Nicolas Pepe: The Nutmeg Express!

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

It’s pretty simple.

He has individual ability and a really good strike on him but he’s erratic and inconsistent even on a good day. That’s the player he is in the PL. Now you can spend the time trying to utilise his ability and negate the shortcomings in hope that it turns out worth the trouble—and it could be—possibly at the expense of another more straightforward and reliable option, or you get rid of him. Using him the way we are now will not bare any fruit. This is not complicated.

 

[Macho]

My friends from the Athletic...are actually my friends today! Interesting piece.

Spoiler: Transfer recruitment only as good as the manager

Flop after flop after flop.

He had to go.

It was the summer of 2016. Aston Villa had endured the worst campaign in their history and suffered relegation from the Premier League with a pitiful 17 points — 22 short of survival.

By common consent, Villa’s major problem was a disastrous transfer window 12 months earlier. They’d sold Christian Benteke, their top goalscorer in each of the previous three seasons, and Fabian Delph, their captain, for a combined £40 million, and replaced them with a series of flops. Therefore, much-maligned head of recruitment Paddy Riley was on his way, with few Villa supporters sorry to learn of his departure.

Four and a half years on, though, it’s worth looking at those ‘flops’ Riley signed.

Central midfielder Idrissa Gueye started seven of the 11 games for Paris Saint-Germain as they got to the Champions League final last season; Jordan Amavi has been a regular at left-back for Marseille, who qualified for this season’s Champions League as Ligue 1 runners-up; Jordan Veretout is enjoying a fine season at Roma, scoring seven league goals so far this season; while Adama Traore has become one of the Premier League’s most exciting players with Wolverhampton Wanderers and Jordan Ayew has performed well up front for Crystal Palace.

And suddenly, you realise Riley’s “disastrous signings” were not actually disastrous signings. They were signings who performed disastrously for Villa, of course, but the fundamental problem was surely not the recruitment itself. Riley had replaced two key players with five talented youngsters who would become, by the standards of a club fighting relegation, genuine stars.

The problem was the management. Tim Sherwood had performed well as caretaker boss the previous season, taking over in the February and steering Villa, who were in the bottom three when he was appointed, to survival and into the FA Cup final. As their long-term manager, though, he was a questionable choice, and Sherwood didn’t know what to do with Riley’s signings.

And this is the reality of a club’s recruitment department — their successes and failures are not judged according to their own work, but that of the club’s manager.

At the other end of the spectrum from Villa, take Liverpool’s successes in recent years, which are often held up as a great example of a transfer committee making a succession of great decisions.

Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane were highly rated, but few expected them to be winning the Premier League’s Golden Boot. Andy Robertson and Georginio Wijnaldum had just been relegated with Hull City and Newcastle United — they were superb pickups by Liverpool’s transfer team. Alisson and Virgil van Dijk were top-class players who slotted in immediately. More great work.

But Liverpool also have a genuinely great manager who consistently improves individuals. This is the most important part of Liverpool’s signings looking good. It doesn’t actually matter, to Jurgen Klopp, whether they’re new signings or not. He did the same with Trent Alexander-Arnold, plucked from Liverpool’s youth ranks and Jordan Henderson, a survivor of previous regimes (and once considered a flop to be lumped in with Stewart Downing, Charlie Adam and Andy Carroll).

It’s what Klopp did at Borussia Dortmund, taking decent players such as Marcel Schmelzer, Kevin Grosskreutz and Jakub Błaszczykowski and turning them into title winners. Had they been signed immediately before Dortmund’s first title-winning campaign, they would have been hailed as genius signings. The man actually hailed as a genius signing at the time, Shinji Kagawa, looked sensational for Dortmund under Klopp but has never replicated that form since.

