AyeDubbleYoo

What on earth is this based on?

Honestly never really think about the January window so I literally can’t be moved to any kind of reaction. I do think we’re sometimes a bit unrealistic with the level of backup we expect to have though. If your main players get injured and the backup players come in, you can’t really just sign backups for the backups on the fly. You do actually have to manage the players you have and think about long term squad planning. Probably only LB where the squad is actually light.

We have backup TBF, we just don’t have backup for the backup.

We all want better and cheaper signings always, not sure there's much point in that debate.

I'm sure we'd be finding reasons to criticise Freedman if we didn't make January signings, don't worry.

Aye I know, I just meant because I wasn't sure if the data was perfect.

Feels like anything below and around 150k is a standard ish wage for anyone at a top 6 club. If you bring players from lesser PL clubs you will need to pay them about that amount. If a club spends a million a week more than you, that's enough for several extra CL level players. Bruno is our highest earner and is on half what Casemiro gets and only around the middle of Man Utd's higher earners. And they haven't even been successful for ages, so who knows if you checked the other top clubs.

All the data shows is that Man Utd pay loads more than we do. Shock.

Man U pay roughly a million pounds a week more in gross wages than we do FFS. I know wages data isn't exact, but that's enough for 10 players on 100k each Our wage bill is about 8th.

Well if you mean being perceived as a 'bigger club', that's basically the same thing as having more financial power, so I'm not sure we've moved on the argument.

Jesus Christ are we still running this thing about not needing Barnes? Shoot me

I like Kelleher but not sure he's the highest level. Not that we can necessarily get someone of the highest level, but you know what I mean.

We also missed out on about 7 attacking players who went to clubs who pay higher wages, as well as losing our best player to one of those clubs. Give it a rest man

Sounds very reasonable but I don’t think scrutiny should go all on Howe. Also this window could still go down and average or slow to impact the team rather than anything disastrous. I’d say all of our signings have a chance to turn out better than they have been so far.

I nearly voted happy with gripes, because obviously there are always things you would like to change or wish a manager would do. But none of those gripes mean I don't think he's the man.

Great post. Perennial CL club is really only available to 2 or 3 teams now. There are a lot of similar quality clubs competing for 2 places, there's no way to do it reliably.

I don't think Wissa was a panic buy. I don't think I ever said 'good window' because Isak left. In fact I can remember saying it didn't really matter what else we did because we would inevitably end up with a worse team. But I did understand the arguments behind all of the signings and I certainly expected them to do a lot better than they have. I still believe injuries are a huge factor.

Plenty of people were sure he's away in the summer based on absolutely nothing, so a couple of suspect tweets and outright rejection is actually an improvement.

Me too, pointless considering anything else really.

I'd say the squad is decent but has suffered from injuries and bad form, one compounding the other. The signings were fairly logical IMO, especially if you allow for the Isak chaos and every striker rejecting us. We don't need to use the fact it hasn't worked out as well as we wanted to pretend there's no thinking behind it.

3 or 4 positions could be decided by 0-2 points the way the league is going now. So basing anything on league position might be a bit of a fool’s errand.

Well pretty hard to judge, but even if that’s true the point remains that nobody is consistent and the picture can quickly change. People have this annoying habit of assuming that anything negative is permanent and anything positive is about to go wrong.

The league is all over the place, we could still finish almost anywhere. Shame our current fixtures are so hard because we could be facing a worse situation in a few weeks.

Wissa’s performance is mainly due to being injured, you could say the same for Ramsey. Elanga has been poor obviously. Thiaw has been class. Woltemade is interesting one because I assume Wissa was meant to take the majority of the load while he went through the Howe integration plan, but again that couldn’t happen due to injury.

Sure, but the point is you can't just assume every good player is leaving because of a dip in finishing position. Otherwise 6 or 7 players would leave every Europa League team every year - it's silly.