I was going to reply to you the other day about your Football Manager thinking. As already mentioned - recruitment is not Ralph’s job and is not the primary role of any modern manager. Indeed Tuchel was given an enhanced role in the chelsea recruitment in the summer and complained about how it took away time from all the other aspects
Similarly it simply wasn’t the case that there was a super strict finite budget and that spending 10m on Mara meant that was 10m gone from the budget for a top attacker. This part isn’t even true any more on the FM games as you can approach the board to bend the budget for important signings
And finally transfers move much more slowly in real life (especially permanent ones) and so when targets fall through late you can’t always just move onto the next one down the list and get it over the line.
Sure Ralph has a final agreement but I’m not sure what you want from him. When presented with Adam Armstrong or nobody last summer due to lack of funds and presumed positive reports from scouts does he say no? When told we can’t afford Guehi so we spend 1/3 on Lyanco does he simply say “no - I’ll go in one central defender short”
It was also obvious to me that we had the funds to make deals earlier than we normally would of in positions we wouldn’t normally have prioritised. We could have kept Romeu another year and hoped Lavia would have been available next year. We could have kept bednarek and/or Stephens and not signed ABK and DCC. But we’d probably be in an even worse place now (no guarantees though). Again this comes back to your seeming insistence that is was one or the other. A completely fixed budget. There was obviously a limit but not what you think it was
Finally on the Broja thing - there is someone on Saintsweb who seems somewhat in the know who said we went in for him and Chelsea messed us around and Tuchel pulled the plug. He also said we had a medical lined up for Vale and they pulled the plug on that as well. And that all the rumours about Broja hating Ralph and not wanting to come back were nonsense (almost certainly cooked up by those who were firmly against Ralph due to the poor end of season form). That is all rumour though but I’m not sure why he would bother with making it up.
So you are criticising Ralph for things that he really doesn’t have the level of control over as you think he does. Which is harsh
Don’t get me wrong - I think this has gone on too long now. Our play is far too negative, players who used to be able to attack can’t or won’t anymore and Ralph has abandoned his pressing style.
(Incidentally if the intention is to lean on a simulation computer game - I tried to sign a back up for Lavia who would be the 4th “defensive” midfielder. Told them they would be backup and they were moaning about game time by November. I made the error of not trying hard enough to find one that could cover elsewhere - but that isn’t always that common. So perhaps that hole in the squad is going to be harder to fill!)
