Everton boss David Moyes says he could be forced to wheel-and-deal in the January market.
Moyes has confidence in his squad overall, and admits the prospect of selling to buy - with John Heitinga increasingly linked with a Goodison exit this month - is out of his hands
He said: "It was the same question last year and we got it and were not expecting it (when the Blues sold Diniyar Bilyaletdinov for £5.5m). That came up and sprung us into life. The difference is this year is that we don't necessarily need to be sprung into life. We are in a strong position, healthy.
"Last year there were still hints we had to be looking over our shoulder to the relegation side of things. We needed to give the supporters something to shout about. We had given them nothing in the first half of last season, I would not have paid to watch some of the stuff we were producing.
"We did that and that came from nowhere. Who knows what will happen? We are probably working in the short term. If somebody left that player would have to be replaced before even talking about someone else. So you would need to be talking about someone who is complete surplus to what we need and we don't have an awful lot of surplus hanging around."