Claudius wrote:
That was such a chaotic period. Waiting so long for the Sanchez/ Ozil deals and chalking it up to player power. We are the only team that does, by the way.
I'm not fussed. Sanchez went to United and got even bigger wages there than Özil did here, so what's the issue? That we were willing to match their spending power on contracts? The larger point here is that even if Sanchez and Özil hadn't been in their final year of their contracts, even if Auba hadn't been in his final year right now, they would still be asking for enormous wages to extend, because that's what comes with the territory when you have players like that on your books. I think this is the key thing people don't understand when we talk about Aubameyang right now. People talk like we should have just gotten it done sooner, like we could have given him a new deal last summer when he had two years left, but of course he didn't extend a year ago, because we were unwilling to offer what he wanted and would have gotten elsewhere. His contract running out just gives him one more bargaining chips. The asking price hasn't changed.
Goon has it right, paying big wages is a good thing, and it's even more valuable to a club than good scouting. It's why Chelsea and City keep winning titles while Dortmund are nothing but a shop window for bigger clubs.
If the idea is that we're never willing to pay top-end wages at all then the question becomes, why bother trying to sign big players in the first place? Why bother having good players at all if we're not able, or willing, to pay for the pleasure? Should we just settle at midtable?
We had the right idea back then, we just went for the wrong players. Some like Sanchez were done as footballers at 29, some like Özil lost their motivation, and some like Mkhitaryan were just fucking awful in plain daylight and everyone who was involved in signing them should be forced to watch their families being flogged to an inch within their lives. Auba fits into neither of those categories; he's the one big player we got 100% right, and he'd be infinitely better to keep around. The problem is that we went for scraps like Welbeck and Lacazette instead to begin with, that we then couldn't shift. That's why the expenditure became so huge. Those two non-footballers cost us £60 million in sheer transfer outlays and they couldn't even replace a carthorse like Giroud properly. We should have been more ambitious, not less.
