Claudius wrote:
Pepe LeFrits wrote:
There's an issue with signing players of the wrong age profile here. We should be investing in younger players who haven't peaked in terms of value, but we also need players who are ready to contribute. Blowing a large chunk of the transfer budget on a player who won't be ready for years isn't clever when you've got large gaps in the squad that need filling now.
Hmmmm.
But here’s the balance, Pépé. Typically the less you spend, the less likely it is that the players are going to come good. It’s a bit like investing in companies. Each round you invest in an Uber or AirBnB it becomes much more expensive because it becomes much more of a sure thing. Players are the same way. We paid big money for Saliba because he is close to being a sure thing. French commentators all rate him very highly. I fully understand what the team was doing here. If we went for a cheaper young defender, we are likely going for someone who is more of a risk. The hope is he turns out to be an elite defender as well, even better than, say, Gabriel and Luiz.
I have much more of a problem with the money we spent on most of the other central defenders before Gabriel and Saliba. If we had aggregated that money better, we probably have one good central defender in there. And you see the same story throughout the field, with Laca - Aubameyang being the most egregious example of waste
I don't think that's accurate. We paid big money for Saliba because he is viewed as having very high potential, not that he's a sure thing. It's more of a high risk, high reward type signing. If he was a low risk high reward signing, he'd be involved in the team already (and would probably have cost more than we paid, tbh). Now, it's early days so perhaps he still will be, but the signs at the moment aren't great.
Klaus is right, it speaks volumes that all of the budget we've spent so far has gone on a position where we signed Saliba already last summer. Perhaps in time he'll develop into one of the best in the world, but we'll suffer in the meantime. If you've already got the one of the best squads in the league, a long term investment like that can make sense. I think if we're spending that kind of money on a player, they should be at least on the fringes of the team from the start. Maybe they might have a lower ceiling overall, but we need players who can help the team now (and could still appreciate in value as an asset anyway, albeit maybe to a lesser degree).
