I have just read this article on Sky Sports and the quote from Roy Hodgson is very concerning.

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"Last week Roy Hodgson said: "We've not sat down and seriously thought, 'What do we need?' That's because we have a good squad and a big squad. You don't want to keep piling players on top of players."

"The club's focus is likely to be on extending the terms of several players out of contract in the summer."

We have no absolutely no creativity in the middle of the park, we have central defenders that are old and slow, a right back that may never actually play for us and as always centre forwards that simply don't score.

Yes, we have a lot of players out of contract and some we should be negotiating with now (ie. Guaita), but others really need to be moved on in January for a fee or let go in the summer.

Those comments illustrate to me that the club have no intention of spending any money in January, and perhaps just concentrating on extending those out of contract in the summer.

Not good, not good at all.

I wholeheartedly concur with your sentiments.

There is of course a television programme called "Location,location,location".
If there was one made concerning our club, an appropriate title would be "Stale,stale,stale".

I an definitely NOT in the know, but I would imagine comments like that from Roy are mostly about managing peoples expectations - I would imagine that the club will have a number of ongoing plans relating to who they want to keep, who they want to sell (at what price) & the most interesting replacements - however as we have seen over many transfer windows making those plans a reality has considerable challenges as does any deal that involves people looking after their own interests as they sit on opposite sides of the table

So basically the club can't / wont spend any money on transfers and the signs are that will continue to be the case in the summer.

Apart from a spell where where Roy complained in an interview about not needing "other club's cast offs" (or words to that effect) he's never used the media to apply pressure.

It does make you wonder whether that sort of result could actually be in the best interests of the club if it gets them to pull their finger out.

So what did you crazy people want Roy to say:
"we've got a war-chest of 50 million, we need a striker a creative midfielder and a couple of young centre backs" "Oh, and we're gonna offload some of our old crocks who aren't good enough now".

Yes. let's signal to the market what we're up to and motivate our squad to give up because they have no future at the club.