Then don't go crying about how we didn't target him when we lose him to City/Real/Barca next summer.
Quantity over quality again hey? Brilliant.He'd be too expensive with all the other business we need to do, we need about 10 new first team players
This would be my ideal scenario, actually reduces the fee for Sancho inadvertently as well. I'm not sure I see Zaha leaving the UK though, he seems a bit precious in that aspect.
He did sign up to play for Ivory Coast so maybe he's not so bothered by that after all. I think everybody has seen the recent success of young English lads going to Germany and doing well, he would thrive in a setup like Dortmund IMO.
Remind me, how many £100m players did City buy in order to finish on or close to 100 points two seasons in a row?
I guess Liverpool is playing the price for splashing massive money on VVD and Alisson after all...
He could have easily chosen to play for England too, that's my point. He's clearly not afraid to get outside of England (where he's lived all his life).
They had already filled the majority of the first XI with non-premium-priced quality like Salah, Mané, Wijnaldum, Robertson, Matip, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Keita had been signed but hadn't joined yet.
Agreed, from what I've heard he's extremely settled here. He basically lives around where he grew up.
Remind me, how well have we done with these these scouted players bought for circa £50mil? Fred, Matic, Alexis, Micky Targaryen would all fit your profile, and yet have been an unmitigated disaster.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for us to get Sancho, but not if our transfer budget is limited to the extent that signing him is going to impact our chances of strengthening the team to the extent that we need.
It is, and I'm not suggesting every one of our signings needs to be £100m. Sancho fits the profile of player we need perfectly, and there really aren't that many alternatives that are going to have the same impact as he.
Problem is though that if you get Sancho for £120m or something like that (remember, Dembele was sold for even more and he forced a move, I think £100m is a very conservative guess with regards to Sancho's price), then only £80m remains from your £200m budget. At that point, even if you want three players to come in, you're looking in the £40m bracket. Three players is nowhere near enough IMO. If we sign three players, we're going to play some well below-par players next year too, who will then be another year older. Assume we use £200m to sign Sancho, Wan-Bissaka (or another right back) and Bruno Fernandes, we'll still have one of dumb and dumber in defence, we'll still have Matic jogging around behind the midfielders, we'll still have Martial and Rashford up front, hoping that they finally kick on and (in Rashford's case) hope that the selfishness will magically disappear.
But the point is that they didn’t sign everyone for £100m because they wouldn’t have been able to buy that many players. The majority of signings were in the £50m bracket and then after the main project of building the squad was done they started plugging holes with players from the top bracket.
These budgets tend to be more arbitrary than that. If we had to spend an additional 5/10% on a player then that doesn't necessarily mean that money wouldn't be available elsewhere. As long as we get the players in we need, and the club see the signings as financially prudent, then we will stretch to accommodate Ole.
Of course, I realise that it’s not a hard £200m, but what I’m saying is that we need a big squad shake-up. We not only need a first team capable of playing one way, we need the reserves to be able to play the same way. We saw what happened when we played well with Rashford, Lingard and Martial up front, and then it was equally obvious what happened when they got injured and their replacements were Sanchez, Mata and Lukaku.
He has a higher upside.
By that point it would be too late. Real, Barca, City, PSG...may have already convinced him. This situation has the writing of another Mbappe story: You either get him when he's at Monaco, or look at him being snapped up by the powerhouses after we spent too much time "analysing".
Agreed with this sentiment. Fact of the matter is this team needs its guts ripped out and completely replaced and as rich as we are, we don't have enough money to spend to get 5-6 players worth 100mil each. Rather get 5 Very good players at 50mil each than 1-2 exceptional/high potential players. They should be the cherry on the top of the cake as Pogba should have been but wasnt due to terrible recruitment
If the right player costs 100 million then so be it. The same people who want to spread out the cash among 20 goodish players will be the ones complaining a year on about how we don't have that elite quality the top teams have. If you can sign that class for 40 million of course you do. But you don't forgo an absolutely top class talent for far lesser ones due to the latter being cheap.
I think people forget how much we've gone for those cheaper under the radar players and how often they've been duds. Our best buys have been the ones where we spend a good amount on young talent.
