There are planned transfer windows and reactive transfer windows, and planned ones are always better. With a planned window you go into the window on day one knowing exactly what positions you're trying to upgrade and have a shortlist of options for each position. You might even have made contact with the club and player to get a sense of availability and you do so with a clear overview of the age profile of your squad, it's temperaments, the contract length of all your players and so on. We didn't do that.
Then there are reactive transfer windows, where you go into the window, look around to see whose on the market and simply buy the best players you can find. You're driven not by what you need as such, but by simple availability. This is typically substandard - you miss opportunities to other clubs who are streets ahead of you, you end up getting good players that you didn't quite need, missing out on positions you needed to upgrade, and so on.
Obviously there's always a little of both going on. Even the most well planned team will have unexpected injuries or losses of form to address.
We definitely had a reactive transfer window, it was almost scattergun at one point, with a new name every day after the Brentford defeat. Indeed I'd be surprised if any of our purchases were priority targets six months ago.
However there are still better and worse reactive transfer windows, and it looks like we've actually had a decent one. Whether this is by luck or judgment I don't know.
Martinez, Malacia and Antony all have long careers ahead of them and are in positions we need. Eriksen and Casemiro should give us an immediate impact, and the latter solves a problem that has dogged us for years.
Given the new manager and the new approach to football at the club entirely, there is a question about how well planned it could ever be. Any long-term targets we had under Ole are bound to be different from ETH, and I doubt RR got to name any targets at all. So I will give the club the benefit of the doubt this summer, even if it falls into the same pattern as previous summers.
Next summer id hope to see far more organisation in how we approach things, given the time we'll have had with the manager. For this summer though, we ended up with a decent window, but could easily have flubbed it with our approach. So overall 7/10.