As we don't know the actual figures (it's all paper guesswork in the main) I spent 5 mins on transfermarkt (which is as equally unreliable as most sources) as a guide. In the last 3 years: Bournemouth spend £95m - breaking our transfer record 4 times Brighton spend £122m Watford spend £40m - breaking our record just once. You did indeed name just two of their signings, Isaac Success £14m. Ouch. He looks gash. Newcastle £19m profit They aren't on the "same kind of budget" as us. That's utter nonsense. Many of the players Rafa has spent money on were never bought as improvements, they were bought as bodies in through the door to account for players being sold off. The other clubs you are comparing us with have actual money their managers are allowed to use to fix weaknesses in the team.
Yes but you can't just focus on the worst players we've signed and then compare them with the best bargains everyone else has got. Watford (who overall have done excellent business, for beyond the other clubs mentioned) also spunked money on players like Success (13.5m), Crystal Palace are hugely hit and miss, etc. Murphy stands out as a horrible purchase for us, others people comment on (Manquillo, Atsu, Hayden, etc.) have done exactly the job i would have expected of them given what they cost. Rafa had a lot of tidying up to do of wages following McLaren signings bonanza. It isn't just about the transfer fee, we weren't going to be able to compete for a player like Hughes without offering him more money than we were willing to.
We arnt divided we have s few cancerous cells su What were their wages , signing on fees and agent fees , not being a dick I'm just interested
No, I'm not but it seems you don't want to deal in facts. please log in to view this image Last 3 windows net spends. Watford £31M more than us. Brighton £110M more than us Bournemouth £63M more than us. Also Watford and Bournemouth have been in the PL this stretch longer than us. Also we aren't even bringing into account wages which influence whether a player will sign or not. I don't know but would speculate that our "average" wage is lower than those Clubs as well plus we have the "not in the south/London area" effect. I'm not saying Rafa hasn't in my opinion made some mistakes as I think he has. But then again ALL managers do. I will judge him when he has been given a level playing field. Only one person who is to blame for what is happening at NUFC and that is Ashley. Criticising others just distracts from Ashley. Joselu ain't great but he tries his best and for that reason I won't slag him off. I don't want him in my team but I respect that he tries his best. I'll moan when he misses an empty net but I won't ultimately blame him, I'll blame Ashley.
Rafa signings (INCLUDING LOANS) since he took over. AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW 2016-2017 Dwight Gayle £11m - hit in the championship. Brilliant for the money, would have finished top scorer but for injury. GOOD BUY Matt Ritchie £11m - hit in the championship. Has been an undoubtedly good signing. GOOD BUY Matz Sels £6m - flop, lost a whole 2m by selling him on, not including loan fees. Grant Hanley £4m - Unbelievable flop? Or useful reserve CB for the championship? lost about a mill or two on him. Ciaran Clark £5m - hit in the championship. OK premiership player. Fit for purpose. GOOD BUY DeAndre Yedlin £5m - hit in the championship. OK premiership player. GOOD BUY Mohamed Diame £5m - hit in the championship. OK premiership player, most tackles this season of any player. GOOD BUY Daryl Murphy £3m - hit in the championship. Fit for purpose. sold for 2m. GOOD BUY. Isaac Hayden 3m - Total flop? really? At 3 ****ing million? Played his part in championship and first winning run in prem when we were promoted. Will sell for same price at least....GOOD BUY Achraf Lazaar 3m - Unbelievable flop - no argument there Jesus Gamez free - Unbelievable flop? He's on a free coming purely as a reserve RB. Its handy to have them, as we have seen at LB this season, but doesn't guarantee they're going to change our lives, quite the opposite. No flop. This was a championship season so not to bad in terms of signings in all honesty. Most not good enough to cut it in the premiership. Signings rating 8/10 - net spend, net spend, net spend. Yadda yadda we wanted promotion and got it. 2017-2018 Jacob Murphy £11m - Unbelievable flop, but no worse than Bournemouth buying Jordon Ibe for 15m. Flop right