Welcome Mateo Kovacic | Signing confirmed on a four-year deal

tolmie's hairdoo said:
When you are so press resistant, as the footballing hipsters like to call it, you can play for a very long time.

Basically, he can hold on to the ball using his intelligence, rather than having to run his balls off all day.

Same rule applied to Gundo.
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Hence David Silva getting Real Sociedad into the Champions League at his age.
 
Since I'm from Croatia, I'll say a few things about Mateo, considering that I follow him more than many of you.
Mateo Kovačić is a player with an incredible first step (don't know if you'll understand what i'm thinking about), an enviable level of technique, but he has a weak lung capacity and, in my opinion, unused potential. Although he played in big clubs (Real, Inter, Chelsea), he was never among the leading players in any of those clubs. I hope that under the leadership of Pep, he will achieve what the Croatian, but also the world football public expects from him.
 
Brunswick Blue said:
At 29 I'd say he's not a long term addition.
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I think that is very much intentional.

We have some of the most talented young footballers in the world coming through our academy right now, and two very talented midfielders that lead Sheffield United to the Premier League (Doyle especially was key to their success; you have to be decent to be your teams set piece specialist as a loanee at 21 years old).

We have quite a lot of young talent in key positions across our senior team already on top of that.

So we need to look at getting older quality stopgap players in for a few positions, including CM, so some of our most promising youth players (especially the 20-21 year-olds) see a clear path to the first team that won’t take them 4-5 years to realise.

Kovacic fits that profile, and I imagine will be happy to play a few years in this star studded side under the best football manager in the world (and in the top five in history for me).
 
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