2020/21 Marcel Brands

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Efcjake said:
He goes into the Not Good category because he hasn't played in a year and a half.

He's made of glass. Do I think it is entirely Brands' fault? Nope, but that doesn't change the fact that he's made zero contribution and is going down as a waste of money.
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If we signed Messi and he was out for a season would you call him a bad signing?
 
Lanolin said:
Not disagreeing with your overall point but what do you mean by the last line? This is his third summer not his first. How many summers does it take to turn 7th and 8th placed finishes into something better? Genuine question by the way, not being funny. It just seems like we're never allowed to think things are moving too slowly, it's always people bedwetting or kneejerking or whatever when they say we're floundering, but nobody ever seems to give a proper explanation of why you shouldn't feel that way.
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The points totals are important as well though not just league placings. Brands picked up a squad that had finished 17/18 with 49 points. That might have been good enough for 8th place but in a lot of seasons that would have been bottom half (as it was last season). We ‘improved’ to 54 points under Silva and came 8th again, before last season regressing to 49 and finishing in the bottom half. Improving from 8th doesn’t sound like much but ultimately if we want the champions league that’s a mid 70e points total which is a huge leap from the 49 the squad he inherited gained.

I firmly believe that this season we’ll surpass 54 points and there’ll then be an upward trend from when he took over to now. If we don’t though then the anti Brands camp will have all the ammo they need to say he hasn’t moved us forward and three seasons on from 17/18 we’re not objectively further along. If we come 7th on 65 points though that is a massive improvement to coming 8th on 49 but measuring only on league placings will invite the remark ‘he took us from 8th to 7th in three years’.
 
Saint Domingo said:
The points totals are important as well though not just league placings. Brands picked up a squad that had finished 17/18 with 49 points. That might have been good enough for 8th place but in a lot of seasons that would have been bottom half (as it was last season). We ‘improved’ to 54 points under Silva and came 8th again, before last season regressing to 49 and finishing in the bottom half. Improving from 8th doesn’t sound like much but ultimately if we want the champions league that’s a mid 70e points total which is a huge leap from the 49 the squad he inherited gained.

I firmly believe that this season we’ll surpass 54 points and there’ll then be an upward trend from when he took over to now. If we don’t though then the anti Brands camp will have all the ammo they need to say he hasn’t moved us forward and three seasons on from 17/18 we’re not objectively further along. If we come 7th on 65 points though that is a massive improvement to coming 8th on 49 but measuring only on league placings will invite the remark ‘he took us from 8th to 7th in three years’.
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I disagree. The only way to measure performance is league positions. His (and Ancelotti's) job is to get us higher up the league, not to get us more points. I know that sounds daft, but it's completely true. I couldn't care less if we get 60 points this year if we finish 9th. Our improvement has to be relative to our peers, not to ourselves. The amount of points means nothing really, some years there's two awful teams that everybody beats, and some years there's no stragglers so everybody drops points to the sides that get relegated. It's why nobody apart from Dave cares that we got 72 points under Martinez, it means absolutely nothing because there's no context to it.
 
Lanolin said:
I disagree. The only way to measure performance is league positions. His (and Ancelotti's) job is to get us higher up the league, not to get us more points. I know that sounds daft, but it's completely true. I couldn't care less if we get 60 points this year if we finish 9th. Our improvement has to be relative to our peers, not to ourselves. The amount of points means nothing really, some years there's two awful teams that everybody beats, and some years there's no stragglers so everybody drops points to the sides that get relegated. It's why nobody apart from Dave cares that we got 72 points under Martinez, it means absolutely nothing because there's no context to it.
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To a certain extent yes, but there is some context to it. If there’s a bottom half that everyone is thrashing consistently then you are a better football team (even relative to your peers) if you finish 9th with 65 points, level with 7th and 8th or a couple behind, than if you finish 9th with 49 points, and an absolute chasm between us and the top 8, and we’re actually only a point ahead of a cluster of teams going down to 12th. Those scenarios are very different as we would have beaten a lot more teams in the first scenario and therefore be better than them. It would also indicate that the season after we are more likely to perform to a better level than the latter of those scenarios.

I get your point. Moyes’ 4th place finish was in my view a better achievement than Martinez’s 5th place with 72 points, but in my view there’s also a world of difference between posting a competitive points total through playing well and posting a poor points total playing badly even if by some quirk that puts you in the same league position. The Allardyce season is a bit of a distortion in my opinion, I know we managed to clamber into 8th place at the end of the season but normally 49 points gets you nowhere near that.
 
