Maybe. But first we need a plan. We can achieve a great team without spending another half a billion, but the issue is that we must know exactly what we need to do with the money. I don’t think City have necessarily bought right off the top shelf -except for in the full-back area. It is clear plenty of time was saved by Pep arriving with a vision and getting straight to what he needs. Sane and Sterling are key to how he plays, stretching the pitch. Can you say that Mkhitaryan was bought with similar deliberation? He was likely purchased as we ‘need a creative player’ - but specifically, there has been little evidence as to how he fits as part of any bigger plan. This is why he was first played on the wing, then played centrally. It’s as if we were just trying to get lucky and it all clicked into place for him.
At the very top of the game now, it seems more planning is required. Just having a 4-2-3-1 of ‘good players’ likely won’t win many major trophies if the plan doesn’t go beyond ‘having a balance of attacking and defensive players’ of as high a calibre as you can find. That’s what we look like. Which is why we win against most teams who have inferior footballers to us, but against the better teams, and top coaches, we are coming up short. Everything about us is about the strength of the individual players. I see very little demonstration that any of our players would look worse if removed from our unit. Typically, we say the opposite of them. And that’s the problem. Spending hundreds of millions and not extracting maximum value from the individuals has been an issue for too long. That can only work if we were the only rich club and could get away with it on the basis that we can attract a calibre of player so much better than our rivals, that 70% productivity will win titles. That’s not the game anymore.
We haven’t even realised this is the main problem. It’s right under our noses. There’s a reason we make comments like ‘he looks amazing now but if he comes here, he’ll turn to shit’. From an offensive perspective, we have been poorly coached for years, relying on getting the most expensive forwards to just win games. That cannot continue. We need a brave enough coach with a proper vision for how the entire unit should operate. I don’t even care if that is as a ‘defensive’ team - just let all XI men know how they fit into this vision, and be purchased and coached deliberately. Then we may get somewhere.