Socistep2
Player Valuation: £225k
This I agree with - the major recruitment mistakes were made from 2016-2020, resulting in a much smaller budget now due to FFP and a squad that is too small and low on quality, signings like Onana, Garner, Patterson and Mykolenko should be given time to bed in but we have to throw them into the squad due to severe lack of depthlast season the focus was on how many goals we were leaking for fun
hence why we brought in Tarkowski (free) and Coady (loan)
as Carragher recently stated about Van Dijk the reason why he was so effective in the past few seasons is because of the protection he had from the midfield in front of him. It was clear last season that our Defence had very poor protection, for example in the 5-2 defeat to Watford at home we had Allan and Davies in central midfield. Even Doucoure recently has been very poor. This probably explains why we brought in 3 central midfielders in Gana, Onana and Garner.
Due to FFP and having no money to spend i guess the majority of the richarlison budget was used to try and solidify the Defence and Midfield and thinking that Dominic Calvert-Lewin would be fine this season that we wouldn't need to re-inforce the attack much and hence why we only signed McNeil and Maupay.
the problem is we needed to invest heavily in the playing squad, at least 200 mil + but we could not do so due to FFP and in the end we ended up going to poundland to try and find the best bargains we could from Burnley, Wolves and Brighton.
They basically gambled and hope that the sale of richarlison would not have a massive effect by banking on Dominic Calvert-Lewin's fitness which has horrendously backfired.
We can't expect all signings to work out but I would question the viability of McNeil and Maupay, if the squad was bigger then they probably would have been good squad players, but again we are reliant on them to be a key part of the starting 11