Rival watch

we have a bigger profile than Lesta…yet we can’t entice such players or we are not brave enough. He’s not a first team starter…so he would be useful on our bench too. Yet there is a broken link somewhere in the chain that prevents us from making the smart signings. They do something better than we do.

 

The minimum reqt is CL qualification each season.
The moment he fails to do that, he is gone.

Much like one Mr Wenger.

Failing to be a PL title challenger is just supporter angst given
the most frequent winner of late is Citeh (ie bragging rights) .

 

Funny how much easier it is to sign strikers when your first-choice forward is 34...

 

please log in to view this image

Of course, if we'd told him that Kane was leaving, he never would have believed it. It's not like it was the main talking point in football at the time.

The club was in turmoil, no coach, no DoF, no plan and no clue. THAT is why we keep on repeating the same mistake.

 

The man joined leicester knowing he would be third choice battling for second choice

Kelechi ihneacho is 2nd choice striker

 

So how do you explain Poch going into seasons with just Harry Kane up front? We had a coach, Poch didn't want a DoF, we had a plan and we had a clue

The fact is that when a club's first-choice striker is superannuated it changes the thinking of both the club and the prospective targets, as the former knows their first-choice striker doesn't have much time left in their legs and the latter knows that they'll have plenty of time to establish themselves because of this, which simply isn't comparable to when a club has a striker in their prime who is scoring 20+ league goals a season and has done so for five seasons

And that's before mentioning the other detail you missed, namely Leicester's entire operation is based on buying low and selling high, as the likes of Kante, Mahrez, Maguire et al demonstrate - an operation that, if we adopted, would guarantee a tsunami of people demanding ENIC leave the second we made a £50m+ profit on somebody

 

So what if they buy to sell? Or are you suggesting everyone they sign only comes on the premise that they will be sold on? We don’t have to buy to sell…we can sell a different story, isn’t that why we have spent a billion on a stadium? So we have a different story to tell, to entice with? That was the plan.

I understand that no one would willingly come to try to usurp a world class striker…however we all know that Kane could be sold and we are willing to sell. If not summer gone then next summer he could be gone, it’s a massive possibility. Therefore it’s not the same Kane situation anymore. If you and I know that then the insiders of the club definitely know and have known that for quite some time.

 

Agree with you here, it’s easier to see a path becoming Leicester’s number one striker than Spurs number one striker.

 

They've also got Perez. They do play two up front, but that's a lot of options and competition.
There's no reason that we couldn't sign another striker or two. It's a ludicrous situation.

 

Any striker knows they will only get game time in the European Clown League, domestic cups early rounds or if Kane is injured or suspended. That definitely makes it a harder sell than Leicester where game time is easier to get because of their system and Vardy’s age

 

You know what annoys me is that we do actually have good scouts ourselves, many of Leicester’s signings had been on our radar but somehow whenever we made our final decision over the last 5 or so years on who to actually purchase - whether that be down to Levy/ Poch/ Jose/ Hitchen - we seemed to always make the wrong choice.

Scouted Harry Maguire at two different clubs but we go and sign Sanchez.
Scouted Pereira for quite some time, went and signed Aurier.
Scouted Soyuncu, didn’t sign him.
Scouted Maddison at two different clubs, didn’t sign him.
Were linked with Castagne last summer, signed Doherty.
Scouted Ndombele for about 18 months, rejected the chance to sign Tielemans in that timeframe and then signed Ndombele.
Picked Lo Celso over Fernandes.
Scouted Eze, even rumoured that we were gonna make a bid in the January before he signed for Palace but obviously that didn’t materialise.
Scouted Olise for periods of last season, Palace got him.

Tottenham Hotspur, man… Kings of the wrong decisions in recent years.

 

Especially as there were strong rumours over the summer Nuno actually wanted to play two up top.

 

When two clubs have different approaches, comparisons between the two become flimsy

Back in the Jol era we were set up to buy-to-sell, and Arnesen was in place to guy low cost/high value players which by and large worked (not so much under Comolli, no matter how much he tries pointing at the fees we got for Bale and Berbatov considering the amount of dreck we sold at a loss that he brought in), but we haven't been a buy-to-sell club for the best part of a decade and instead we've focused on trying to build a squad, which was evident during Poch's tenure - although also damning of the ubermensch's tenure, as that felt less like we were building a squad and more like we were trying to keep it together, which it has to be said the last eighteen months or so of Poch's tenure had a similar feel to it

Look at what we invested in the likes of Sanchez, Ndombele, Lo Celso and Romero, or how we were willing to let Sarr return to Rennes for a season if it meant we signed him now - that is not what a club who sells to buy does, not least because the first four players mentioned would have to go for eyewatering fees in order for them to come close to being able to reinvest into the team (which is an issue in itself if the players' ceiling is much lower than we thought it would be, but that's not important right now...)

That's why I mentioned how Daka's agent seems to be incapable of naming Leicester whenever he gives interviews and is instead naming the usual half dozen clubs, because Leicester are effectively a shop window and have been for a few years and so far have managed to balance it out, and ironically the only time they haven't is the 2016-17 season where instead they spent big on Zieler, Slimani and Musa and their form nosedived, but they picked right back up again when they focused on the buy low/sell high strategy

 

And that might rule us out of getting Daka, but why would it rule out every striker in the world?
Is there a Premier League team with less depth at striker than us?
There are probably Championship teams with better, more experienced backup there.

 

In terms of Maddison, lately I've seen him bundled in with Tielemans and Ascensio as players that Levy and/or Hitchen offered to Poch, yet Poch turned them down

Pereira is the one that bugs me, because at the time he had a £15m release clause at Porto, yet instead we decided to show The A Word and pay the best part of double that on Aurier, when realistically this was the worst decision we could have made of the three which were available
a.) Trippier as first choice with Pereira as long-term replacement
b.) Trippier as first choice with KWP as understudy
c.) Trippier and Aurier both expecting to be first choice, with KWP relegated to playing in cup games as a result

Managing to pick the option which was guaranteed to irk two players simultaneously is something only Football Manager newbies should be doing

 

Leicester have had a minimum three senior strikers in their squad every year since Vardy was 29 years old. They now have four.

Age has nothing to do with it. Nor does likelihood of becoming first choice.

There isn't a logical reason under the sun we should only have one striker for the second time in 3 seasons.

Any suggestions otherwise smack of apologist bull.

 

And yet how many of them have been any good?

Slimani was an expensive flop it took them five years to get off the books
Okazaki was already there, and his best goal return for a season was seven goals in all competitions
Iheanacho spent his first three seasons mainly only starting in cups as Vardy was first choice in the league
Daka almost exclusively starts in European games

Iheanacho actually surprised me because I honestly thought he was doing better than he has (which explains my fantasy football team most season...) but when three of the four strikers they've had in that timeframe not named Jamie Vardy haven't provided much when called upon, and let's be brutally honest here people are wetting their pants over Daka because he scored four goals against Spartak Moscow yet aren't considering why Rodgers doesn't use him in the league coupled with the obvious point that with a superannuated striker up front in Vardy signing for Leicester is obviously the path of least resistance to get first team football not just compared to us but also the likes of Everton and Villa, there's an obvious difference between a striker looking at the options of either being Harry Kane's understudy or being Jamie Vardy's successor

 

Cameraman's thinking, "Shall I tell him? Nah, **** it!"

 

A good few of us on here did actually mention at the time that option b would’ve been fine. A lot of us had high hopes for KWP but the way he ended up being managed by Poch cost us a potentially decent player in the long term.