twosips wrote:Nick wrote:Agree with all the above, only things I'll add are:
1) Most importantly, why the fcuk do all the clubs go after the same players? Pretty sure theres more world class quality than Pogba and Reus. Yes they are class but every c*** and his dog want them. I don't remember Chelsea and Madrid trailling Silva, Yaya or Aguero at the time. I can scout Pogba and Reus, we need the next best thing. Mangala seems like that kind of level yet hes already over hyped, wanted by everyone and we paid STAR QUALITY price.
2) We all agree we would be shit hot if we signed the players we missed; mainly Isco, SANCHEZ (don't forget) and Hazard. But aren't all of those 3 players adding to our existing problem/moan that silva, nasri, yaya don't do the running? I don't think either of Isco, Sanchez or Hazard are partners for Dinho in the middle.....
It's easy to say that, but who are they? The problem is that all potentially good players are known by all clubs. You just don't find gems that others don't know about anymore.
I'm not sure but we're not full time on scouting. I don't think zaba or Vinnie were ''huge known quantities''. Vinnie was a football manager type name who clubs had looked at (Like Christian Zapata) but nobody made a move for him. I was pleasantly surprised when we signed him. I'd not heard of Zaba.
Now if we were to find the next zaba now, I'm sure we would be paying 15,20m+ but the difference is we wouldn't have Madrid, Chelsea etc all pushing the price up and us losing out on the player (as with Sanchez, Isco, Hazard, Tiago Silva etc. for various reasons)
An example is Coutinho. Or any of the left backs Chelsea have bought. They get quality left backs for cheap whereas we pay 12m+ for Kolorov who is pants compared to Chelsea's pair.
I don't want much European football anymore but these forums are full of suggestions of names we could go for.
Koke sounds like he could fill a whole and I've not heard rumours that all the other big teams are buying him.
I think if FFP wasn't an issue we would have paid £30m plus for Barkley. This looked like good business at the time and blues everywhere were crying out for us to pay the price; but hes been crap this season.....
It seems like we wait for other clubs to take a risk on a player and then try and sign them 1-2 years later for an extra 10-20m.