He has played 1 game so far and I would argue over half of the forum had never heard of him before we were linked. Lets not expect too much of him too soon. He may become a top player for us but its way too earlier to call him an improvement on our first team.
There is an obvious recency bias in quoting our finish to the season - we got the number of points we got, and our late season form was largely the result of players being injured and then coming back not in the same form. What our second team losing on pens last August or us losing to Man City in the fa cup has to do with our league chances this year I really don’t know. Chelsea are a basket case. Yes we lost heavily a couple of times - so what?
Applying your logic, I’ll bet you a tenner Villa don’t finish 8th.
TBF, there is a lot of correlation around spend and league position, has been for years, then you get the odd team that break that mould (we did it for a while), but typically, spend goes hand in hand with success.
There are exceptions with teams that punch well above their weight. The trick is to capitalise on that positive momentum, something we failed to do during the Poch years.
It's small enough that, if you were looking just at wages, we'd be just about equally likely to finish anywhere from 6th to 8th, with 9th probably being about as likely as 4th. Although I expect (not checked) that when you take amortised net transfer spends into consideration we get closer to Liverpool.
