I'm not sure I'd call it terrible, he served a purpose for a season, but again it speaks to our Hodge podge squad planning of the last x seasons that leads us to repeat the process and constantly fill critical gaps in the same way. Casemiro, Varane and Eriksen are the key players I was thinking of in my comment. We should not be dependent on a player like Eriksen whose legs can't take him more than 60 minutes a week, as much as I like his technical ability when he is playing well.
Signing older marquee players isn't working, and if we want to play high intensity pressing football these signings aren't going to work out. I'm strongly of the opinion that we need to go younger, and stop signing these older players to long term contracts.
Younger Like Martial, Sancho, Antony, Mount, Onana and Hojlund??
I think the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Other than the length of contract there wasn’t much wrong with that Casemiro deal. And at his best he’s been streets ahead of what these younger signings have given us. Who have all frankly up until this point been a session of disastrous signings.
We’re not going to get anywhere near our money back for Sancho, Onana, Antony and Mount so I’m not sure there’s a lot of tangible difference between having that be the case with a 30 something year old or a 20 something year old. Look at Arsenal and Pepe or Liverpool with Keita. Both ended up just fecking off on frees. We gave Martial a new contract four years ago and it’s been an absolute mess.
I’m by no means saying the club should be constantly signing older players. But it’s exaggerated how much we’ve done it and this notion that sticking to only younger players and never signing anyone over 27 is the route to success is incorrect.
If you look at our older marquee signings I’d actually argue there’s been more success than fails and again they’ve been miles better than their younger counterparts.
A few of them have also been free transfers.
I just think we’re at a point as club where we can’t turn our noses up at these experienced signings, especially with the managers we’ve had who are horrific at identifying actual decent footballers.
If we fix it above and not allow incompetent managers freedom of signings than yeah maybe we can have a more strict transfer policy but up until this point thank feck players like Ronaldo, Zlatan, Cavani, Casemiro, Eriksen and Varane were brought in otherwise we’d have been relying on absolute dross.