City
God you sound bitter...
Premier, either Man U or Chelsea. Sadly, it seems that Arsenal will be struggling to get 4th spot again :/ .
Well, that's still better than picking ¨Chelsea with a terrible gameplay and a 9-0-1 formation in the semifinals¨ :3
I forgot to mention that Pep will manage to screw up Bayern as part of some master plan to let Barca win the CL. Only kidding.
City or Chelsea (Just waiting how long it takes Mourinho to revert to form. Seems it only needed 45 minutes)
Really?Liverpool
I might be getting ahead of myself (an opening day loss does not make a season) but Arsenal might even struggle to qualify for Europe. Its bad enough the top 3 strengthened themselves but with Spurs, Villa, Fulham and Swansea tooling up Arsenal need to bulk up their squad
Nah... I still think that Arsenal has a top 4 team (in fact, the match against Villa could had been different with some decent ref calls here and there), but the team is far from the top 3. Like, really, it's easy to blame Wegner about this last 8 years, but I dunno if there's someone else to blame. With 74 mil, Luiz Gustavo, Higuain and Bernard could had been easily signed... but this ain't FIFA, so I dunno.
Nope
In truth, one of the major problems for Chelsea the last number of years is the African Cup of Nations. It takes some of our key players away each winter. One of the massive reasons, apart from rotation/depth, that I wanted another DM is that Mikel and Essien will both go off to the AFCON and leave us without a real DM for a while.Nope
I think it will be between City and Chelsea...though I'm very wary of Chelsea imploding at some point in the season. Utd will probably get lucky again like they always do. And unless Liverpool get at least two more solid defenders and another striker that can finish the chances, there's a small chance they'll make 4th spot. I have plenty hope though ^^
I would put Luiz as CDM if they're both not available and test out 3-5-2 or 3-2-4-1with Ramires just in fron Luiz...similar to how BR has Lucas and Gerrard in the midfield.
If we do that, we're then down a CB. Luiz isn't good as a CDM, it's just that Rafa played him there occasionally. It did improve his positional sense a little bit from only slightly better than Cahill's to actually halfway decent.
Thats real life for you.
Here's the problem. This isn't something that's happened over the last two seasons. This has been 9 years in the making. Arsenal have kept enough quality in the squad to do the bare minimum and its going to catch up with them especially if Tottenham avoid their traditional Easter implosion (I'm really going to miss those). For years Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool had those CL places nailed down because those below them were so far behind they could slip up mid season and still keep it together. (Liverpool got into the CL with 60 pts in 04. Last year it wasn't even good enough for the Europa League). Then Liverpool f***ed up just as Man City and Tottenham got their acts together. Arsenal don't want to go that way.
Sad thing is Liverpool wanted £50 mil for Suarez and Arsenal quibbled over it. They dilly dallied over Higuain, Napoli snuck in. Apparently Wolfsburg got Gustavo with a lower bid than Arsenal. At some point it comes down to how desperately a club wants a player.
