Basing it on 5 actually being average and not the now common practice of the mean average of 5 being deemed terrible, I'm giving it a generous 3/10 and that's only because we kept the likes of laporte and Bernardo and even that was seemingly because nobody would stump up the money.
Sugar coat it however you want but our main priority was a striker, Pep said so, khaldoon said so every single city fan said so and we failed to sign one, that's a monumental failure by any measurement.
We didn't get played by Levy all summer, Pep himself said Levy refused to even entertain the prospect of a bid for Kane so why the hell did we hang around until a week before the window closes just twiddling our thumbs seemingly waiting for Charlie Kane to force Levy to deal with us with no backups?
Aside from the striker, I think we really needed a holding midfielder too but no movement there either and I think we will regret that before the season is done. I don't believe left back is a problem.
We paid a release clause set so high that the villa board didn't believe it would ever be met for a left midfielder which is arguably our strongest position in the side. Personally, I don't think he's better than our other options, I think Foden is already better and that gap will only widen, and sterling is vital to the squad for the sheer fact he's the only runner in the side. if others think he's better than foden/sterling fine but I don't think anybody will say he's a significant upgrade and that's kind of the bare minimum you'd expect when you break the British transfer record on a player.
Of the outgoings, got some OK money for squad players. can't say any of them are good prices, but none terrible either. I'd say most are on the low end of reasonable, didn't manage to get rid of all of them though. would have liked to have seen that money coming in reinvested in more of those kind of players to fill the coffers for future seasons, particularly once we had decided against a striker.
Overall, its a failure of a window and that is blown up more by the fact that 2 of what we expect to be our closest rivals had incredibly strong windows and have strengthened significantly. We still have the capabilities to have a good season and win trophies but what we've done is tied one of peps hands behind his back and thrown him in the ring to fight.
