we sold 1 in the summer and signed 4 first team players, you seem very eager to point at der net spend, in this market, it means naff all.
The squad needs rebuilding, we lost 4 first team players in the Summer and certain areas need improving
You contradict your point in the very next sentence.
Also...Valencia is first-team? To be fair, neither were the 4 players we lost by that time. They were old and knackered, ideally best replaced by youth, but their
peak quality needed replacing with top-$ signings if we want top 6.
What we needed in the summer was more quality. Ultimately we needed to sign players who are better than Osman, Pienaar and Howard were at their peak. This costs money and a clever window would've thus resulted in more spend (with potentially better league performances).
Our like-for-like looks like this:
Howard - Stek (will Stek go on to be better than Howard at his peak? Not likely)
Osman - Gana (Leon was fine, but Gana is looking better)
Pienaar - Bolasie (jury's out if Bolasie can reach the effective heights of Pienaar)
Stones - Williams (we like Ashley and need him, he's arguably an upgrade in the short-term...tho' Stones is looking tasty longer-term)
Hibbert - Valencia (not like-for-like, but Tony has almost 300 games under his belt mostly while we were a top 6 club. Valencia looks useless)
In my opinion we've not moved forward this transfer window, and we only began to spend money once we received money from player sales. Our actions in the transfer window betray mid-table contentment, not the actions of an ambitious Europe-chasing club.
