Hypothetical scenario:

1. You can keep our current roster for the next three years with guarantee no one will miss a single game due to injury. Caveat: no Partey, all players age and progress naturally but Jorginho who is frozen at current level.
2. Regular situation related to injuries and our transfer budget is $80M a year + what we can sell.

Which would you take? I take #1. I love this team.

Watching this Spurs-Villa game and thinking about our game yesterday, I have an idea. Before you accuse me of being an ignorant/entitled American that wants to turn soccer American, let me say I also love imagining tinkering with rules of American sports equally.

What if you drew a line at the six yard box and made a rule that each team had to have three players (including goalie) behing the line at all times. So inside the box, it would always be 8 v 8 (excluding goalie).

Goal: open play up just a little without changing the game too much.

I love “ground ball” headers.

The main reason we lost was that White wasn’t in to mess with the goalie on all those corners at the end of the game.

Playing around with some numbers on Nketiah.

This season and last season combined (all competitions), he’s at 0.47 goal per 90.

If you assume he plays 34 EPL games in a season and averages 80 minutes per game, that comes out to a little over 14 goals. That’s right around 8-10 in the EPL if you look where that would rank the last handful of years.

I think his size and strength is exposing him a bit.

I think we do have a world class striker in Jesus.

I think our squad is at a point where it’s not that easy to improve it with transfers.

If we had budget for another big player, I’d probably go for midfield. I think it would be waste of money for anyone up front. No one available for less than 120M cracks our front three, and no one available for less than 80M is an obvious improvement on our depth: Nketiah, Trossard, Havertz.

Backline is solid. Following the City model, if a versatile ball-playing center back is available, that might be a nice pick up. But with Timber coming back and what we have, we’re very solid.

Midfield has some opportunity for improvement. Maybe another try at the left 8, since Havertz is not exactly working out there. If I had budget for a big player, that’s where I’d put it.