carl_feedthegoat wrote:Im_Spartacus wrote:I'd be surprised he's going, primarily because of the state of the squad at the moment.
I struggle to believe that the club that have been so strategically perfect over the last 15 years, have allowed an entire squad to age together without any meaningful activity in recent transfer windows, at the same time we risk losing the manager.
The only explanation I can see for the lacklustre transfer windows, is that the club potentially do have some concerns about the outcome of the PL case, and haven't wanted to spend big just in case. When you win the treble and the champions league, your job is to get out there and do everything to maintain that level, and while we had a good season last year, and are well placed this year despite the current blip, I worry big time about next year.
Next season we're either going to have a new manager inheriting a squad very clearly past its collective best and risk getting into some questionable decisions of buying for a manager vs buying for the system, or Guardiola staying and needing to bring in 3-4 key players into his very specific way of playing that takes 2 seasons to get the best out of new players.
Either way, it doesn't fill me with confidence.
If they had sold walker ,KDB and Bernardo we would have had enough money in the bank to buy a couple of excellent players....instead we fucked up , 2 of those players are non existent this season and the other one has played poorly.
We wouldn't have missed any of them if we had sold them.
I have these thoughts about KDB every year, then he goes on a run which shows we were right to keep him. Hopefully it happens again!
We've turned a profit the last few years so I don't think there are any issues spending 200m in a window on 3 top tier players, the strange thing for me is that we've chosen not to.
I get that there are times when it may be seen that there's no value in the market, and perhaps Pep himself being up in the air has caused us to be reluctant to spend OR caused players to be reluctant to sign with the media telling anyone who will listen we'll be playing in the Vanarama Sunday league next year.