Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
Look at the players he highlighted and we never got due to parry being a slow clown or the cancers draining all the finances though.
Alves, Pato, Ronaldo, Vidic to name but 4, they were all ready to dot and cross but no financial backing and / or parry dropped the bomb, rafa's left looking for scraps.
You cant question his ability to pin point good players. Unless someone wants to tell me they are poor players?
I think any manager can go, offer huge sums to a bunch of clubs offer huge contracts to a bunch of players then not actually have the money, infact phil Brown can go to REal and say, here i'm bidding 300million for Ramos, offer Ramos 600k a week, then when it comes to it, not have the money.
Being able to know who the best players around is one thing, that frankly almost any manager is capable of. The question is who has he got for the money he's spent.
Johnson, 17mil, Sagna, was it 4mil? Eduardo 8 mil ish, Keane, others.
Every single team in the world, bar none has to buy cheap players to fill out the squad, Rafa's ability to buy good cheap players, is woeful, Rafa's ability to find unknowns who are cheap and end up worthwhile, is woeful, Rafa's ability to buy anyone under 20million is pretty poor. Utd have gotten free transfers, cheap youth players and cheap better players aswell as a few huge signings. Real have quite a lot of cheap players, youths, cheap transfers, as do Barca.
You simply can't win anything, consistantly without being able to get great quality for cheap now and then, and Rafa hasn't shown he can do that ever. Frankly Babel, Reira, they are players that are worse than people Wenger bought for half the money. I don't think Wenger, nor our board would have sanctioned 10-12mil for babel because he was never worth it.
You can talk about backing and whatever else you want, but any other top manager would have spent the money he's spent, on frankly more players who are also better. A dozen top players move to clubs every year for under 5mil, theres plenty of free transfers around, Benitez chooses to buy bigger names for bigger amounts and its costs him, hugely, not sure how anyone else can get the blame for so many of his choices not living up to their cost, a cost that other managers were unwilling to spend. Wenger wanted Babel, but never wanted to spend close to 10mil on him.
