How in your view that you think I'm changing the goal post?
I was making a point that despite of them being 4th place and 25 points behind, they reached final CL & their league goal scoring number showed some promising to be in the title challenger next following season. With the additional of both Mane & Trent massive improvement and spent 170m pounds on 4 players, they closed the gaps.
I don't know whether you are playing dumb on me here but I was actually expecting you to be smart enough to know the difference between Spurs & Liverpool situation.
Toby, Vertonghen, Rose are declining and they lost Trippier without replacing him. Liverpool wouldn't close that 25 points gaps if their defense is in decline & they lost Trent the next following season.
First of all VVD was already the best PL centre back at that time. Second, Salah was world class. Third, it wasn't just 1 signing that close the gaps but another 4 signings. Fourth, it wasn't just signings that close gaps but also the fact that both Mane & Trent made massive improvement to different level which make the losing Coutinho as a small loss.
I don't get what you are getting at. The fact that I said we can still challenge the league with the current squad sums up that I'm not ignoring the others like Bruno & Ighalo, that's pretty much tells you that we have the core to challenge the league but we don't have world class attackers to win us. Both Rashford & Martial have stepped up but they'll still need to go further like what Mane did last season and what Salah did in his first season.
The fact that Sancho doesn't want to join Liverpool because he knows won't start over Mane or Salah which should give you the point here.