Whatever scouting networks, data analysts or negotiation skills Liverpool’s recruitment department have are less important than the fact they are handing these signings over to a manager who makes players better. Diogo Jota has done extremely well for Liverpool since his summer move from Wolves, but if you took any other wide player from a midtable club — Raphinha of Leeds United, Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha, Newcastle United’s Allan Saint-Maximin or even Nicolas Pepe of Arsenal — and plugged them into the champions’ team they’d probably look great too.

Pepe is a perfect example of a footballer who has underperformed at his new club and is considered a disastrous signing. So disastrous in fact, that after his first season Arsenal supposedly launched an internal investigation into precisely how they ended up paying Lille so much money for him.

This investigation focused on errors in the recruitment process. Whether Pepe was ever worth £72 million is debatable but he’d enjoyed a superb 2018-19 campaign as Lille finished as Ligue 1 runners-up, including absolutely running the show throughout a 5-1 thrashing of champions PSG in April 2019. It’s worth noting that his replacement (of sorts), Victor Osimhen, signed for Napoli this summer a similar fee. That, it seems, is roughly the going rate.

Arsenal’s investigation would be much better off considering that Pepe was going into a shambolic side performing terribly under Unai Emery. It should show that almost every other player was underperforming, that Pepe was handed his full debut in a game where Emery used a midfield diamond against Liverpool’s rampaging full-backs at Anfield, which caused them problems down the flanks. Arsenal’s system constantly changed and Pepe’s team-mates constantly changed.

Pepe has underperformed, but the insistence on immediately attributing this error to Arsenal’s recruitment department seems to ignore several important steps along the way.

In recent years, we’ve witnessed the rise of the big-name sporting director, those given credit for a club’s successful recruitment — to the extent they themselves are often scouted and poached by rival clubs.

It’s somewhat rare, though, for a sporting director to be successful at two major clubs.

Take the near-legendary Monchi, who spent 17 years working wonders at Sevilla, and was widely given great credit for their consistent Europa League success before leaving for Roma in 2017.

Monchi spent less than two years in the Italian capital, where he received criticism for almost everything, from selling Salah too cheaply to wasting money on the likes of Javier Pastore and Steven N’Zonzi. He promptly returned to Sevilla, like an underperforming striker who can’t adjust to playing in a different league and therefore quickly retreats to familiar surroundings; Monchi is now not necessarily a ‘guru’ but actually the Iago Aspas of sporting directors.

Sven Mislintat earned a similar status at Dortmund before finding life at Arsenal more difficult and departing after just 14 months amid internal power struggles, but the main tentpole of his approach was simply signing ex-Dortmund players.

Most strikingly, Steve Walsh received rave reviews after finding Jamie Vardy, N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez for Leicester City. He then joined Everton on the back of that group’s unlikely 2015-16 title success and seemingly oversaw the recruitment of players including Morgan Schneiderlin, Davy Klaassen, Sandro and Nikola Vlasic as the Merseyside club bombed dramatically.

It’s worth remembering Kante, arguably the most successful signing the Premier League has witnessed in the last decade, had actually been Walsh’s back-up option for a central midfield role at Leicester in 2015. His first choice? Nantes’ Veretout, who instead chose Villa and became one of the ‘flops’ of Riley’s apparently disastrous regime.

We essentially have no idea whether Walsh is as good as Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester made him look, as bad as Ronald Koeman’s Everton made him look, or somewhere in-between.

There is evidently great skill in talent-spotting, and tremendous expertise is required to manage a huge network of scouts, but unless a sporting director has performed impressively at a good number of clubs, it’s somewhat difficult to say, with any real certainty, that they are excellent at their job.

It would be a bit like enjoying a fantastic dinner at a good restaurant (those were the days) and exclaiming, “compliments to the produce buyer!”

I swear to God I never wrote this.

 

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

‘Recruitment only as good as the manager’?

I stopped reading right there tbh

 

[BigPoppaPump]

‘Recruitment only as good as the manager’?

I stopped reading right there tbh

Usually I think you're an idiot but you got it spot here.

