First of all, exception doesn’t prove the rule, so when you bring up Salah I can give you Lukaku coming from Inter, Higuain, etc and a ton more if we're talking about other than the Italian league. Second, you’re comparing Lukaku, Maguire vs Kane, not in terms of type of player, but the quality of player and also the state of the team they were/will be coming into? Third, I’m all for signing your 50-60m player who you can give time to bed in, but not a 120m+ player who we want to be the spine and the lynchpin of the team from get go as we have no one in his position.
Hey, I’m all for players like Kvara, who I don’t think will have the same pressure to perform right away given the cover we have in the wings.
I didn’t say Salah was a proof that Serie A was a good league to recruit from, just as I don’t believ that Maguire, AWB, Sanchez… are a proof that the PL is a bad place to buy players from… Higuain was washed when he joined Chelsea… Mid-table Milan wanted rid of him… Chelsea signed Torres when he was among the very best of the PL and made him look like a complete donkey… it‘s not about the league, it’s about what player you get and how you use them.
Every player should be judged on their individual quality and how they play football at the high level. The main difference between Serie A and the PL is considered to be the intensity. But there are still enough games with high intensity in Serie A that should be more than good enough to judge how a player perform in these high intensity games, even without having seen him in the CL. We are not talking about the Qatari league…
Salah is a good exemple of scouting working well and identifying a player who matches what the manager is doing with his team Perfectly. Lukaku to Chelsea (or Zlatan to Barcelona, to lesser extent he is still a great player and he helped them) is a good example of the recruitment being wrong in identifying what profile works for the team…. But it has nothing to do with Serie A, he is failing now under Inzaghi even more than he failed under Tuchel. And he performed for Martinez’s Everton just as well as he did for Conte’s Inter…. It about the player and the system, more than about the league…
If Osimhen matches what ETH wants to do then he would be a great signing for us. Every time we‘ve seen him against PL opposition in the european competitions he looked more than up to it…