Saint Domingo said:
To a certain extent yes, but there is some context to it. If there’s a bottom half that everyone is thrashing consistently then you are a better football team (even relative to your peers) if you finish 9th with 65 points, level with 7th and 8th or a couple behind, than if you finish 9th with 49 points, and an absolute chasm between us and the top 8, and we’re actually only a point ahead of a cluster of teams going down to 12th. Those scenarios are very different as we would have beaten a lot more teams in the first scenario and therefore be better than them. It would also indicate that the season after we are more likely to perform to a better level than the latter of those scenarios.

I get your point. Moyes’ 4th place finish was in my view a better achievement than Martinez’s 5th place with 72 points, but in my view there’s also a world of difference between posting a competitive points total through playing well and posting a poor points total playing badly even if by some quirk that puts you in the same league position. The Allardyce season is a bit of a distortion in my opinion, I know we managed to clamber into 8th place at the end of the season but normally 49 points gets you nowhere near that.
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No you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. The point is that you could parachute Fleetwood and Salford into the PL and we could take 6 points off both of them, whereas we might only take 5 points off Burnley and Sheffield United if they were to finish as the bottom two. There would be no difference in how good we are as a team though, or how much we've improved relative to our peers. We'd have just got seven more points because they were easier to come by. The same applies in reverse when looking up the table; sometimes there are teams who nobody takes any points off, sometimes there aren't. That has an effect on how many points you get, but it doesn't affect where you're able to finish in the league. It's simple, Brands has to make us outperform our rivals, not outperform our previous seasons.
 
Saint Domingo said:
The points totals are important as well though not just league placings. Brands picked up a squad that had finished 17/18 with 49 points. That might have been good enough for 8th place but in a lot of seasons that would have been bottom half (as it was last season). We ‘improved’ to 54 points under Silva and came 8th again, before last season regressing to 49 and finishing in the bottom half. Improving from 8th doesn’t sound like much but ultimately if we want the champions league that’s a mid 70e points total which is a huge leap from the 49 the squad he inherited gained.

I firmly believe that this season we’ll surpass 54 points and there’ll then be an upward trend from when he took over to now. If we don’t though then the anti Brands camp will have all the ammo they need to say he hasn’t moved us forward and three seasons on from 17/18 we’re not objectively further along. If we come 7th on 65 points though that is a massive improvement to coming 8th on 49 but measuring only on league placings will invite the remark ‘he took us from 8th to 7th in three years’.
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It wouldn't worry me if we won the league with a record low number of points gathered. It would please me far more than finishing 2nd with a record high points total for that position.
 
Saint Domingo said:
The points totals are important as well though not just league placings. Brands picked up a squad that had finished 17/18 with 49 points. That might have been good enough for 8th place but in a lot of seasons that would have been bottom half (as it was last season). We ‘improved’ to 54 points under Silva and came 8th again, before last season regressing to 49 and finishing in the bottom half. Improving from 8th doesn’t sound like much but ultimately if we want the champions league that’s a mid 70e points total which is a huge leap from the 49 the squad he inherited gained.

I firmly believe that this season we’ll surpass 54 points and there’ll then be an upward trend from when he took over to now. If we don’t though then the anti Brands camp will have all the ammo they need to say he hasn’t moved us forward and three seasons on from 17/18 we’re not objectively further along. If we come 7th on 65 points though that is a massive improvement to coming 8th on 49 but measuring only on league placings will invite the remark ‘he took us from 8th to 7th in three years’.
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Yes...yes they are.

:coffee:
 
When the discussion is about points or league placing I go back to.......

would I prefer 97 points and finish second like the RS did or 75 points and win the league like Manure did.
 
YMJ said:
When the discussion is about points or league placing I go back to.......

would I prefer 97 points and finish second like the RS did or 75 points and win the league like Manure did.
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That 97 point team won the CL and then the PL the next year. Not to say I wouldn't take a title on a low total, but there is some value in being really good. So even if we did end up in the Europa with 70+ points again I'd still take it as a good sign and hope we wouldn't Martinez it up again.
 
That 75 point team won the treble 2 seasons later so they weren’t bad either.

I agree though that the next step is Europa+ (6+) but I don’t care how many points we need to do it.
 
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