Toni Kroos
a veteran, arguably the greatest passer of the ball in the 21st century, serial winner, someone who stands on a higher platform than Xavi and Pirlo for some people, retires at the peak of his powers. There was not even an attempt at bringing a midfielder with high level passing ability and experience.
Nacho Fernández
a veteran, an academy graduate, a serial winner, a great captain, bleeds Madrid, leaves the club. There was no attempt at bringing in a high profile center back with enough experience to lead the defense in the absence of Rüdiger or Militao, who already had suffered 1 ACL at that point.
Luka Modrić
a veteran, one of the greatest midfielders ever, serial winner, great captain, a colossus at even 38,39,40 years old leaves the club even though he wanted to stay here and retire, and there was not even an attempt at bringing a high profile midfielder with leadership and experience.
Carlo Ancelotti
a veteran, one of the greatest managers ever, a true professional, a father figure for the players, a legend who won us 3 Champions Leagues has to go through a season with insane injury problems, and he doesn't get any help from the board. No winter transfers, no nothing. Was he perfect? Of course not, but with the limited squad he had, he still got 84 points in the league. Will we get there after buying 4 new players and hiring 2 coaches this season? Let's see, we need 14 points in the 7 remaining games to even match that "horrible" season.
So, 4 veterans who are legends of this club leave and you don't feel the urgency to replace them, for what, maybe for a rebuild? Oh, I know about that rebuild attempt.
Xabi Alonso
a veteran player, an arguably new young coach who went unbeaten and won the Bundesliga, did something that could never be done before, and probably won't be done in a long while. You bring him with high aspirations and big dreams for the future. "Yes, he's a system coach, we will play organized football". "This is a long-term project". We do in fact play a lot more organized in the early season, but not all of Xabi's requests are fulfilled. We still did not bring any midfielders, we did not fill the gaping holes in our squad, we spent most of our money on rising talents from different leagues and took a gamble, we still did not find a way to not make our superstar divas upset etc.
Was Xabi tactically outclassed from time to time? Yes, obviously. Was sacking him going to change anything if you don't fix the internal issues in the squad? Definitely not. Xabi could not command enough respect in the dressing room, and was overpowered by Pérez' superstar team.
Finally, what I'm trying to say is that most of our issues, let it be the players having performance dips, let it be the players not acting as a team on the pitch in 90% of our games, or any other problem you can think of, all of them are caused by the chain reaction of Pérez' and the board's actions. Pérez won the ego battle by brining the best player in the world to his club, but he did not think this thoroughly. Our squad planning did NOT account for injuries, did NOT account for some of the best players to ever walk the earth leaving the team, did NOT account for huge egos clashing with the coaches' decisions. You can love or hate any player as much as you like, but you should not fail to see the main reason behind our failure.
by DonuandDeca
8 Comments
Perez should end his presidency honestly. Just a trail of failures in the last seasons aside from finances
deflecting the blame from your beloved kyky?for how long?people have clocked it
i expected a paragraph on *joselu
Careful now, the mods will come for you saying truths
Modric should have stayed another season. He is a revelation at AC Milan.
Xabi should also have been given more power and guarantees for two seasons. You can see the moment he was unable to control Vini everything went to shit. Can you imagine if Mou was fired five months into the 2010-11 season where would we be now?
I can tell you same shit is happening at my workplace now – some high performer is trying to consolidate power, getting his boss fired, new hires fired, because everyone loves him and is dependent on him, then he starts to become complacent and the entire team becomes weakened completely. Same politics going on now in the club. Same old shit in all of human history. And the president with the power to stop this let it happened.
Finally a good opinion. I’m TIRED that after we lose it’s 20 or more posts with variations in how they say: Mbappe Out, Vini Out, Bellingham Out, Trent Out, Mastantuono Out, etc etc etc. But Oh God how do they glaze when we win a game by their heroics.
Your thesis is right but your thoughts on players is just so wrong.
Starting with the midfield, no one will ever be Modric and Kroos but the idea was to give the midfield to Bellingham, Arda Guler/Valverde and Camavinga/Tchoumeni. You only have 2-3 central midfielders and the ones that we have are talented.
In the defense, they brought in Alaba, Rudiger and Huijsen. They also have players like Asencio coming in from the second team.
The issue is that the team is not balanced and is too focused on just getting the best players instead of building a team. It didn’t make any sense to bring in Mbappe while having Vini who at that time was probably the 3rd best player in the world and his best position also be Left Wing.
You can’t have Mbappe, Vini, Bellingham, Valverde, TAA roaming from their positions the whole match and then not play defense. The players have to learn to give for the team otherwise we end up loosing to bad teams because everyone looses focus.
Alonso was trying to make the players understand that but Perez just wants the shirts sales so he chose the players and that’s why we won’t have a trophy this season.
Some blame Mbappe, some blame Vini, some blame coach, but the real culprit is Perez who has failed to do the transition smoothly and signed out of position players that were not needed, only attackers don’t win you matches.