Which one of those two was Paulinho supposed to be replacing? I'd suggest that he might've been closer to a Dempsey replacement, who also left in that window. Even that's quite a vague match.
Either or, at the time he was seen as a significant upgrade on both. Probably would’ve been too had AVB not tried turning him from a goal scoring box to box midfielder into a defensively minded poor tackling one. I wish he joined when Poch was manager, think he would’ve been brilliant under him but by the time Poch inherited him the guy was broken.
I actually don't think badly of Hojbjerg. I don't think I am qualified to judge the difference between players really. But I do think players usually improve with confidence that comes from being selected and since he joined Hojbjerg has started more PL matches than Winks, Skipp, Dele and Lo Celso put together and I can see no evidence that his run in the team has improved us at all.
I think he’s improved us but I also think he’s limited in the sense that he doesn’t have a lot of discipline and isn’t great offensively. But he presses well and gets the ball back a lot. But pressing can’t be an individual game, so him doing that can leave us exposed. Overall I think he’s a net positive but lacks some positional discipline as a DM. Conte has some working out to do because I think Højbjerg is best as a box to box in a 3 man midfield that presses, but that’s not our game.
They’re all inferior players to Hojbjerg so whilst impossible to prove, you can believe with great certainty we’d have lost more games and points had any of those started over him. Three different managers and one interim have all picked him in their XIs too, that’s another indicator they believe he’s better and therefore had they gone for the others we’d have likely been worse off. He’s not the most amazing player but in comparison to the other options we have he’s certainly the number one midfielder at the club, though in a year or two I’d imagine that will change as Skipp progresses further (plus any new additions may have something to say).
Realistically the reason Lo Celso was brought in due to the drop in the number of goals scored, most obviously Harry Kane dropping from 30 goals in 2017-18 to 17 in 2018-19, exacerbated by the other scoring options starting to become injury risks (Dele, Lamela) or their contract running down (Eriksen) so signing a player who could ghost into the box like Dele while also press high up the pitch like Lamela or Eriksen did in their primes absolutely made sense as that ticked two boxes at once, but it only made sense on paper because in reality our midfield was dismal at getting the ball into the attacking third let alone the opponent's penalty area at the start of the 2019-20 season due to a combination of changing our formation to a certain rhomboid hell formation and the player whose role it was to move the ball, namely Ndombele, simply wasn't able to do so - and especially not after the 60th minute when he usually looked like he needed an iron lung The conundrum we have is getting the right combination of personnel to get the most out of players we have, and while there is an example of how to potentially do that with Lo Celso if you look at the Argentina setup where Rodriguez defends, De Paul dictates play and Lo Celso pushes up, the obvious point is we realistically don't have players identical to either Rodriguez or De Paul, which takes us back to the Ndombele issue as he's supposed to be that player
Conte is likely to warm to Hojbjerg because he at least plays with his heart on his sleeve and has that fire in his belly, a rare commodity at Spurs made even rarer when Lamela left. Having someone like that on the pitch is an unseen value as we'll never know for sure that his presence is able to squeeze an extra 5% out of the players around him, but it is a value nonetheless and one that several not-so-amazing players have brought to the table over the years. Dawson, Dempsey and Lamela all spring to mind.
