Other managers and clubs seem to do it ok. Pretty sure Mourinho, Wenger, Pellegrini and Rodgers all identify the exact player they want to add to their squad.
And they all have worse transfer records than we do as far as I can see, with the possible exception of Wenger. Rodgers clearly has - he spent more than us and finished below us. The list of dud signings by Pellegrini and Mourinho is horrendous, they simply have so much money to burn that they get away with it.
Yes. A guy called Emmanuel Adebayor. He's been training with the youth team for a while now but is apparently ready for the step up to the big time.
Well from what Wenger said about Welbeck, that he wouldn't have signed him if he was in the country on deadline day, that may not be the case. Add in Rodgers denial of interest in Balotelli, Mourinho's lack of enthuasiasm towards Cuadrado and the structure at City with Txiki Whatshisface, perhaps it's not as clearcut as you say. Who knows what goes on inside these clubs? Tottenham just seem to be the ones portrayed as having some counterproductive structure in the media. When City do badly it's mentioned with them too but the others tend to get off scott-free for the most part. That's why I think we have this reputation despite possibly not being very different to other clubs.
I think it's down to the quality of scouting networks. It's well documented that ours has left a lot to be desired over recent years. With the new editions in that department, coupled with stability in management, we should hopefully see some improvement over the next few windows.
With clubs looking all across Europe (and even the world) for players these days, it's essential to have good scouts. If a potentially top class player is at Rubin Kazan, how is a PL manager going to get the chance to watch him? He's going to rely heavily on scouting reports and video footage. I have a friend who is a City fan, who as a teenager in the late '80s/early '90s went to watch Oldham on a regular basis just to collect autographs. There would be anything up to a dozen top flight managers at their midweek games watching players like Denis Irwin, Earl Barrett, Mike Milligan, Rick Holden and Andy Ritchie, as Oldham topped the old Second Division, got promoted and had some Cup runs. This is where clubs looked to find emerging talent and it was usually the manager or the chief scout who spent an evening running the rule over a player in a match for themselves. This just doesn't seem to happen now, except on rare occasions. Managers don't have time, clubs at that level now want crazy money (not like the £900,000 Utd paid for Irwin) and there is a perception that some gem can be picked up relatively cheaply abroad if clubs are shrewd with their scouting system. Again, it comes back to stability and continuity. If effort is made to set up a network the manager is happy with - because he trusts the judgement of the scouts recruited - then it needs to be persevered with. When a new manager comes in, he may not have the same relationship with those scouts. It's inevitable there will be some changes again and the networks, information and contacts built up by the outgoing scouts are lost and will probably be picked up by another club elsewhere. Once a good system is in place and working, it can be very beneficial. Utd had a stream of Norweigan players being identified at one time. Going back to the '60s, Burnley had strong ties in the North East which led to many players from that area going to Burnley rather than the big clubs in the region.
With few exceptions football managers seem to be egotistical maniacs who can only function with a whole group of staff and players who they have personally picked by hand. I don't think you would get the job as Operations Director for BA if you insisted on replacing half the work force and most of the planes as your first act. If I was Levy that attitude would drive me bonkers - I'd want to hire the guy who told me he could get 10% more out of the current squad with one or two tweaks. I suspect that is what AVB and Pochettino both told him.
The problem there is that Levy keeps selecting managers with wildly different philosophies. He goes from the gung-ho and cavalier to the efficient and functional, then back again.
When asked who should make the ultimate decisions, the 42-year-old laughed: “I think it should be me, no? “Always the manager and the coaching staff need to deal with the player, in the changing room or on the pitch. please log in to view this image “And if the feeling is not good between us it is difficult to achieve something. “It is very important that the players who stay here and the players who maybe we bring in that I agree and it is my decision. “Because if not, if you bring in some players here and I don’t know these players, maybe it is not that they are bad players but it is important the feeling the player has with the coaching staff or the manager.”
Rodgers, I'd agree. In fact I'm surprised he's still got his job. Pellegrini seems to be doing ok with his 'dud signings' and Mourinho has had more successes than failures. Last season he became the only manager to ever win the Premiership on a negative net spend. I know there we're other factors in that, but still some achievement. Plus Pedro looks a fantastic signing for a relatively small spend in today's crazy market!
I found this list on the Telegraph web-site for Mourinho's signings in his first stint at Chelsea. Given player inflation since then I reckon you can about double the prices to get their value today. I'd say the bold ones were very good signings and these are a mixture of cheap signings of established players at the end of their contract and marquee signings, none of which we could afford. There are a lot of lemons elsewhere. Juliano Belletti Barcelona £3.7m Florent Malouda Lyon £13.5m Tal Ben Haim Bolton Free Claudio Pizarro Bayern Munich Free Steve Sidwell Reading Free Ashley Cole Arsenal £5m Khalid Boulahrouz Hamburg £7m John Mikel Obi Lyn £16m Ben Sahar Hapoel Tev Aviv £320,000 Andrei Shevchenko AC Milan £30.8m Salomon Kalou Feyenoord £8m Michael Ballack Bayern Munich Free Michael Essien Lyon £24.4m Shaun Wright-Phillips Manchester City £21m Lassana Diarra Le Havre £1m Scott Sinclair Bristol Rovers £160,000 Asier Del Horno Athletic Bilbao £8m Jiri Jarosik CSKA Moscow £4.83m Ricardo Carvalho Porto £19.85m Didier Drogba Marseille £24m Tiago Benfica £8m Mateja Kezman PSV Eindhoven £5m Paulo Ferreira Porto £13.2m Arjen Robben PSV Eindhoven £12m
Are you confident Jose wanted to sign all these players? from what I remember he had an issue with Shevchenko and by listing all these players, no one here has any idea on the exact number of players that were his first choice, or the number of players that were handed to him to work with. http://www.goal.com/en/news/8/main/2008/08/27/836225/mourinho-i-never-wanted-sheva
Ashley Cole didn't cost £5m. He was £5m plus William Gallas, who was rated at about £20m at the time. Still a very good deal, but not nearly as good as that would suggest.
No idea. I was responding to a post giving Mourinho as an example of a manager who did all his own transfers which implied that was a better system than ours. the real message from that list is that Chelsea have pissed more money up the wall than we have.
It relates to a point that others have made in the past, that Mourhino is a great manager, when he's given unlimited funds with which to buy his team. I bet he's a demon player on Football Manager! He's not looking so hot when he has limited funds (or limited opportunity to spend such funds as he does have), and has to work with the team he's got. He'd better watch out that he doesn't slate too many of his players, because they're all he's got, at the moment!
