Jagten

More of the balanced and varied spending people are bleating on about

This is blatantly not true. Of big spenders we spend the largest % of our total outlay on PL players. I don’t know why anyone would defend this.

This is an abstraction that ignores the players we are buying - wherever they are from - have been increasingly bad value. We cannot afford misses like Elanga.

I’ll be generous and say it doesn’t matter, and that whoever it is sucks. I do have some insight tho, like this is the genius our analytics dept was farting out lololol

His nephew is leading recruitment. That said, whoever is in charge - and I don’t care who - Elanga, Wissa, Barnes and Ramsey was not an especially prudent use of 200m for a squad that, minus Isak, tops out at 5th.

I think there’s a reasonable middle ground which says Howe has mostly done exceptionally well but his influence on executive policy has become outsized as a consequence of poor PIF management, which is something common to most of their ventures.

Yes and yes. I think he’s mostly gonna be a no-op serf and he doesn’t address technical or process shortfalls of current leadership.

Wilson probably yes, Hopkinson we can’t evaluate.

Bingo

Hall and Livramento are the real risks. Bruno, who is clearly our most important player given the profile we have converged on, is too old for the money we’d want. Tonali would be too expensive for most given what you’re getting.

That is literally what happened.

I’m not a Mitchell fan. The failure lies with PIF for allowing any of this to happen.

He won a power struggle against our DoF and was allowed to buy whatever he wanted with his nephew.

By his talent spotting abilities? He spent 250m mate.

Recruitment now, independent of his (mediocre, mostly contact-based talent ID) record, is much harder than it was. He still underperformed his spend - even then.

Reminder I once had a conversation with our “head of data” and the guy was nice but a total dipshit

Howe is great and our problem has been abysmal talent ID and dealings over last two summers. His influence there should be aggressively curtailed.

Lol

Are you pleased with the way we managed to pay 55m for him?

We ended up paying 2x the valuation for Wissa (who is good) because of incompetence.

So is watching Elanga on the wing m8

This would be funnier if we hadn’t blown his fee on Elanga, Wissa and Ramsey, solving none of our issues.

He’s an elite role player, but not an elite midfielder overall.

That’s a genetic fallacy / motive attribution. You’re arguing about why you think people say it (“bad form takes”), not whether it’s true. I am personally making case for only him and Gordon. I argued extensively at peak Gordon that he was not elite and people got upset.

This is actually from Andy Howe’s slide deck when people pushed back