Respectfully you seem to be poorly informed over the Enzo transfer. His profile is as good as any young midfielder in the world's bar Bellingham - and we ultimately paid €1m more than the release clause to allow for a more favourable payment structure and avoid the colossal tax and FFP penalties associated with actually triggering the clause.
Sure - €1m is a lot in a vacuum but it hardly constitutes us paying "over and above" when you consider the fact that we avoided something like €40m in taxes and would not have been able to amortise Enzo's contract making it impossible to comply with FFP.
Also on top of the payment terms being negotiated I'm pretty sure I read some rant from Rui Costa where he said he didn't think it was fair that a part of the agent fees now had to come out of Benfica's end of the money (guessing a 50/50 split between us and them) but if we'd triggered the full buy-out then any agent fee would have come entirely from us.
Of course the sensibility of paying a 120M€+ for a midfielder to begin with is open to discussion/argumentation but considering the circumstances around the sale I'm not really sure if 'paying more than the clause' is something to slate the club with because triggering the actual clause would have cost even more.
I look at Chelsea’s signing’s and despite all the money spent and the ages and lengths off contracts, I think you might has well have burnt the money. There’s some good players potentially in there such as Felix and Mudrich but Felix is a loan. Chelsea did this a few years back when they went on a big spree and it got them nowhere now they’ve done it again. Surely they’d have been better in the summer spending on 5 class players like Kane, Casemiro, Bellingham two x defenders etc.. The only annoying thing is that they’ll go after Man Utd/ Arsenal targets. I honestly believe they’ve bought their players based on press hype. Koulibally has been hyped in the press over here for years yet no one actually even bid for him. I can see why now
The reason nobody actually bid for Koulibaly before was not because he wasn't good but because Aurelio De Laurentiis the Napoli owner was only willing to sell for 100M+ and when that guy says something like that you can be sure he really means it.
He simply moved to the PL too late in his career but because of his contract situation an earlier move would have been very difficult to facilitate. I'd say 3-5 years ago he'd have been worth all the hype and was an actual world class player but I look at him now and there's something seriously wrong with him. There's been some media talk he's struggled to settle to life in London and that's affected his performances but not sure if I'm buying that because he looks so clumsy and that's more to do with the physical and not the mental side of the game.
I have to admit I honestly thought Koulibaly would still be good for us in the short term to fill the gap left by Rüdiger's departure. The idea was to get an established player in the position to give the club more time to think about a longer term solution over the next couple of years but he's been nothing short of a catastrophe and the club have clearly given up on him too given the Badiashile signing, who I have to say looks quite good based on the first few games he's played.
Can only hope there's a club somewhere who would be willing to take him off our hands in the summer but any departure will still cost us a lot of money given his big salary. The most likely outcome is he'll stay another season and maybe then we'll find a solution where he can return back to Italy because after two years away he'd again be eligible for the Italian tax breaks for footballers (50% reduction) which would make the salary issue much easier to solve.
If only the club had the balls to go for Badiashile already in the summer instead of Koulibaly we'd be much better off now but Koulibaly was Tuchel's recommendation because of his vast experience and we're now suffering the consequences of that decision.
