A problem I don't think is getting enough attention is how little any of our players seem to improve in their time here. We sometimes have a tendency to look at some of our younger players and see them not as the players they are now but as the players they could become, yet they don't seem to follow that expected upwards trajectory.
Nelson has been in and out of the team and has stagnated since bursting into the scene at youth level. Xhaka and Mustafi still make the same silly mistakes they used to. Lacazette is scoring less than when he first got here. Bellerin isn't particularly better than when he broke through. Torreira started off promising and has tailed off. I could go on and on.
This obviously poses several problems. Beyond the fact that it means the team doesn't improve much year by year (and rather even depreciates in quality), it means that the value of these players is slowly dwindling because they're meanwhile getting older, so we're getting less money out of sales. Given the financial model of our club, that's pretty catastrophic.
There are likely many reasons for this: the rotation of managers over the past 3 years, the poor quality of our coaching staff, a bad "culture" in the club, misuse of players, too much/little rotation of players, maybe even our poor interpretation of these players' abilities in the first place. But we aren't going to get far if we don't find a way to fix this, because new signings aren't going to do us much good if we can't improve some of the pieces we already have in the first place. We can't buy a whole new team.
What are your thoughts?
Nelson has been in and out of the team and has stagnated since bursting into the scene at youth level. Xhaka and Mustafi still make the same silly mistakes they used to. Lacazette is scoring less than when he first got here. Bellerin isn't particularly better than when he broke through. Torreira started off promising and has tailed off. I could go on and on.
This obviously poses several problems. Beyond the fact that it means the team doesn't improve much year by year (and rather even depreciates in quality), it means that the value of these players is slowly dwindling because they're meanwhile getting older, so we're getting less money out of sales. Given the financial model of our club, that's pretty catastrophic.
There are likely many reasons for this: the rotation of managers over the past 3 years, the poor quality of our coaching staff, a bad "culture" in the club, misuse of players, too much/little rotation of players, maybe even our poor interpretation of these players' abilities in the first place. But we aren't going to get far if we don't find a way to fix this, because new signings aren't going to do us much good if we can't improve some of the pieces we already have in the first place. We can't buy a whole new team.
What are your thoughts?