Erikse

1 billion Man Utd fans clicking the article. Huge success for TEAMtalk.

I agree. I remember in an interview he talked about how people wanted him gone in 2022. "Am I really that bad?" he thought. The next season he responded excellently by scoring 18 goals which got us into the CL. It's okay to want him out, and we should probably move him on now, but point is that players sometimes pick up on posts like that one.

Poor Callum man. This is bullying.

I bet Premier League will start looking into the rules now that a threat to their favourites did it.

Pints for PSR, finally!

Chelsea got £200m, didn't they?

Just over half a year ago I got stick for suggesting that many underrated the quality of our players. Was told "bar Isak we don't have players that can hurt opponents" etcetc. It was the explanation for poor results. Opinions change fast from one end to the other in football. I guess now all our players that has played a role are very good players.

For me a great signing from a price perspective is one that exceeds the expectations from the price we paid. I think Barnes has been on par overall. Which is decent. But it's kind of rare that people rate their own players or signings as "decent". They go from bad to great in a heartbeat. My post was exclusively replying to a comment on why Chelsea are paying more for Pedro. To me that's pretty clear. Whether it works out or not remains to be seen.

The fact that he has someone very good starting ahead of him doesn't really make the signing better, though. It's like buying an expensive backup for Isak and give the signing a better rating from a business perspective because he has someone world class infront of him. That's like half of the reason someone was disappointed until he hit good form, but then got benched again. I get he was injured in the first season, but we can't just exclude that season entirely from the evaluation. He has helped us getting top 5 this season, but there are probably many different routes we could have taken with the money that also would have gotten us there.

They are not allways the most accurate, but I still generally find them more accurate than the valuation of fans of the players club. A vast majority of fans would value their players and signings higher than what the reality is. Especially if things has been going well recently.

Look, if someone told you in 2023 that we were going to spend £40m someone that would have more bench performances than starts in the next 2 seasons, would we be excited? He has largely done well when called upon, and he will come in handy next season, but that doesn't mean that it was necessarily great business. It was just decent imo, which is fine. And to be clear, when I say questionable, I only mean one that you could maybe question. Here's what transfermarkt has to say about player values: Barnes percieved value hasn't gone up in years. He's still rated at 35m euros. Pedros value has been going up and he's rated at 50m currently. Do you think the top clubs are more likely to want Barnes (when we bought him) for 40m than Pedro for 60m? Pedros type is more sought after, and is why we faced more competition for him. Transfermarkt isn't perfect, but it's less biased than fans of the teams that the players are in.

No reason to compare signings against some of the biggest flops out there. If that's the standard, 80% of all signings are great deals, and not even just "okay/decent". Again, those clubs have a much higher budget than us, so they can pay more for the same players. Paying £40m is a bigger investment for us.

Because of price, and our tight budget. Honestly the stats you put out here doesn't actually scream of a great signing at £40m? Not sure what you mean. The other signings were obviously better, but Barnes is okay. Not saying it was a bad signing by any means, everything doesn't have to be either great or bad.

Do you mean the summer window in 2023 here? I thought it was okay. Barnes, Livra, Hall and Tonali turned out to be good signings. Barnes is the only questionable one due to price, but I don't think he was a bad signing either. We could not do that much more with the budget.

Yeah I never ever believed that. Then people saying he dived on purpose when he was trying to get Krul(?) sent off because he didn't want to score. I think that was all just protecting their mind from the reality that he wanted to leave his boyhood club for Liverpool. He went for the bag and the bigger team, like most do, and it was naive to think otherwise.