You may be right as we might be paying for past outlay. However when Sam took over we spent £40 million or so in Jan, as well as the Beast on loan. RLC would be an obvious recruit but cannot see Chelski releasing him now as they are challenging for the title and cups and he has put some decent performances together. Agree with the assessment of 3 max players, 2 in my opinion should be strikers with RLC the other. If RLC cannot come then happy to have 2 strikers with an increased budget. One fly in the ointment would be having to off load some strikers. Think Ayew can go back in Jan, maybe Sorloth out on loan or keep him in the 25 and have 5, meaning we have to drop somebody else or loan them out. Wickham's injury problems must be assessed as well. Looks like a busy Jan for the club.

“ [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. ”
—United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

If the budget is small all I can see is midfielders and defenders. I can't see our scouting department identifying a good affordable striker let alone signing them.

We are very well organised and despite some recent lapses we are actually much better defensively than many teams in the league, we just need at least one player who can add some real creativity to take the load off Zaha, be it a striker or a creative midfielder. Personally, if it's a striker then I would just go for an expensive short-term option of Defoe who if he stays fit will score goals given the chances, or, if we could persuade Spurs, Llorente. Now is not the time for promise or speculation, we just need someone who will have the confidence to hit the ground running. It's harder to find a creative midfielder who we could afford and who would want to come here. The best option would probably be RLC if we could get him back. One of the aforementioned strikers and RLC and I think we'll see a significantly better second half to the season.

SP mentioned on FYP that these moves were basically to toughen up training sessions. Surely we won't be looking for moves of this ilk in Jan ? If we can't get a player to fire some goals in attack I do hope we get somebody who can work with what we have and get some more out of them as well. Be nice to knit the team more together and could make all the difference if we cannot fix our goalscoring woes.

“ [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. ”
—United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

I suspect that we won't be in the market for "Expensive strikers" as we will not be shopping at the higher end stores.

Apropos departures, in the final analysis,there have to be clubs interested in players we wish to offload,besides the offloading of those mentioned won't significantly add to our coffers.

Our wage bill as a proportion of income is on the high side but the players you mentioned wouldn't save the club that much when one considers the overall picture.That said, there wouldn't be too much gnashing of teeth amongst our supporters if these players moved to pastures new.