to stick with the small squad mantra when the squad is getting on with age, KDB injury prone big time, the Gundo that left is not the Gundo who came back, and we new we will have little time for proper pre season due to Euros(where this club sent the most players) and also we knew that new format CL and CWC is bringing quite a lot more games into the schedule. these are all things we knew.
thing is we only signed Gundo as he became surplus to requirement at Barca, otherwise we wouldnt have even made an offer. he had a contract there but wanted to get rid at the time thought only due to financial reasons to be able to sign and register Olmo but now looking at Barca it had tactical reason as well. we play much slower football and lot less pressing than Flick's Barca, and Gundo looks slow in this as well.
so who knows if this unplanned Gundo transfer doesnt provide itself early August out of the blue our only signing is Savinho on his own?
that with the previous summer planning of going from Bellingham, to Rice, to Paqueta to Nunes, we certainly could have made our squad much stronger past two summers making much better decisions.
even the fact we only looked at some Japanese guy at Celtic as potential attacker and brought in a free agent who was released by WHU (has anyone heard of him since), I dont understand the logic. Feels a bit Txiki checked out early.
record sales, record net spend, its all great, but this squad is older than it was, and also weaker at least with JA's input.