Going by that person’s posting history, it really is simply because they spent £100m on one player.
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- Offered contract to Henderson when he was past it.
- We made Nunez one of the most expensive signings in our history and two years later he appears to be in the last chance saloon.
- Did not extend TAA and Van Dijk last summer and they are now close to being able to walk without the club receiving a penny.
- Went after Caicedo and Lavia, ended up with Endo.
- Went after Zubimendi as a specialised DM, got rejected and presumably we are now content with what we have.
- No replacement for Matip in sight, unless we think Van den Berg can fill in adequately.
- Promising youth being sold or made available.
The above have taken place under different regimes and can be attributed to a variety of reasons, but one way or another they don’t look good. We have done some good business in the meantime as well, but that doesn’t change the fact that there seems to be a distinct lack of direction in our transfer dealings for the last couple of years.
I can’t imagine that we won’t sign anyone, but nevertheless there are legitimate reasons to be concerned with how we’ve been handling transfers and extensions.
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It’s also a useful reminder that as we compare ourselves to our rivals, City just had a player force his way out who had 20 goal contributions last season and for whom they dont really have a replacement and have done nothing so far except bring in an inexperienced 20 year old with a season and half of european football to his name.
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I feel like I’m the only one who thinks it’s logically incompatible to question the Henderson contract extension while also questioning why the club seems apprehensive at handing out extensions willy-nilly to Virgil and Salah.
Is he? I must have missed that.
Already discussed that extensively above.
This one makes me curious, since the chatter from the “journalists” seems to suggest that he might be up for sale, but (I can’t remember where) I read that he didn’t play in the friendlies on Sunday because he was being rested after the workload from pre-season.
That said, Arne played Gomez at centre-back at least on Sunday, not sure about the other games. So that makes Gomez, Konaté, Quansah, Virgil for the standard 4.
This is what worries me, but if the Carvalho one was a one-off you can kind of see why, as we already well-stocked in the positions he plays. Not sure about the Clark and Doak situations though.
Like night follows day. Lose out on a player so release a hype piece for the existing squad through the usual mouthpieces.
No excuse for us not winning the league now, we’ve been told the squad is better than what Klopp got out of them last year.
All just excuse making when it’s patently obvious our recruitment has faltered the past couple years. Both in terms of process and quality of players we’ve brought in.
Yeah it’s become so shit we didn’t manage to identify a World Cup winning player with an interesting release clause and convince him that we should be his choice destination. Also so shite we couldn’t get one of the most highly-rated young midfielders in the world to join us, dominating the league for much of his first few months. So shit that we were nowhere close to winning the league, and barely avoided relegation.
Definitely not you having a tantrum because we failed to sign one player.
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It’s really the no dickhead policy that gets in our way. Too many dickheads in this young generation
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I mean, have you seen @cynicaloldgit?
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Good job TAN doesn’t have a “no dickheads”policy or it would only be @Iftikhar talking to himself.
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It’s not just Zubimendi. We’ve failed to upgrade our starting lineup since Fabinho. Almost everything has been a downgrade. Firmino => Nunez. Mane => Diaz. Fabinho => Endo. Salah, VvD 4 years older. Most of our transfers since 2020 have been average or we’ve even failed to secure our main targets. Eight transfer windows, and the only one to nail down a starting spot is Mac Allister.
Diaz
Szobo
Harvey to an extent
Even Nunez for that matter
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Are you taking the piss? Elliott? Jones? Szoboszlai? Even Endo is an upgrade on 2023 Fabinho. That’s just midfield alone.
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Was it really so hard to understand the sarcasm in my statement blaming the executives ? 
Have you seen the standard of some of the tantrum posts here? It’s quite hard to tell what’s satire and what’s real.
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Don’t be daft. You’re being drawn in by the bantz accounts.
I think our transfer operation is pretty transparent.
Ian Graham has done seminars in the past about transfers and he offers five reasons why football transfers fail. Very high up that list is buying a player that isn’t an improvement on what you already have. He speaks about how clubs frequently fall into the trap of undervaluing what they have, while overvaluing the new thing. The ‘shiny toy’ syndrome. Boehly’s folly.
Although Graham has gone, that thinking will still be part of our programme. If there is a clear improvement on what we have we’ll act to try and get that done. But we won’t making signings for the sake of it, and we won’t spend £50m on a player who isn’t transformational.
There are clearly loads of DMs we could buy, but as they probably don’t represent much of an improvement on what we have, then we don’t bother.
Signing Endo last season was a little different, as the unexpected departures of Hendo and Fab left us in the slightly unusual position of just needing a body (after having failed to get the transformational elite signing, and the young player with promise).
We don’t need a body, as we have plenty of those, including a player in Bajcetic who I think has genuine elite potential. We’re back to looking for what we thought we had in Caicedo and Zubi - a player with immediate first team capacity who massively improves the team. And they are few and far between.
With Zubi, I’m not sure what went wrong there. I half think genuine change of heart and half think that we got played by his people - whatever we obviously got the come on from his reps, and then the story leaked from Spain. I don’t think there is much that we could have done.
I’m not shedding any tears over it - the lad would have probably spent years pinning for the Basque region before fucking off.
So I’m not worried - we have plenty of depth. But let’s talk again if Bajcetic gets sent on loan, cos that really would tip me over the edge.
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Compare to our peak. Everyone who can run better than Fabinho 2023.
Quansah replaced Matip
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