6 Comments

copying this from a twitter thread as im not sure i can link the thread here... but these are exactly what i think about this model too:

"Buy a large amount of promising players at a discount, increase their valuation through by developing them and showcasing them in European leagues, keep the best ones and sell the rest for profit averaged over the full cohort".

The Plan is simple in concept, but doesn't really address potential issues.

* What happens when your young squad doesn't quite get good fast and you miss European football several years in a row?

* What happens when manager doesn't actually want to play these young players?

* What happens when these young players subsequently don't develop due to not being picked by their loan teams and their valuation doesn't go up?

* What happens when some DO develop but want to leave because they want to play European football you're not getting?

* What happens when you can't quite get a profitable market for these players because you paid too much for them and locked out the midtable market from buying them?

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Umair its not uncommon for clubs especially Chelsea to recruit players that the manager doesn't want to play because they aren't good enough or they weren't what was needed and this happens to senior players as well as youth players.

Sometimes the manager changes and they don't rate a player for example Poche and Maatsen/Noni Madueke to name just 2. Both will be sold in January I suspect.

Loans often have a break clause in them and if a player isn't being picked they come back and go out on a different loan I'm thinking the Nottingham Forest saga with one of our players here. Yes it holds back the players development to a certain degree but not totally.

Whose to say the club won't have European football next season or the season after its anyone's guess but despite the Newcastle kick up the backside we are still in the mix this season.

You can only sell players for what they're worth and sometimes clubs take a hit on the transfer but on others they make a profit but even when they appear to breakeven they probably haven't due to wages paid et cetera.

I think what I'm saying is people are tying themselves in knots worrying about things that are beyond there control and which only time will clarify.

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agree with most of what you say but tell me one club which signs players at the same speed that we have done and have clogged the development pathways of both the youngsters that we have signed and the ones in academy.

Its the volume of the players signed at premium prices that worries me since sooner or later it will hit us in the face. Not everything that the club is doing needs to be justified. They have done quite a bit wrong ever since they have walked in. Hope they clear up the mess soon and adopt a more calculated approach. Creating chaos will not lead us anywhere

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Umair what choice did we have? It was clear out the dross or be relegated this year as the wage mercenaries deserted the sinking ship.

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I think the other thing to consider is that the club operated almost under the opposite principles under Abramovich. Talented youngsters were bought almost purely for profit while established players were bought purely for the first team. What we saw happen was the club consistently buy senior players and when they did manage to buy gems like De Bruyne and Salah, there was never the patience nor the space to allow them to develop properly. So over the years, we've seen a lot of younger talent go other places because either first-team pathways or blocked or the player saw a better development future elsewhere.

On the other hand, I think the current ownership has taken the current approach a bit to the extreme. They did need to lower the average age of the squad and by essentially removing most of the senior squad, pathways aren't blocked and young players could see a path to playing. But we also see that there's a lack of experience in the squad when it comes to winning football matches.

I, for one, thought that some sort of change needed to be made in transfer policy, but I didn't think it'd be that extreme. However, if the current ownership would have set out to by established players to win now, I think we'd end up back in the same cycle as we were stuck in under Abramovich.

The only problem right now is that I think the expectations of making it back to the CL this season were a bit too high. I always thought that just getting back to any kind of European football next season would be considered a win and would buy time to make some decisions over the summer to hopefully push on for CL in 2025-2026.

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My own expectations are that European football of any type will be a good season and I wouldn't want to throw the current team into the Champions League without European experience of some sort.

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