Seeing Liverpool be crowned champions after so many years of them essentially being a joke just makes me green with envy, I must say. And they fully deserve it, TBH. They have built this team and infrastructure over the last 4-5 years and have got their just rewards. It kills me to compare their current status with ours. We have almost nothing that they do in terms of owner, structure, board, manager, players, youth etc. They really are a perfect blueprint for us in terms of how set a goal and achieve it. Will we ever be able to build like them? Will we ever be able to one day be champions again? Or are we permanently also-rans like so many teams that have not won the league in decades?
No, and nor will almost anyone again. You need a perfect storm of: (1) appointing the perfect manager (2) picking up a random that no-one ever thought would be quite so good (Coutinho) (3) luckily a random team in Spain being given £200m for one of their players by an oil French team and that Spanish team needing to buy a replacement straight away to appease their fans and thereby buying said 'nobody' for way over value (4) this insane purchase then helping you afford to buy several world class players yourself to turn you from also rans to world class team To be like Liverpool you need the best manager in the world AND a load of oil money. They don't even have that oil money themselves so what they have now I can't see being sustainable without big transfer luck again. Eventually all the best players will start signing for City, PSG, Barca and Real again. Which is a bit depressing.
We need luck in the transfer market, a clear playing style and for the over top teams to go through a transition and underperform. Basically what happened when Leicester won the league it should have been us
We don't even need that. We need to buy mid-20yos for £20-30m who can be turned into top drawer players rather than buying them. SOrt of like Liverpool who spent medium amounts on Suarez, Coutinho, Mane and Salah but turned them all into worldies. Stop spending £50m on 28yos and gamble £20m on younger players who can be bent to the will of a quality manager. That clearly depends on us having a manager who can bend, train and mould youngish players like Klopp can... Saliba and Martinelli are starts. You can tell Klopp is jealous of Martinelli already and would love to get his hands on him. Carry on with shizzle like that. Stop wasting big fees on players like Auba. Great guy but not going to help us long term.
Yes we will. We are unfortunate in the fact that both Klopp and Guardiola are managing rival sides. Arguably the two best managers in World football. I highly doubt we will win the league whilst those two are still around. When they move on though things will open up again. It was only a few years ago Leceister won the league.
we need to completely sort out the squad, especially at the back. for some reason Oil has gone from playing every game prior to lockdown to not even being in the squad. if Oil isn't in Arteta's plans then lets cut our loses and get rid. why oh why did we offer Luiz a new contract, and yet we haven't sorted out Auba and Saka contracts which both expire next season. for me we need to 1/ sort out Saka as a priority, as he is class and will get better. 2/ Auba - offer him a pay rise or let him run down contract at current pay. who will buy him at 32 with big wages, as no one else was after him when we got him at 27. he would demand top wages and to be a starter so perhaps only United in the PL, as any other team would be a step down. 3/ get rid of Ozil, Mustafi, Chambers, Bellerin, Xhaka, Kolasinac, Sokratis, Elneny, Mkhitaryan - think of the savings from the wage bill, which we can use to secure Martenelli and Saka and the other youngsters. 4/ sign up Ceballos - i rate him
1/Agree - where do we play him though. LB/LM or LWF. Hard to say whay his best position is. 2/They are trying to tie him down - i think he is stalling to see what offers are out there though. 3/No point selling Bellerin. With his current form he will sell for WAY less than his actual worth - if we can get him fully fit though.. He's a far better player than AMN. Have to keep Xhaka IMO. The rest I would sell.
glad to see Saka getting a new long term contract - for once we sorted out something we needed to and we did it quickly. now to sort out Auba and Ozil and the rest