Management really doesn't matter as much as money and ownership, it's about money spent and the quality of players at your disposal. Chelsea aren't successful because of their managers but because of Roman Abramovich.

 

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

Usually I think you're an idiot but you got it spot here.

Management really doesn't matter as much as money and ownership, it's about money spent and the quality of players at your disposal. Chelsea aren't successful because of their managers but because of Roman Abramovich.

Glad you think I’m spot on, but you ruined it by shapeshifting into @Makingtrax . I think it’s nonsense because it’s like saying your toast is only as good as the eggs you buy. Which is of course a steaming pile of old ****.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Glad you think I’m spot on, but you ruined it by shapeshifting into @Makingtrax . I think it’s nonsense because it’s like saying your toast is only as good as the eggs you buy. Which is of course a steaming pile of old ****.

@Makingtrax is an intellectual who is taken for granted on this forum, a true man of wisdom who I admire. I agree with most of what he says tbh, and if I agree with you it's usually a sign of intelligence.

 

[Gooner416]

My friends from the Athletic...are actually my friends today! Interesting piece.

Spoiler: Transfer recruitment only as good as the manager

Flop after flop after flop.

He had to go.

It was the summer of 2016. Aston Villa had endured the worst campaign in their history and suffered relegation from the Premier League with a pitiful 17 points — 22 short of survival.

By common consent, Villa’s major problem was a disastrous transfer window 12 months earlier. They’d sold Christian Benteke, their top goalscorer in each of the previous three seasons, and Fabian Delph, their captain, for a combined £40 million, and replaced them with a series of flops. Therefore, much-maligned head of recruitment Paddy Riley was on his way, with few Villa supporters sorry to learn of his departure.

Four and a half years on, though, it’s worth looking at those ‘flops’ Riley signed.

Central midfielder Idrissa Gueye started seven of the 11 games for Paris Saint-Germain as they got to the Champions League final last season; Jordan Amavi has been a regular at left-back for Marseille, who qualified for this season’s Champions League as Ligue 1 runners-up; Jordan Veretout is enjoying a fine season at Roma, scoring seven league goals so far this season; while Adama Traore has become one of the Premier League’s most exciting players with Wolverhampton Wanderers and Jordan Ayew has performed well up front for Crystal Palace.

And suddenly, you realise Riley’s “disastrous signings” were not actually disastrous signings. They were signings who performed disastrously for Villa, of course, but the fundamental problem was surely not the recruitment itself. Riley had replaced two key players with five talented youngsters who would become, by the standards of a club fighting relegation, genuine stars.

The problem was the management. Tim Sherwood had performed well as caretaker boss the previous season, taking over in the February and steering Villa, who were in the bottom three when he was appointed, to survival and into the FA Cup final. As their long-term manager, though, he was a questionable choice, and Sherwood didn’t know what to do with Riley’s signings.

And this is the reality of a club’s recruitment department — their successes and failures are not judged according to their own work, but that of the club’s manager.

At the other end of the spectrum from Villa, take Liverpool’s successes in recent years, which are often held up as a great example of a transfer committee making a succession of great decisions.

Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane were highly rated, but few expected them to be winning the Premier League’s Golden Boot. Andy Robertson and Georginio Wijnaldum had just been relegated with Hull City and Newcastle United — they were superb pickups by Liverpool’s transfer team. Alisson and Virgil van Dijk were top-class players who slotted in immediately. More great work.

But Liverpool also have a genuinely great manager who consistently improves individuals. This is the most important part of Liverpool’s signings looking good. It doesn’t actually matter, to Jurgen Klopp, whether they’re new signings or not. He did the same with Trent Alexander-Arnold, plucked from Liverpool’s youth ranks and Jordan Henderson, a survivor of previous regimes (and once considered a flop to be lumped in with Stewart Downing, Charlie Adam and Andy Carroll).

