goon wrote:
I think you're letting him off the hook there. The mandate is always going to be different to Stuttgart or even Dortmund and I think that's the problem with the Sven and Monchi types, they can't work under the pressure of success.
We had 50 million that summer and urgently needed 6-7 players, which is more like midtable standards than pressure of success, never mind the environment he worked in at Dortmund. I think we did pretty well under those circumstances. We would probably have gone for a higher quality of players if the resources had been bigger and short-term needs had been smaller. Auba had arrived in January, we got Leno, a stopgap centreback, Torreira who was class for the first half of the season before he ran empty, and a couple fringe players of varying profiles. Crucially he also looked at the talents we had coming through and decided to trust the academy to a large extent which we've seen rather big longterm benefits from.
Conversely, if Sven had arrived sooner I don't imagine we would ever have wasted 50 million on Lacazette, we would have gone for Auba straight away and would probably have made Champions League that season as a result, and would have had more money to work with the following summer.
It's all ifs and buts and could've-beens at this stage, but there's no question in my mind that the biggest mistake we've made over the last couple of years was to back Raul instead.
