mancity1 said:
Points well made and success at all the levels of the club are taken into account but part of Txiki's tenure rides on the success of the first team and his appointments and the ability of their appointments to achieve their targets which includes playing personnel as well.
All players must have targets , personal ones , collective ones , professional ones.
Targets are movable in fact and sometimes over a smaller portion of time for a variety of reasons but at the end of the day you are measured by those targets ( not goals as they are not targets don't confuse to two because sometimes they overlap and sometimes they are mutually exclusive ).
You can rightly criticise individuals that do not understand the roles and responsibilities of individuals at a organisation and defend them and your view on whether they are the Rolls Royce of DOF 's and CEO in the modern game of football a view which is hard to debate beyond subjective measures or inexact and conflicting boundaries in any case by any objective measure you choose to measure it by if you can find objectivity at all.
You will have trouble arguing your case if your decisions and the decisions based on those decisions fail to meet their targets often enough and fail to meet the expectation of your employers.
Even if Txiki was not solely responsible for our recruitment policy since he joined us in the eyes of his employers it would not necessarily follow that he not be held to account by his employers should that policy fail to meet the standard required.
I think we're on the same page here. I don't mind people criticising them for unmet goals in proper context or praising them for met goals. My issue is when people criticise them for things that are nothing to do with them.
I don't know what Soriano's goals were when he was signed up with the expansion of the CFG, the successful completion of the CFA and the new extension, the title last year and the amazing revenue growth then "he's done alright, no need to criticise" is fair if not underrating his performance.
Txiki's job was to take our squad and improve it when judged on a year by year basis as that's what the DoF job actually is when you simplify it. When people say things like "Fucking Txiki, look at De Jong and now we have Fernando!" it irritates me because of the about ten different problems with that idea. With the constantly shifting landscape beneath our feet in terms of player development, you can't just throw away people because they have a bad year or spunk money on people because they've had a good year though you also cannot rely on players who were good three years ago. Oh and you have to buy and sell responsibly with the club's money weighing up that long term cost for the price and do your Cost Benefit Analysis just like anyone else.
My problem here is that on a talent level our squad is better than last year. Our big priority was to get a young centre back who could forge a relationship over a few years with Kompany for number one. Our second priority was to get a right back who could take some pressure off of Zabaleta who was overplayed previously. Our third priority was to get a striker for our fourth choice to allow the "2 for every role" idea in a 2 striker system. Our fourth priority was to get a midfielder if we wanted to switch to a 3 man but could play in a 2 to help create further competition in that area which would in turn allow Milner more flexibility to play on the wings.
We did all of that, and not only did we do it but we did it for under £49m as limited by Financial Fair Play. Mangala provided competition to Demichelis with the idea of a long term replacement so his priority number one was nailed on as done. Sagna came in as a highly experienced right back who could compete with Zabaleta. Job done again. We didn't initially get a striker and this absolutely cost us over the winter period - a bad mark against Txiki which he rectified with the signing of Bony; if people were criticising him for missing a striker in summer then they've absolutely got a point and it was definitely a mistake. Our fourth "it would be nice" priority would be to bulk the centre midfield and make us less reliant on Yaya. We had £12m left after the above (though you could argue we had £37m for both a midfielder and a striker due to the Negredo money that later went on Bony) and we got what we could get with that money which was Fernando - another player who all of the scouts on here said was a midfield enforcer just like what we needed. Again, people looking him up and watching him at Porto weren't wrong and suddenly he's wank, he just hadn't had his performances this year. Oh and we bought in Lampard for nothing aswell.
Overall he had 5 priorities with 2 urgent ones in the long term centre back and backup right back departments. 3 of those priorities fell firmly into the "squad depth" department and we spent very little on them until Bony came available in Jan and we brought in another quality player. The missing priority was the left wing department which wasn't addressed but understandably so as number 5 on the shopping list for the squad when we have been financially limited and were struggling on a quality midfielder for price.
Most would believe this to be an excellent job if we won the league. Unfortunately the performances from the squad this season didn't achieve that
which is entirely on the manager. No-one can argue that our squad is not good enough to win the league, the problem was extracting that performance from them. Again, not the Director's fault.
The two black marks against him this season are the lack of striker in summer which I think is fair and the lack of left winger which I think is probably a bit unfair given the restrictions we had. Everything else he has done has been great in terms of addressing problems in the squad.
Too often people confuse form and talent. Txiki's job is to buy talent. Pellers' job is to make them show form. We haven't bought any untalented players, they are all capable Champions League class players. In fact all of them outside of Bony who was the leading goalscorer in the league HAS Champions League experience and quite a lot of it.
This is what I mean when I say about people criticising him for shit that isn't his fault and that he hasn't done.
