The one good thing George Graham did was take a look at our midfield and ask "Where's anyone who can tackle?" which led to us signing Steffen Freund In other words, neither Gerry Francis nor Christian Gross noticed this obvious gap in our midfield...
All I can remember is him trying to reassemble Wimbledon FC's defensive roster of a few seasons previously...and they were all ****.
Yet somehow still not the worst player we signed from Wimbledon in that period That would be this piece of ****e
Neil Sullivan was quite mediocre, but that's several steps up from Ian Walker, so I have mixed feelings about that signing.
I've got no idea who these players are . Don't remember watching them play and have no clue if they were effective at any point for you. I'm guessing they're not fan favourites?
They were from around 20 years ago and they weren't great. Not fan favourites, by any means, but not that unpopular, either. Alan Sugar had some weird ideas about transfers, so we ended up with Teddy Sheringham and Jurgen Klinsmann playing with some real ****e. The first XI tended to be pretty decent, but the quality after that was awful and we'd get plenty of injuries, for some reason.
Here's the top ten record signings of clubs: Tottenham: Ndombele, Sanchez, Sissoko, Lo Celso, Bergwijn, Soldado, Reguilon, Lamela, Son and Moura. Man Utd: Pogba, Maguire, Lukaku, di Maria, Martial, Fred, Fernandes, wan Bissaka, Ferdinand and Mata. Man City: de Bruyne, Dias, Mahrez, Cancelo, Laporte, Sterling, Rodri, Mendy, Stones and Walker. Liverpool: van Dijk, Alisson, Keita, Benteke, Fabinho, Jota, Salah, Mane, Firmino and Carroll. Chelsea: Havertz, Kepa, Morata, Pulisic, Torres, Jorginho, Werner, Chilwell, Kovacic and Shevchenko. Arsenal: Pepe, Aubameyang, Lacazette, Partey, Ozil, Xhaka, Sanchez, Mustafi, Mkhitaryan and Saliba. Leicester: Tielemans, Fofana, Perez, Slimani, Iheanacho, Silva, Maddison, Castagne, Pereira and Soyuncu. I would say of those lists, only Chelsea have had a worse record than us when it comes to spending big on record signings. City, Liverpool and Leicester have had significantly better value from theirs, Utd have had slightly better, Arsenal probably on a par. We really do struggle when buying players who we think will be instant game changers.
"You say tomato. I say a complete ****ing waste of £5.4m, You say potato, I say short arsed, non-entity, Let's call the whole thing off"
That partly reflects our purchasing power. The more you pay the more you would expect the player to make a difference because the higher the player should be in talent. You get a pretty ordinary player for 30m now. If you look at the higher brackets, players between 40 and 60m are less than a 50:50 of improving a top 6 team on average. Above 60m you have a reasonable chance of success unless you are Chelsea.
Everything is comparative though. Record signings are signed to instantly improve a team and are seen as essential to achieve certain targets. Whether you can spend £60m, £40m or £20m on a record signing, the expectations from each club will be that this particular person will become a key player. Many of our big money signings haven't proven so.
City's top 50 are probably more expensive then most of our top 10, though! Their wage bill over £100m and 75% higher than ours. We're about as comparable with Palace as we are with them right now, financially speaking. Otamendi is their 15th most expensive player at £40m-ish. He'd be our 2nd.
We don't have the same ambitions as City though. Record signings are all comparative, City's record signings would be expected to secure them the title and be amongst the best players in the league/ world, ours would be to help secure top four and be a level or two below those of City and so on and so on the further you go down in terms of club's stature and finances. Leicester theoretically shouldn't be signing better players than us yet they are. That for me certainly highlights how poor our big money signings have been.
And as we have documented elsewhere Leicester have bought players that we have scouted and rejected and in almost every case they have been a success and better than the players we bought instead.
Leicester have done particularly well. That doesn't mean that we've done particularly badly. A number of their most expensive players have flopped badly, too. Here's their top 25: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/leicester-city/transferrekorde/verein/1003 Slimani, Silva, Musa, Iborra, Benkovic, Ghezzal, Ward, Kramaric, Inler and Benalouane all failed badly. Iheanacho and Perez haven't proven good value. They've had some massive successes, but generally not with big signings.
Similar can be said of ours though if we're going into the top 25. Sessegnon, Aurier, Bent, Bentley, Janssen, Paulinho, Rebrov, Keane (second time) and Doherty have all failed/ are failing.
Sessegnon's 20, but I'll give you the rest. How does that show that Leicester have done better with big signings? More of theirs have flopped. I'll even ignore that one of our failures went to Barca! Clubs signing players outside of the top bracket are going to be taking chances a lot of the time. They'll either be generally more risky, younger and/or unproven and without Premier League experience. Chelsea spent massive money on proven players and they've still gone badly wrong with quite a few.
The point I've been trying to makes is that by quite a lot of luck in signings a few years back we've already got a squad where most of the players were worth over £30m at their peak. So spending £30m on a player isn't really expected to improve us. If you look at our signings from that point of view, then most have done OK.
He's still done nothing for Spurs so far and until he does he can't be considered a success. Paulinho didn't go directly to Barca. What a player does outside of Spurs is also irrelevant. Because their top ten which is what I was comparing at the time are better than ours in terms of value for money, you then moved goalposts to top 25 where it becomes more even. The top ten of most teams are also primarily from recent years too, generally in the last 4-5 and Leicester, City and Pool especially have done so much better than us.