It’s what Klopp did at Borussia Dortmund, taking decent players such as Marcel Schmelzer, Kevin Grosskreutz and Jakub Błaszczykowski and turning them into title winners. Had they been signed immediately before Dortmund’s first title-winning campaign, they would have been hailed as genius signings. The man actually hailed as a genius signing at the time, Shinji Kagawa, looked sensational for Dortmund under Klopp but has never replicated that form since.

Whatever scouting networks, data analysts or negotiation skills Liverpool’s recruitment department have are less important than the fact they are handing these signings over to a manager who makes players better. Diogo Jota has done extremely well for Liverpool since his summer move from Wolves, but if you took any other wide player from a midtable club — Raphinha of Leeds United, Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha, Newcastle United’s Allan Saint-Maximin or even Nicolas Pepe of Arsenal — and plugged them into the champions’ team they’d probably look great too.

Pepe is a perfect example of a footballer who has underperformed at his new club and is considered a disastrous signing. So disastrous in fact, that after his first season Arsenal supposedly launched an internal investigation into precisely how they ended up paying Lille so much money for him.

This investigation focused on errors in the recruitment process. Whether Pepe was ever worth £72 million is debatable but he’d enjoyed a superb 2018-19 campaign as Lille finished as Ligue 1 runners-up, including absolutely running the show throughout a 5-1 thrashing of champions PSG in April 2019. It’s worth noting that his replacement (of sorts), Victor Osimhen, signed for Napoli this summer a similar fee. That, it seems, is roughly the going rate.

Arsenal’s investigation would be much better off considering that Pepe was going into a shambolic side performing terribly under Unai Emery. It should show that almost every other player was underperforming, that Pepe was handed his full debut in a game where Emery used a midfield diamond against Liverpool’s rampaging full-backs at Anfield, which caused them problems down the flanks. Arsenal’s system constantly changed and Pepe’s team-mates constantly changed.

Pepe has underperformed, but the insistence on immediately attributing this error to Arsenal’s recruitment department seems to ignore several important steps along the way.

In recent years, we’ve witnessed the rise of the big-name sporting director, those given credit for a club’s successful recruitment — to the extent they themselves are often scouted and poached by rival clubs.

It’s somewhat rare, though, for a sporting director to be successful at two major clubs.

Take the near-legendary Monchi, who spent 17 years working wonders at Sevilla, and was widely given great credit for their consistent Europa League success before leaving for Roma in 2017.

Monchi spent less than two years in the Italian capital, where he received criticism for almost everything, from selling Salah too cheaply to wasting money on the likes of Javier Pastore and Steven N’Zonzi. He promptly returned to Sevilla, like an underperforming striker who can’t adjust to playing in a different league and therefore quickly retreats to familiar surroundings; Monchi is now not necessarily a ‘guru’ but actually the Iago Aspas of sporting directors.

Sven Mislintat earned a similar status at Dortmund before finding life at Arsenal more difficult and departing after just 14 months amid internal power struggles, but the main tentpole of his approach was simply signing ex-Dortmund players.

Most strikingly, Steve Walsh received rave reviews after finding Jamie Vardy, N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez for Leicester City. He then joined Everton on the back of that group’s unlikely 2015-16 title success and seemingly oversaw the recruitment of players including Morgan Schneiderlin, Davy Klaassen, Sandro and Nikola Vlasic as the Merseyside club bombed dramatically.

It’s worth remembering Kante, arguably the most successful signing the Premier League has witnessed in the last decade, had actually been Walsh’s back-up option for a central midfield role at Leicester in 2015. His first choice? Nantes’ Veretout, who instead chose Villa and became one of the ‘flops’ of Riley’s apparently disastrous regime.

We essentially have no idea whether Walsh is as good as Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester made him look, as bad as Ronald Koeman’s Everton made him look, or somewhere in-between.

There is evidently great skill in talent-spotting, and tremendous expertise is required to manage a huge network of scouts, but unless a sporting director has performed impressively at a good number of clubs, it’s somewhat difficult to say, with any real certainty, that they are excellent at their job.

