Needs to take a huge amount of blame. This so-called mega DoF left us with two centre halves going into the season, one of which was Michael bleedin' Keane, the other who was injured for large parts of the previous season, Mina. Their backup, Mason Holgate was probably available early in the summer for transfer given we'd put all our eggs into a Kurt Zouma-shaped basket, but nobody wanted to take him off us.
Then Brands goes and, yet again, fails to bring in a proven striker, unbelievably. We're happy with Kean as an option, but we've been severely lacking goals for 2 years - how can you overlook that and not bring in a proven scorer?
He even allows our best player, Gueye, to go, and fails to bring in a proven replacement. Gbamin may turn out to be a fine player, but his career to date doesn't suggest he's anywhere near the elite category that Gueye is in.
So that's the DoF leaving us way short in the centre of defence, midfield and up front.
He then goes and almost splashes 60m on Wilfried Zaha, a crazy thought, before panic buying Alex Iwobi at the last minute, who Arsenal couldn't sell quick enough, for a massive fee.
He sanctioned nearly 100m to be spent on Kean, Iwobi and Gbamin when we needed proven quality to come in and go right into the first XI as we were badly lacking. What sort of fool thinks this is a winning strategy?
I have little patience or sympathy with Silva, however I truly believed he was genuinely frustrated when he couldn't bring himself to say the team has improved this year over last year, as it truly hasn't. It's gone backwards, despite, again, more big investment.
A sorry, sorry state of affairs which Brands needs to take a large portion of responsibility for.
