What fragility exactly? Diaz wanted to go on the back of his best season, club didn’t feel he would be worth the wages he would command at that point and decided to sell him when his stock was the highest up to that point.
As for Ngumoha, I hope he and his advisors are smart enough not to get entagled in Bayern’s immaturity. I assume they will extract a new, improved contract for Ngumoha but there’s no real reason for him to leave now that he has a pathway and a coach who plays attacking football.
I agree. I don’t really see what others are seeing. He might turn out to be a world-beater but right now if Bayern want to throw daft money at us I’d take the chance, especially with the state the squad is in.
I wish these crap managers would stop playing him on the right. He’s so much better on the left.
If they want him on the right he needs more time there at a lower level even then he’s so good on the left I doubt there’s much point. A better option than him starting wide right might be more central right so he has space to use each side?
There is no suggestion of 150m, he’s expressed his attitude towards us and he signed a contract in September. Also it doesn’t particularly look like we will have a great summer in this area and he’s err 17.
150m for any of our players would be hard to turn down in fact I probably would take that for any of them but we are fans why the obsession A) with flogging anyone so we have cash in the bank to buy players we don’t actually know.
B) judging players at 17, personally for a 17 year old in an underperforming squad he looks really good.
I felt at the time that we didn’t do enough to fight for keeping him. 70m is a lot of money of course, but the lack of willingness to renew his contract and to give him what he deserved appeared as a bit strange to me. Unsurprisingly, as you say, he has gone on and even improved at Bayern. I think it was wrong to let him go, based on how last season went.
Bayern came in as the big club they are, and instead of meeting a club which is even bigger and richer than them, we showed small-club mentality. Oh, he wants to go to Bayern… well, let’s then negociate a fee and let him have his wish…
No, we were the big club, we really needed to show them that we were above them in the food chain. If we wanted to let Diaz go, fair enough, but then, secure his replacement first, and then let him go. Instead of that, we were very nice with Bayern and with the player, and as a result, we were left with a gaping hole at LW for the whole upcoming season. Bayern must have laughed at us no end, and rightly so.
Is it then a surprise if they come again this summer, hoping to lure our most brilliant young prospect away from us?
Typical English self-destructive behaviour: instead of letting a brilliant, very young prospect quietly develop and protecting him from too much media-exposure, they put maximal pressure and exposure on him. God help him if he scores a goal at the world cup… he’ll be made to think that he’s the next best thing after sliced bread.
I hope that Iraola will be able to put this lad’s feet firmly on the ground again when he comes back. This is way too much, way too early.
You do remember that Diaz was later confirmed by the reliable press to have wanted to leave Liverpool a year earlier, with Man City his destination, only for Liverpool to deny him that move and extract the best season of his career up to that point, right?
Look, I don’t think the powers that be got the Diaz replacement right, at least not for 2025/26 but he’s a guy who had one and a half great seasons out of three and a half seasons he spent at Liverpool and they extracted a premium (massive profit as well) from a Bayern side desperate for a big signing having missed out on Wirtz.
Looking at Diaz deal in isolation, Liverpool played it perfectly, in my opinion. They couldn’t have envisaged the whole season breaking apart so badly and Gakpo being so comically bad, though. Everything else is revisionism, in my opinion, since Gakpo was improving season after season up until the start of the last season.
Bayern don’t seem like a smartly run institution these days, do they? I’m thinking they are getting to the point where they are slowly beginning to understand that their pillaging of German football left German football in such state that the league doesn’t pose a challenge for them, while they lack a coach of Enrique’s quality to make use of that lack of challenge and channel it into Champions League domination. They try to compensate for that by failing at impossible signings from other big clubs. I will piss myself laughing if Real Madrid lure Olise from them this summer, as much as I despise Real Madrid for their sense of entitlement.
