LoveCity said:Blue Haze said:That sumer was a disaster. We spent 15m in Roswell when Verratti went for 10m and Pogba went for free.
Sickening
Our club has shown a terrible inability to see beyond the near future, with lots of short-term thinking. Pogba and Verratti would not have been instant world superstars, but would have been good young rotation players and developed into what they are. And now with the squad aging, players of this profile would be taking the reigns and becoming our new leaders. We may not have been able to get those two anyway, but there have been other examples and no one can convince me we couldn't have signed at least a couple of these brilliant emerging talents.
Every week you hear of City scouting some excellent young talents. And come summer it's nearly always the same... they end at at Juve, Dortmund, Chelsea, PSG. The recent exception being Mangala, but we still managed to pay one of the biggest fees of all time for a defender while most good young talents (Zouma a good comparison) go at more reasonable prices.
This club needs to utilise its scouting system (which by all accounts is very good) better and show some foresight. Rather than a predictable and one dimensional transfer policy... ie. "We aren't scoring goals so let's sign Bony even though he'll be available after 3 strikers are back from injury!". The academy looks good but you can't gamble too much on an academy... the failure rate of even the BEST academies for creating first teamers is incredibly high. We may rave about our U18s, U19s, U21s but history has shown that many of them will not adjust to the men's game well enough that they're good enough for City. So we need to also buy great young players.
How is it that a more primitive club managed to nab a player like Vincent Kompany so cheap, yet this state-of-the-art City lets great talents go by the handful and instead spends 8 figures on players like Fernando and Garcia?
To add to the great points you made here, because City haven't bought any young talent for the past few transfer windows that in few years time City will have to have a completely new team. At the start of the 2018/19 season the only players on the current squad that will be under 30 are Mangala and Jovetic. And Jovetic will most likely be sold this summer. Meanwhile Madrid and Bayern both have 10 players that will be under 30 at the start of the 2018/19 season.
If City don't get these next few transfers exactly right, the team could be fighting for 4th instead of 1st.