So it’s that time of the year again when many start thinking in terms of a telephone numbers transfer window!
Already the moans are emerging the emerging that the likely £60 million plus won’t be enough with the view among many appearing to be that a repeat of last season or more is a MUST.
It’s a view clearly based on the belief that only top players can be bought for top money yet it really didn’t turn out like that this season did it.
Just remind me for a moment, how much did Declan Rice cost (nothing), cast Iron Hammer of the Year Lukasz Fabianski (£7 million) Fabian Balbuena (£4 million) and even Issa Diop at £22 million was not a bank breaker.
Have any of them failed? On the contrary they have been tremendous success at a combined fee of £33 million and have demonstrated conclusively that fortunes don’t have to be thrown at big name players for the sake of it.
One big reason for appointing a top manager at a lot of money is to ensure that he can buy (or develop) players such as these.
And there is no reason to believe Manuel Pellegrini can’t do the same again during the summerwindow. Would he have taken the job had he not been aware of the club’s financial restraints – of course not.
Anybody can call for £300 million or more to be spent – not everybody can make £30 odd million work as well as Pellegrini has managed this season.
So maybe it might be a wise idea for us all to keep it zipped after a “not bad at all” first season and let him get on with his second free of thre moans and groans which walk in hand with the social media age.
COYI
Pellegrini had the budget to be able to take punts and still buy proven quality. Lets be clear, I’m sure every fan would be delighted if we could spend 20-30million and get 5 players who turn out to we worth ten times that amount. That’s the dream scenario. That’s Football Manager fun. The reality is there is no way of knowing how unknowns will do. Remember when we moved to the London Stadium and bought a load of cheap players that turned out to be crap?
I absolutely have more faith in Pellegrini and his team to be able to find better quality players for less, but every team in the Premier League has dozens of scouts active around the world and finding a unnoticed gem is probably not all that simple. Wouldn’t we love a Richarlison for 11m? Fingers crossed we can do that but I think the budget was right last year. It gave the manager big money for a couple of quality signings and still some to play about. I often hear that moving players on is one of the toughest things in football, so to just assume we can add 30-40m to the transfer kitty is getting ahead of ourselves.