It would be a bit like enjoying a fantastic dinner at a good restaurant (those were the days) and exclaiming, “compliments to the produce buyer!”

I swear to God I never wrote this.

I didn't renew my subscription two weeks ago and they now start pumping out quality? **** off.

 

[Heskey]

My friends from the Athletic...are actually my friends today! Interesting piece.

Spoiler: Transfer recruitment only as good as the manager

Flop after flop after flop.

He had to go.

It was the summer of 2016. Aston Villa had endured the worst campaign in their history and suffered relegation from the Premier League with a pitiful 17 points — 22 short of survival.

By common consent, Villa’s major problem was a disastrous transfer window 12 months earlier. They’d sold Christian Benteke, their top goalscorer in each of the previous three seasons, and Fabian Delph, their captain, for a combined £40 million, and replaced them with a series of flops. Therefore, much-maligned head of recruitment Paddy Riley was on his way, with few Villa supporters sorry to learn of his departure.

Four and a half years on, though, it’s worth looking at those ‘flops’ Riley signed.

Central midfielder Idrissa Gueye started seven of the 11 games for Paris Saint-Germain as they got to the Champions League final last season; Jordan Amavi has been a regular at left-back for Marseille, who qualified for this season’s Champions League as Ligue 1 runners-up; Jordan Veretout is enjoying a fine season at Roma, scoring seven league goals so far this season; while Adama Traore has become one of the Premier League’s most exciting players with Wolverhampton Wanderers and Jordan Ayew has performed well up front for Crystal Palace.

And suddenly, you realise Riley’s “disastrous signings” were not actually disastrous signings. They were signings who performed disastrously for Villa, of course, but the fundamental problem was surely not the recruitment itself. Riley had replaced two key players with five talented youngsters who would become, by the standards of a club fighting relegation, genuine stars.

The problem was the management. Tim Sherwood had performed well as caretaker boss the previous season, taking over in the February and steering Villa, who were in the bottom three when he was appointed, to survival and into the FA Cup final. As their long-term manager, though, he was a questionable choice, and Sherwood didn’t know what to do with Riley’s signings.

And this is the reality of a club’s recruitment department — their successes and failures are not judged according to their own work, but that of the club’s manager.

At the other end of the spectrum from Villa, take Liverpool’s successes in recent years, which are often held up as a great example of a transfer committee making a succession of great decisions.

Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane were highly rated, but few expected them to be winning the Premier League’s Golden Boot. Andy Robertson and Georginio Wijnaldum had just been relegated with Hull City and Newcastle United — they were superb pickups by Liverpool’s transfer team. Alisson and Virgil van Dijk were top-class players who slotted in immediately. More great work.

But Liverpool also have a genuinely great manager who consistently improves individuals. This is the most important part of Liverpool’s signings looking good. It doesn’t actually matter, to Jurgen Klopp, whether they’re new signings or not. He did the same with Trent Alexander-Arnold, plucked from Liverpool’s youth ranks and Jordan Henderson, a survivor of previous regimes (and once considered a flop to be lumped in with Stewart Downing, Charlie Adam and Andy Carroll).

It’s what Klopp did at Borussia Dortmund, taking decent players such as Marcel Schmelzer, Kevin Grosskreutz and Jakub Błaszczykowski and turning them into title winners. Had they been signed immediately before Dortmund’s first title-winning campaign, they would have been hailed as genius signings. The man actually hailed as a genius signing at the time, Shinji Kagawa, looked sensational for Dortmund under Klopp but has never replicated that form since.

Whatever scouting networks, data analysts or negotiation skills Liverpool’s recruitment department have are less important than the fact they are handing these signings over to a manager who makes players better. Diogo Jota has done extremely well for Liverpool since his summer move from Wolves, but if you took any other wide player from a midtable club — Raphinha of Leeds United, Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha, Newcastle United’s Allan Saint-Maximin or even Nicolas Pepe of Arsenal — and plugged them into the champions’ team they’d probably look great too.

