Where does he fit in?
Who do we sell to make way for him?
We currently have 19 foreign players, that is not including Echeverri and Reis who are under 21 and don't count within the numbers in a PL squad.
We can only have 17 foreign players within a Premier league squad.
We still need a right back, too.
There's a list of ageing players (Gundog, Stones etc) & players who evidently have no future at the Ethad (McAtee, Grealish etc) who we need to jettison. Any incomings now rely on those players being culled.
The issue is that when push comes to shove, Pep will fall back on his tried & tested treble winners. We should've started our succession planning in the immediate aftermath of that incredible feat.
However, we spent the next two summer & winter windows tinkering around the edges, as Guardiola continued to put his faith in his treble squad having enough to go again, when the signs were clearly there that our squad needed to evolve.
All it took was for Rodri's body to break & the wheels fell off our season. Stones, Gundog & others have stated it's their intention to remain at the Etihad this coming season. The question is, in whose best long-term interest is that in?
At some point we have to trust & put our efforts into blooding Gonzalez, O'Reilly, Lewis, Reis, Khusanov, Bobb, Echeverri etc. My fear is that Pep will patch up & send out Gundog, Kovacic & Stones etc, at the expense of our new younger recruits.
At best, most of them will be on the bench, not even make the matchday squad, or be sent out on loan. It's such a waste. The old guard are essentially blocking the new recruit's path to regular first team football by slurping up valuable squad places. This is the reason our squad is bloated.
Can you make sense of why we've bought all these players, & still haven't moved on the players they were presumably brought in to replace? I can't...
