Oh aye, there's always an excuse to dumb expectations down.
We have an expensively assembled squad, money to spend, and the rest of the PL are dreadful outside 6 teams...not all of whom will have great seasons...which is how we broke into the top 4/5 in the recent past.
There's nothing drastically different now than before...better in fact, we now have the wherewithal to get closer and have less excuse not to.
Who is dumbing down expectations? My expectations are to finish at least 7th. Preferably closer to 6th than last season. Whether we can after that start is debatable.
I'm saying put
Moyes or Martinez into Everton now and they wouldn't have the talent to finish above, stable, well funded teams that all have better managers at the helm.
Like you say in future we need one of them to slip up or go through transition then we can break into that group. Your point is it has been done in the past, that's the bit I have issue with, there were not 6 solid teams ahead of us until last year. There were always between 3 and 5, the landscape has changed and you constantly say otherwise. It of course can always change back, Spurs are low hanging fruit at the moment and Arsenal will implode at somepoint but Wenger's replacement may have them up and running soon afterwards.
Both never had the spending power of now, £140m just in the Summer we spent, overall under Koeman we spent over £200m in 16 months, Moyes wouldn't have stopped creaming in his kecks over those sort of figures.
He had a chance to spend those kind of figures with a better basline to start from and it got him where? Easier to unearth gems than pay for and manage stars.
Take nothing away from
Moyes he was a good but limited manager and was what we needed at the time.