Pepe is a perfect example of a footballer who has underperformed at his new club and is considered a disastrous signing. So disastrous in fact, that after his first season Arsenal supposedly launched an internal investigation into precisely how they ended up paying Lille so much money for him.

This investigation focused on errors in the recruitment process. Whether Pepe was ever worth £72 million is debatable but he’d enjoyed a superb 2018-19 campaign as Lille finished as Ligue 1 runners-up, including absolutely running the show throughout a 5-1 thrashing of champions PSG in April 2019. It’s worth noting that his replacement (of sorts), Victor Osimhen, signed for Napoli this summer a similar fee. That, it seems, is roughly the going rate.

Arsenal’s investigation would be much better off considering that Pepe was going into a shambolic side performing terribly under Unai Emery. It should show that almost every other player was underperforming, that Pepe was handed his full debut in a game where Emery used a midfield diamond against Liverpool’s rampaging full-backs at Anfield, which caused them problems down the flanks. Arsenal’s system constantly changed and Pepe’s team-mates constantly changed.

Pepe has underperformed, but the insistence on immediately attributing this error to Arsenal’s recruitment department seems to ignore several important steps along the way.

In recent years, we’ve witnessed the rise of the big-name sporting director, those given credit for a club’s successful recruitment — to the extent they themselves are often scouted and poached by rival clubs.

It’s somewhat rare, though, for a sporting director to be successful at two major clubs.

Take the near-legendary Monchi, who spent 17 years working wonders at Sevilla, and was widely given great credit for their consistent Europa League success before leaving for Roma in 2017.

Monchi spent less than two years in the Italian capital, where he received criticism for almost everything, from selling Salah too cheaply to wasting money on the likes of Javier Pastore and Steven N’Zonzi. He promptly returned to Sevilla, like an underperforming striker who can’t adjust to playing in a different league and therefore quickly retreats to familiar surroundings; Monchi is now not necessarily a ‘guru’ but actually the Iago Aspas of sporting directors.

Sven Mislintat earned a similar status at Dortmund before finding life at Arsenal more difficult and departing after just 14 months amid internal power struggles, but the main tentpole of his approach was simply signing ex-Dortmund players.

Most strikingly, Steve Walsh received rave reviews after finding Jamie Vardy, N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez for Leicester City. He then joined Everton on the back of that group’s unlikely 2015-16 title success and seemingly oversaw the recruitment of players including Morgan Schneiderlin, Davy Klaassen, Sandro and Nikola Vlasic as the Merseyside club bombed dramatically.

It’s worth remembering Kante, arguably the most successful signing the Premier League has witnessed in the last decade, had actually been Walsh’s back-up option for a central midfield role at Leicester in 2015. His first choice? Nantes’ Veretout, who instead chose Villa and became one of the ‘flops’ of Riley’s apparently disastrous regime.

We essentially have no idea whether Walsh is as good as Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester made him look, as bad as Ronald Koeman’s Everton made him look, or somewhere in-between.

There is evidently great skill in talent-spotting, and tremendous expertise is required to manage a huge network of scouts, but unless a sporting director has performed impressively at a good number of clubs, it’s somewhat difficult to say, with any real certainty, that they are excellent at their job.

It would be a bit like enjoying a fantastic dinner at a good restaurant (those were the days) and exclaiming, “compliments to the produce buyer!”

I swear to God I never wrote this.

Solid read. Agreed, @Macho, you certainly didn't write this.

 

[Heskey]

I didn't renew my subscription two weeks ago and they now start pumping out quality? **** off.

Good thing we have the Established Shill™ here to get you hooked again, @Macho.

