You've really phrased this as a race to the bottom. The difference between them at this stage is there's hope De Ligt has better to come and Maguire does not, but at this moment in time, the difference between them is negligible and that's not a good thing, given how bad they have been and how poor our defensive unit is with them in it.
In an ideal world, you get rid of both and start again, but in our complete mess of a situation, we have to hope that De Ligt can become something better than he's shown and that Maguire can become a consistent 6/10 over a constantly erratic performer.
As someone who was underwhelmed with De Ligt when we were linked to him, I'm objectively looking at this through a more negative lens, trying not to have confirmation bias do its job of clouding my outlook, but at the same time, the decidely average to the downright abject has been seen in abundance over good performances and we have to hope for a massive turnaround for this guy to be a starter in a team that's going places that don't point toward the Championship. He certainly hasn't come in and made us better, that is for sure, and that should be the bear minimum expectation for any touted name on top class wages.
Hope is the thread. And I hope he turns it around, otherwise we've replaced one calamity with a version 2.0 with less distribution ability, which really would be quite something in our illustrious litany of errors.