enough though. Florian Lejune £9m - awesome prem player. GOOD BUY Christian Atsu £6M. useful in champ and single-handedly got us 6 points last season just by playing Zabaleta. A flop if you want. Joselu £5m - Unbelievable flop...at 5m, at the end of the window after missing out on about 5 other targets. Yes flop. Javier Manquillo £5m - Unbelievable flop - WTF RAFA. No argument there. Kenedy, Dub- great bit of business, saved our season at a point when the owner would spend no money. GOOD LOANS Merino- GOOD BUY. Our first season in the premiership under Rafa. This transfer window was a disaster, due to Charnley's ineptitude, yet we finished 10th despite most expecting relegation. Can't even be arsed to give this a rating, we survived. 2018-2019 Yoshinori Muto £10m - he's been injured, now at the Asia cup and has played about 5 games. Yeh, flop if you like but we'll see at the end of the season. Mikel Merino £4m - sold on at a profit, due to a clause agreed by Charnley, not Rafa Federico Fernandez - £6m - good player, GOOD BUY Martin Dubravka - £4m - THE ONLY CLASS SIGNING RAFA HAS MADE TO DATE Fabian Shar - £4m - GOOD premiership player. GOOD BUY Sung-yong KI free - OK premiership player but came from a relegated club. What's it matter who he came from? for free too....GOOD BUY Rondon (loan)- moves as fast as someone playing bowls, but somehow scores goals. GOOD LOAN. Signings rating. 5 good players, one we haven't seen enough of yet, ZERO support from a useless MD and an owner who's taking money out the kitty (whatever/10) SUMMARY Note that any good/ok signings are defensive players, because we haven't been allowed to buy that many attacking players, imagine if we had Plea. Overall if I was Ashley I would be looking at this and saying "Christ, I really have destroyed this team whilst making profits on transfers over the last 3 years, how the **** are we in the prem". P.S This took me little doing so feel free to hit the like button on geordieginola's post.
Just to confirm, are these players that we negotiated to buy and Rafa blocked signing as he saw more value elsewhere? If not, I'd argue that the criticism for not purchasing these players lands at the feet of our scouting and then Charnley etc
Some of them will be more than Murphy for sure - particularly now. Not the agent fees as we have already had factual information that actually we are good payers of agents fees. Gross's wage was the same as Murphy's 25K. Lookman's salary now is about 23K - not sure when he signed? Calvert Lewin got about 2.5K when he signed. Meyer was an expensive one because he was free - rumoured to be 170K. Bernard would be the same, free so I think 150K was rumoured. I think Deufoleu would be in the 40k-50K range. Mooy was about 50k. Redmond about 40K. Brooks about 25k-30K. Wages and fees are not as wild as everyone thinks. Its just some clubs do deals that are financially mental. The above is proof we can and should do better with recruitment. Personally I think Rafa badly needs a recruitment expert to take it out of his hands. Most of the managers have this now. I mean we could blame Mike for not putting that in place, but it wouldn't actually be fair as we know Rafa wanted to control this.
Rafa wanted Murphy. Rafa got Murphy. By this logic I take it that Charnley takes all the credit for Lejeune and any other successes? Like all signings he gives a list and we try to get them (well that is the logic - its more like he gives the list and we see who is at the bottom). Murphy is the player Rafa thought represented the best value of his type for 12m. That is the deal. This is where the problem lies for me. Its Rafa can do no wrong syndrome. If its a great signing, its normally down to Rafa. If its a bad signing its due to the money available, Charnley or some other mythical reason. They are Rafa signings end of story. This is who Rafa thought was a good idea to spend the money on. He makes the final call on all transfers, Charley and Rafa have confirmed this.
I admire your positive approach to this. It shows we can all have different views. I did indicate that Loans where not included. I am basically trying to judge Rafa on HIS signings even with the tight shoe strings. I also didn't want to include the future sale of the players. The purpose of my post was to look at his signings and grade them accordingly. My honest opinion is that even with the shoestring budget Rafa's performance on the signings front has been poor.