 

[Heskey]

On Pepe in general, I think I've said it a few times before but will happily mention again, that we've done him great dishonor with the changing of managers, systems etc. I can't see how it's all down to him. And the people slagging his technique and ability with the ball makes me laugh. He did so much good stuff last season with the ball at his very feet - imo. what he's strongest at.

There's literally a 13min video on Youtube of him just dribbling past players from last season alone.

Perhaps he doesn't fit our style of play, fair, but it's not down to him being untalented. He's shook, clearly, and lacking confidence which is key for a player of his type which ends up with him missing chances he'd usually bag or challenge the keeper on though. Auba has been looking aside of himself this season similarly.

 

[Macho]

‘Recruitment only as good as the manager’?

I stopped reading right there tbh

If you read it you'd have seen some good points.

Look no further than your boi Willian as an example of what a manager can do for ones career. Arteta is literally the only reason that guy sees any game time.

Most would absolutely bin that guy judged on what he's served up in an Arsenal shirt.

 

[Macho]

Chelsea aren't successful because of their managers but because of Roman Abramovich.

Removing the convo away from Pepe for a second, with the talent Chelsea have at their disposal should they be doing better?

 

[Riou]

Removing the convo away from Pepe for a second, with the talent Chelsea have at their disposal should they be doing better?

I feel they have overspent on a lot of their players tbh, they aren't in my top four in terms of player quality...you?

 

[Macho]

I feel they have overspent on a lot of their players tbh, they aren't in my top four in terms of player quality...you?

I think Havertz is a fantastic talent.
Werner I am not too fond of, but he can be effective.
Tierney > Chilwell goes without saying but buying an England international that's just how it goes.

Put it this way, an experienced top manager would struggle to fit in all those guys. A number of them, first season in the prem etc - Lampard had no chance really.

Manager counts for sure.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Removing the convo away from Pepe for a second, with the talent Chelsea have at their disposal should they be doing better?

I’m sure they should but I think Lampard is an amateur and not ready for this level, but all it takes is some good form for everything to change so it’s hard to say.

Top 4 would be a success for them, as you said integrating all these new players is a tough task. Not sure Lampard is up for it.

 

[Jack_the_boy]

At present, Pepe is a £72m backup to an academy product. This whole situation is unsustainable.

 

[Trilly]

Willian has a history of success

So the logic is to keep playing Willian based on what he showed at Chelsea?
Okay let’s play Pepe based on what he showed in France or Özil based on what he showed under Wenger. :confused:

 

[Trilly]

Usually I think you're an idiot but you got it spot here.

Management really doesn't matter as much as money and ownership, it's about money spent and the quality of players at your disposal. Chelsea aren't successful because of their managers but because of Roman Abramovich.

Yeah agreeing with that guy is a slippery slope. Of course management matters you weirdo.

 

[Makingtrax]

@Makingtrax is an intellectual who is taken for granted on this forum, a true man of wisdom who I admire. I agree with most of what he says tbh, and if I agree with you it's usually a sign of intelligence.

 

[AbouCuéllar]

So the logic is to keep playing Willian based on what he showed at Chelsea?
Okay let’s play Pepe based on what he showed in France or Özil based on what he showed under Wenger. :confused:

Well, as we know, success in the premier is not the same as success in Ligue 1 (though I don't like to make these kind of comments because I think with good scouting usually Ligue 1 players translate well enough, it's just that Pepe was poor scouting, he had a great penalty-inflated/counter-attack inflated season that should've raised flags with the scouting department).

The argument is the one I made before:

But if we got him operating on even half the level he was last season he would be a massive upgrade on Pepe. Considering it's unlikely he's just had a sudden cliff-peak decline over the course of 3-4 months that's naturally the more sound bet (try to get him operating at least at a 50-75% level that he was last season) for a manager.

Anyways, the reality is that they both look to be poor signings, but yes, I do honestly hold out much more hope of Willian being of some use to us than Pepe and I think Arteta can have strong arguments for thinking the same.