Because we are an inexperienced squad with zero past glory as a collective. Can't help but be excited for the next big game.
Stop throwing your toys our of the pram RDBD everytime someone suggests something different to what you and Levy have been discussing People buy players and get on with it but you want to spend your time dissecting it all till you find a positive spin on it for Spurs. 60 Mill for them 4 players and yet you find a 'ahh yeah but' All 4 would improve our squad. Mendes or not ..fair play to them. In the meantime we value a bullshit arrangement with Mighty Madrid because it sounds good but you show me how we have gained anything from it? Like CK says we are too arrogant.
Note for the reader : Shows you my skill last summer to have remained unbanned for so long on the Harry Hots*** site, considering their cult of precious snowflakes are exactly like the above.
I would imagine having personal connections with players and their agents helps immeasurably. There are thousands of pro footballers out there and even the biggest clubs only have a finite number of scouts to watch a finite number of players across a relatively limited period of time (teams will rarely scout a target for more than 2 seasons). Looking at Wolves again: Nuno managed both Neves and Boly at Porto and so had the personal connection to bring them with him. But it runs far deeper than that: Boly only played 4 or 5 times in his Porto career and was widely regarded as a c-list journeyman. Yet Nuno had the insight that his strength and physicality would enable him to take to the PL like a duck to water, which he has done, and is now one of their most consistent performers. Like you, HBIC is taking one factor and using it to sweep everything under the carpet of convenience. Yes, the Mendes connections must help too, but there's players being prodded by their cash hungry agent to get to the PL land of milk and money, and then there are players who the buying club successfully calculates will amount to more than a GKN or NJie. Wolves initiated an overhaul of their backroom staff back in 2017 in preparation of a hoped-for promotion, appointing a new scouting team and new sports analysts. And it has worked. It wasn't pot luck like you say, it wasn't due to a lone agent like HBIC says, it is the by product of a long term strategy and careful planning which is now reaping dividends and will continue to do so as all of these players have years left in the game and will either spend them at Molineux or will bring in a 500% profit if sold. I am firmly with @Spurlock on this: our scouting team has gone to pot over the past 3 seasons and needs replacing. We've gone from signing Dier, Dele, Toby et al. to signing PSG rejects to signing no one.
And Mendes blurs that line horribly. The Chinese company that own the club also own a stake in Mendes' agency, which represents a lot of their squad and their manager. Neves, Jota, Patricio, Costa, Moutinho, Cavaleiro and Nuno Espirito Santo are a massive part of their success. Add in his connections outside his own clients and it's impossible to ignore that he's an enormous influence, at least.
The point is that it was a lot easier three or four years ago. What we are trying to do now is sign players that are better than Dele, Dier etc not just improving a much more mediocre squad. And lets see which of those Wolves players puts together 4 good seasons. My betting is none of them.
Your explanation certainly fits. Trying to sign players better than Dier and Dele only works if you've got £50m+ per player. And since we don't, we've decided not to sign anyone at all. It's as if we've suffered a collective amnesia and forgotten that Dier and Dele weren't England internationals the day we signed them, Kane wasn't a 30 goal a season striker the day we handed him his debut, Son wasn't the best Asian footballer in the world when we picked him up, and Danny Rose couldn't score on the volley from 40 yards out in nort...oh, wait. No you've got me on that one. If you haven't got a bottomless pot, you need to sign 'em young and trust the best coach in your PL history to develop and nurture them into prodigious talents. This is what continues to piss me off about Aurier and Moura. We thought we'd get all clever by signing the finished article for £5m more than we'd normally spend. And if we were West Ham, we would have indeed be looking at the finished article. But we're not. We're of the level where a fortune is needed to bring that in. Dave cost £42m and he is years away from Toby or Jan still. Van Dijk was the finished article. That's what you need to spend at this level and since we can't afford to spend that and won't be able to for the foreseeable future, the fact that we've abandoned the first model of buying young and developing smacks of naive arrogance.
Wolves have the big Chinese backing now and with their scouting prowess could well be top 4 contenders over the next few seasons so all of us need to up our game.
