Obviously. But we didn’t have them last summer, so them leaving doesn’t actually make us weaker than we were then, does it?
It’s like if you have a mate that lends you a hat, and after a few days you give it back. You had zero hats before you borrowed the hat, and you’ve gone back to having zero hats. Not minus-one hats.
It does when they’re largely the reason why we were so successful this season.
We aren’t just replacing loanees, we are replacing premier league quality players in 3 cases.
Our form has been worse since we signed all the players we did in January. It seems to have really disrupted us, and was probably too much at once, in hindsight.
And we haven’t signed Premier League quality players, we’ve signed potentially Premier League quality players. None of them have seriously broken into the first team at their parent clubs in the top flight, and if they were currently good enough they wouldn’t be with us.