Name all these awful CB's that Txiki has signed for us.
He certainly presided over us paying too much for Mangala; although I don't think he is an awful player. We'll never know but I reckon if Managa had had two seasons playing 30 games per alongside Vinnie, we'd have a somewhat different view of Eli.
If you are going to tell me that Ota, Stones and MDM are awful, I'm going to disagree.
Well yes MDM was pretty awful against top class opposition, Stones at 50m is ridiculous and I like him and think he will be a good player for us, 42m for Mangala is a terrible bit of business, if you want Ota is not as good as he looked in Spain, his defending is far more rash and he spent his first year sliding about on his arse, improved somewhat on that last season.
https://bitterandblue.sbnation.com/...i-begiristains-history-in-the-transfer-market
Chyrgynskiy - £22m - Defender (22 yo). Highly rated, played 12 games for Barcelona before being sold the year after signing. Barca ate a loss of £9m on the player.
Henrique - £7m - Defender. Who? Really, who? A 21 yo Brazilian defender. Released after 3 years having never played a game for Barcelona but had loan spells at various European clubs.
Gabriel Milito - £17.6m - Defender (26 yo) Signed from Zaragoza, Gabriel played for 3 years for Barca notching 48 appearances for the club as a squad player. A useful utility plug and play type, the size of the fee and the number of games played leaves me underwhelmed or to give this signing a pass.
Some good, some bad. Alves and Pique are the standout signings of Txiki's reign. We also saw some cheap depth players who went on to play a lot of games for Barca, so kudos there. But there were some mistakes, none bigger than Chygrynskiy at £22m, Caceras at £14m. Milito at £17m, and Henrique and Edmilson cost in the £8m range. It's hard to argue that any of that £70 odd million was particularly well spent.
Txiki was excellent on the cheap signings and poor on the expensive one's save fopr Dani Alves.
I have added this one in just for the relevance
Gerard Pique - £4.4m - Defender (22yo) A clear success story, was sold by Ferguson who, so the stories go, believed
J Evans to have greater potential. An easy signing to make, bringing home the 'stolen' youth product. A great price too
At the end of the day nobody will convince me signing JFE for nearly 30m is good business.