The thing about Dele and Dier was that they were worth their place when they were signed because they were already better than what we had. Because they played a lot they gained confidence and fullfilled their potential. We've already got Skipp, Walker-Peters and Foyth trying to do the same thing. There are definitely some players in the squad that we could have sold and replaced with untested youngsters. Aurier, Wanyama, Lamela and Trippier have all underperformed this season but it still isn't easy to find players who are definitely better. Also i think we can now spend around £200m without falling foul of ffp so keeping our powder dry might work. On the last few years performances we are the 2nd best team in England and probably in the top 5 in Europe. Look at the clubs we are trying to catch like Man City, Real Madrid, Barcelona and ask yourself if those Wolves players are as good as their players. If not they won't really help even if they are marginally better than ours. I take your point about Poch being great at development but i think that is partly due to stability.
What I will concede having given it some thought is that over the past few seasons the only top 6 side to truly unearth a promising talent has been City and Zinchenko, and he was technically signed in 16/17. Pool have promoted some excellent youngsters as have the rest of the top 6 but to a lesser extent. Aside from him no one else comes to mind as an 'out of nowhere' name who looks right at home in the PL in the same way that Dele and Dier did for us. Maybe that Guendouzi lad at Arsenal is another but the jury is still out about him. So the evidence does seem to favour your argument that it is much harder than it seems to strike gold in the market without forking out loads of said gold.
The obvious factor in recent seasons is, thanks to increased TV money, it's harder to get a bargain in the lower leagues. Case in point Bournemouth paid Sheffield United £11.5m for David Brooks last summer, whereas a few years ago we paid the same club £9m for Kyles Walker & Naughton, while a few years earlier £8m was enough for Forest to sell us Andy Reid & Michael Dawson - whereas now £9m likely wouldn't be enough to sign some Championship prospects we've been linked with, such as Daniel James at Swansea There is value out there, for example the various South American leagues offer plenty of potential gems for cheap fees such as the £8m we paid for Foyth or the £3m Celta Vigo paid for Maxi Gomez, and there's some real value in the Danish league such as Celta paying £4m for Stanislav Lobotka and £3m for Mathias Jensen, or Werder Bremen paying £2m for Thomas Delaney - and it's surely no coincidence we've been linked with players from the Danish league such as Robert Skov and (prior to his joining Celta, because of course...) Mathias Jensen
Shouldn't we be focusing on tapping-up Ziyech first? He's reportedly available for a surprisingly affordable £30m, didn't you know?
I reckon alot of problems could have been solved with this signing Hope Villa don't win the play offs
Same, really would love it if we can get him in the summer, he’s gone up yet another level from when I became a fan of him last season. Him and Sissoko 2.0 would’ve smashed it this season.
Benfica Watch As the links appear to have us slowly working our way around their first team, today's Benfica player we're linked with is central midfielder Gedson Fernandes, with a bid of £38.5m rumoured to have been tabled...and while I assume you may have guessed, it's probably worth saying that he's a player very much in the Dembele/Sissoko mold who'll receive the ball and bulldoze his way forward with the ball at his feet, although he's also capable of playing a killer ball after bulldozing forward which is something that neither Dembele nor Sissoko could reliably do ...and, yes, he does also come across like a cheaper alternative to Ndombele Sessegnon Watch I'll just leave this here...
Rumour Roundup Since my "non-drowsy" hayfever stuff I took yesterday has me feeling as sluggish as Southern's service on a bank holiday weekend today, I'll just bang out a list of who's linking us to who The Torygraph Andre Gomes (Barcelona, 25yo, centre midfield and perpetually linked with us) Youcef Atal (Nice, 22yo, right back) + one other FootballDotLondon David Brooks (Bournemouth, 21yo, right wing and we should've bloody signed him last summer for a fraction of what he'd cost now) Diogo Jota (Wolves, 22yo, left wing) Jack Grealish (Aston Villa, 23yo, centre midfield) Matthias Ginter (A German Team, 25yo, centre back who on average gets linked with us twice a season) Steven Bergwijn (PSV, 21yo, left wing) CalcioMercato Hakim Ziyech (Ajax, 26yo, right wing) Nicolo Zaniolo (Roma, 19yo, attacking midfielder) CM Journal Gedson Fernandes (Benfica, 20yo, central midfielder) Exodus Watch Shayon Harrison has reportedly been told to look for a new club at the end of the season. Luckily we loaned him to an A-League team, making it so much easier for him to contact League One clubs about a potential move...
