Summer mercato 2015

[Ryo]

Rumor of the day that got me excited, we are looking at Laporte from Bilbao Athletic for defense. Holy crap, this guy is like one of the biggest defensive talents in Europe right now with all the big teams looking closely at him. I would trade both JM and Kondogbia for him, that's how talented this guy is and can be.

Read some good posts on the direction of the club and wanted to share my two cents on this. While I full-heartedly agree with the notion that a team built from the ground up with young people that have bright future is the absolute best strategy, that strategy really doesn't work for this Milan for a few reasons.

First reason is money. The team, as we all know, is now bleeding cash. Our new minority owners have mysterious backings, but we do not really know what their plan for the team actually is. As a result, the level of investment they will pump into the team is a difficult thing to predict. We might look at our 150M budget this year and think "we have a lot of money". But there is absolutely no sure thing that we could get anywhere near that kind of investment in the near future. What that means is, we need to figure out a way to become self sustaining quickly, and the first step to that is making CL to increase revenue. Young players are fantastic to have, but unfortunately they will take time to develop. By the time they developed into champions, our team could be knee deep in financial trouble again and have to sell all available assets for cash. Star players can deliver results quickly and are great for marketing. Real hasn't really won much for years, but they are a marketing and money making juggernaut because of all of their star power. And to me, that is the model that we are really imitating. A jolt of cash can quickly elevate us into elite level and make us more financially stable and attractive to market. Man City was a team nobody even remember existed until they got cash injection and all of a sudden became a major club.

Second reason is development. As many also know, we are absolutely horrendous at developing young players. Pretty much every single young talent we have had in the last 10 years have turned out to be either crap or shinned after going somewhere else. With the amount of money we are losing out every year not going to CL, management cannot take the risk of striking out on another batch of young guys any more.

Last reason is competition. While it might look like a daunting task for a 10th place team to make CL within one year, Serie A is such a wide open case that it could actually happen. I mean, look at Lazio, with the players they had, they almost finished second last year. It's the weakness of the competition giving management the desire to just load up and quickly rise through the ranks instead of being patient and waiting for internal development to take place. Not saying their strategy will definitely work, but it is not as impossible as we all seem to think either.

That view is short-sighted.

First off, like you mentioned, you don't know exactly how much cashflow we have from our new backers. It could be an investment of 150M every year for the next 5 years, it could be two big lumps of cash in the next two years and then a big fat nothing. But therein lays the bigger problem. How much of a difference would just one or two players be to our rag-tag squad right now?

Face facts, mate. Right now you're talking about aiming for top-tier players that cost minimum 30m each to get. Given the fact that everyone seems to know how much we have to spend, that means every player we will be trying to negotiate with will suddenly have a boost in value for no good reason as well. Just how many players can we bring in on a yearly like that? Not to mention the wages and stuff? I'd say max we can grab three "Big Name" signings per mercato. Just how much of a boost will that give us in itself is already a mystery. Our current squad is inconsistent as F, and even if we find a world-class centre-back pairing to compliment it, we still have issues controlling possession/pressuring opponents in the middle AND creativity on the attacking end.

The players we would be bringing in would be billed as the savior of our team. Not only is that a huge pressure for any star, but it also means that said player can absolutely NOT have a bad game EVER. Under those circumstances, just how many Top-tier stars do you think we would be able to attract to this team? NOT to mention the squad he will be playing with sucks balls AND the coach himself isn't any big name as well. Any player willing to join us in these conditions either
(a) Love this team very much (which doesn't happen that often), or
(b) is in it for the money.
All else considered, I don't think our past decade of achievements has brought in that many footballers as fans (specifically when it's obvious there is a rift between our Legends and the management as a whole, fans would side with the Legends who actually played their hearts out for the shirt), so if anyone was coming it, it's probably for the later. They'd be just as willing to jump on another ship (ala Ibra) if things weren't going well for the club, EVEN if it was their fault for not performing.

Lets not delude ourselves here, our squad right now isn't even built for a decent run in the Serie A league itself, much less in an additional competition. I don't care if we were beset by injuries and were "unlucky". Every other team has gone through injuries in one part of the season or another, you don't see Fiorentina, Napoli, Roma or even Torino and Lazio crashing to the lows that we're at now do you? And you expect two or three signings to get us into Europe next season?

First off, you say Serie A is an open case, but we only have two guaranteed CL spots, and an additional CL qualifier. Three spots. Take away Juventus and that's two spots left for the likes of us and the teams I mentioned above. Competition isn't as loose as you think it is.

Okay, say that we can only get into the EL instead, what would you do? Would you take the grueling competition seriously in hopes of winning it and using that as the platform to get back into the CL? Or do you focus on the league, just hoping for a top-3 finish? I recall that horror year when we had a full talented squad with the likes of Nesta, Maldini, Stam, with Sheva, Kaka, Pirlo and Gattuso at their prime, and still ended up both second in the League and the CL (fkn Liverpool). Even with a squad like that we weren't able to run away with things in the League to comfortably deal with things at home before focusing on Europe. Do you really expect an EL place would attract Top Talent to the squad when other teams get to play and win in the CL already?

We would go through an endless cycle of being stretched so far that we can barely compete on both fronts and end up without European football for the years after that. Our star players, whoever they may buy, will become either frustrated at the lack of help and choose to move to other places, or come down with injuries because they're being overplayed (because the rest of our squad is shit and cannot help much).

We'd be pretty much stuck in the same position as after Ibra and Thiago left us that year. It was only a surprise blessing that El Shaarawy had the half season that he did, and that we bought a performing Balotelli during that winter that we managed to get into Europe the subsequent year. But you cannot expect that sort of windfall every single year.

In the end, one-off spending without any sort of plan is idiotic.

In the current market, even if we had the money, we cannot do what Man City, PSG or Chelsea did, because of the inflation AND because those teams already had a base of decent players at their disposal before they upped their level to buy superstars.

Us right now? We don't even have that base. THAT is what we first need to build up before thinking of Top-Tier players for Instant Success.