Yeah, they made a good profit in one of the windows, if not for that it would have been a chunk more in the red.
Its not like we are picking just one or two. I've picked out a few but there will be many more. I mean we could look right across Europe. What then? The English tax would be brought up. There is always an excuse, but you know the likes of Watford don't make excuses, they go and find the Pereya, Ricarlison, Hughes etc. It just seems to me the Rafa fan boys have a hard time accepting his transfer business, regardless of how much he had to spend, is average at best. Defenders he has done a good job with - unsurprising as this is where his coaching strength lies. Midfielders and attackers the bloke has been useless. I'm not against Rafa to be clear, I think he is the best man for the job we have on our hands. We should be grateful we have him in my opinion. However if we had the money behind us, I'd probably want him changed the first chance we got or the transfer power removed for him at the very least.
I appreciate what you're saying but I have a different view there. If we assume that all the players that we sign are on Rafa's list then you need to know where they rank on that list. If Lejeune was the top ranked defender for Rafa and we sign him, then credit goes to both the manager and Charnley etc. If Murphy was top midfielder for Rafa then the same logic applies, albeit towards the opposite end. What I was trying to say is that it's hard to compare our purchases to other clubs unless we know that those are players on Rafa's list but that we couldn't negotiate for. Or alternatively if we did have a bid accepted for say Gross but Rafa turned it down to purchase Murphy . I think sometimes we view these as too black and white - Rafa can certainly do wrong and I think we all have examples here, some on signings some on tactics. However, on balance, I'd argue that the positives outweigh the negatives and he's our best chance of surivial.
Meanwhile at Wolves http://www.nufcblog.co.uk/2019/01/0...-agreed-with-120000-per-week-contract-report/
If they are on Rafa's list they are his signings. If Gross, Ricarlison, Hughes, Pereya weren't on Rafa's list, then Rafa has his scouting set up wrong (and he did set it up when he arrived). Ultimately Rafa is responsible for all signings. What his preferred priorities are is irrelevant really bar that it shows he is not getting the best of the best. If his lower options aren't as good as those other clubs are signing for similar amounts, then he isn't dong a very good job with transfers. In my opinion we are over complicating things. Its quite simple really. Forget about lists etc. What has he paid for players. How does that compare with what others managed to secure for similar finances. That is how you judge a manager on signings to me. Its different if you are comparing to who a Liverpool or Man C have bought for similar fees, or if you saying West Ham signed Arnautovic (25m) and Felipe Anderson (25m). Clearly that isn't fair because they've either cost a packet or went to a big club. As I say I believe Rafa is the perfect fit for this situation. He gets a lot out of what we have available. I'm simply saying he is pretty poor in the transfer market (always has been wherever he has been), and we'd have better options available if someone else was picking the players. Put it this way, Graham Carr was a far better judge of a footballer.
Except would some of these players be on Rafa's list if he wasn't in Ashley World? If you are told you can only buy from Poundland and have to bring back change from a packet of KP's (peanuts) then blame the person setting the parametres of your search not the person searching. Another unknown factor is the effect, if any, Ashley has on players who we are bidding for in regard to the image of the Club. If you're ambitious and want to win things then we aren't a great choice under Ashley no matter who the manager is.
You could easily lose the will to live with this, I don't understand why people just can't get their head around this. It doesn't matter who is on the ****ing list! . You work within the confines of your budget. Simpler terms to assist: Chris Hughton paid £3m and 25K in wages for Pascal Gross. Rafa Benitez paid 12.5m and 25K in wages for Jacob Murphy Chris Hughton did a much better job with the money afforded to him. Nobody (at least I hope not) is suggesting Rafa has a great budget to work with. Its utter ****e. He could undoubtedly do better with more money. People are simply saying that other managers who have tight budgets have managed to spend their money much better. I would add this only applies to midfield and attack for me. His defensive signings have been good and great value for money.
