They’d be very naive to buy a player based on numbers on a spreadsheet, as we found out at a very expensive cost.
It boggles my mind, it really does. I liked Siggy when he was at Swansea but I've always been cynical about the increase of using bare numbers to compare players that seems to have gone into overdrive over the last 5 years, and even with Ricky the loon appearing on all platforms to bang on about him 'outperforming De Bruyne' or whatever the hell Sigurdsson's stats in the 15/16 season suggest, I've always thought that midtable was his level.
It's like Stoke fans getting annoyed at the RS saying Shaqiri was Stoke's best player in their relegation season because he had the most goals and assists. What those stats fail to mention is the amount of consolation goals that were involved in those numbers, and the fact that very often the other 89 minutes were filled with absolute uselessness. Sounds familiar doesn't it.
The fact is that we've not been a good team since Sigurdsson joined, apart from a handful of matches here and there. Granted there is a whole heap of other dross that it could also be attributed to but there comes a point when you hear 'don't single him out, everyone was bad' enough times that you think he's doing nowhere near enough to try and change things. There's a video on Twitter from Sunday of him standing in the middle of the park ordering our defender to pass it to someone else, while he positions himself close to a Liverpool midfielder and thus makes himself an unattractive target for the pass. It's all well and good if you magically appear for a pass when all you have to do is flick it into a gap in the defence for a great chance but if you're 2-0 down partly because you haven't started any attacks because you've been hiding then what good is it? That's probably harsh but that's how it comes across - he only bothers to get involved when he spots that he can immediately set up a chance. That's brilliant when we're playing well but ineffective beyond belief when we're struggling.
He sometimes produces good, even very good numbers considering the fact he passes the ball about once every 5 minutes despite supposedly being a midfielder, but it's not insane to imagine that someone a lot more mobile, or getting on the ball a huge amount more and keeping things ticking, would have made us a better team.