Jagten

Because he has an extremely specific function that doesn’t appear to fit in our first XI. He’s good and I like him but it was a poor allocation of resources, given Jacob Murphy started today.

Tonali is not the midfielder we needed. A James Maddison would have been much more interesting given how we struggle against low blocks.

Spunking >100mm on Tonali and Barnes who, whatever you think of them, don’t really solve any problems, is inexcusable. Both are running at pretty substantial paper losses right now.

Nah he is bad

Likely 13th after 15 games. I'm not saying it's right, but we might've crossed the rubicon here.

I mean it has been a generally good trend wrt the underlying numbers, but yes that was fucking garbage.

We can debate the intent of the rules but they were in the place the entire time we were buying players. The club fairly deserve criticism for some of their decision making, especially given those out-sized bets (Tonali, Barnes) have not worked as of yet.

I think we've actually got quite a bit better in recent weeks after starting the season looking like we were headed back to being not very good.

He's not especially press resistant and his ball progression isn't good enough.

r/r was always obviously terrible on the Barnes and Tonali transfers. That is not how you close massive financial disparity with skill.

< 0.70 expected goals in first half, of which 50% was Isak. Slightly unlucky, but possession dominance translated to not a huge amount, which is the main concern. Otherwise it was OK

Right now, our season numbers have been bottom half. Struggling for top ten is a stretch, but that outcome is probably more likely than top four.

Tonali showing what he cannot do there btw.

There’s nothing in his data that says he has an elite passer. I get why people want to believe that.

I think what you're mostly getting with Tonali is out-of-possession talent plus a runner. I think it's pretty unlikely he was the right buy, but true 6 market is pretty bad.

Mitchell's reputation has long exceeded his actual record, and he has not demonstrated the ability to lead a successful analytics operation—something you're increasingly dead without. Howe may or may not be the answer, but his achievements at this club are remarkable, and I couldn't care less about Mitchell.

Both visual performances and underlying numbers this season have not been good. It's a small sample, but we're in the bottom half, and we're fortunate to have 10 points. Howe has arrested periods like this before (last season's match against Liverpool was peak dreadful), but the current environment at the club makes me worried for both him and us.

He prefers them.

Maybe we’re consuming different content but all I saw was smart people that didn’t like it. Our business over the last 12 months has currently been quite bad.

Tonali pretty clearly.

High volume of low-quality shots. We were not good, but they have issues.

additionally bad because the players we were publicly linked with, and the prices we were linked at, were mostly overpays for good-but-not-great talent. Even in a world where we buy Guehi (a better world than this) for 65mm, I’m pretty sure most PL recruitment teams are going wtf are they doing.

I have no idea. We’re missing a bunch of context. Either a Howe early season implosion or roll the dice again with a DoF. I’m not saying either is right because I’m not really sure what went so badly wrong.

It is an underrated possibility on here than Staveley went because of the PSR disaster. I would not be surprised to see action here.

I think he's like fine but he's a pretty expensive deal to do and I think the value is probably not good.