Think we were handcuffed by FFP and couldn't make a competing offer.
Or chose to spend our money unintelligently on Mangala and Fernando. Said it time and time over that summer, we needed a more incisive attack. I could not convince folks here our weakness was on offense. Sure our defense was average, but could get by. Where we lacked was another midfield controller, and a scoring winger. Barcelona had both on the trade block in Sanchez and Fabregas.
I kept saying over and over, forget adding defense. We had Komps, Demi and Nastacic with Denayer as the fourth. What we needed was more control in midfield and and a scoring winger.
I was scoffed at. Told we had banged in over 100 goals that season and offense wasn't an issue.
I argued then that we scored more early on and tailed of drastically towards the end. Not to mention, Yaya scored 20 goals: lots of Free kicks in there. This was unlikely to repeat. And he was showing signs of slowing down that was covered by the goal explosion.
I recommended selling Yaya at his production peak (albeit not his performance peak), getting Fabregas to run our offense and adding Sanchez biting edge.
Most thought I was an idiot. It was so glaringly obvious back then. But most here bought into the "Beast" Mangala and the "Octopus" Fernando hype.
I said it then, these are good players, Sanchez and Fabregas were great players. Heard Fabregas wanted London, fair enough. Sanchez on the other hand was just waiting for any taker.
Seeing as we were into him when he went to Barca, and the guys who got him for Barca now worked for us, how the fuck did we lose out on such an easy gimme? Tunnel vision I suppose :-(
Like I said, I'm ammusedly annoyed :(