chunk of this dross is a big challenge but I have my fingers crossed, a lot also depends on what happens to RVP and Theo, if they do not sign on then they will be sold, of that there can be no doubt, talk of them seeing out their contracts is just brinkmanship to get big transfer fees if needs be.  If Theo and RVP sign on I think we would only need 3 quality additions to be competitive, if not then we would need to replace them and add three to that.  Come on you Gunners!  The window is still young.