Pedri is coming off an injury from a challenge. Have his minutes affected him before? Sure, but that’s not all down to the club. Either way, again, Gundogan doesn’t fit into Flick’s setup and he’s on a 19 million contract. We also have Frenkie, Fermin and other players in midfield on top of Pedri and Gavi. No matter how you cut it, getting rid of Gundogan was the right move. We never should have signed him to that sort of contract in the first place and we shouldn’t have him in the team now regardless of the situation, so any complaints about letting him go are misplaced. To the original point, you’ve got people complaining about letting him go and they’re also people complaining about other signings. You can’t have it both ways.
As for swapping Gundogan for Olmo, I won’t disagree with that point, but I’m also not entirely in agreement with that sentiment either. When it comes to Olmo, I wouldn’t have signed him. He chose to leave the club when he was a kid, luxury signing and his injury history is worrisome.
As for the planning, there was planning. That said, I think they’ve done a poor job in the market. However, where I disagree with most Cules’ opinions is that we’ve done poorly in the market more so down to who we haven’t sold than who we haven’t bought. When you were banging on about Nico Williams a few weeks ago, while he was on vacation and nothing was going to be done about his signing anyway, I was talking about the lack of player sales. And to this day it’s still a problem. To be fair, it’s not an easy market, but we should have offloaded Lenglet, Garcia, Martinez, Fati, Ferran, Gundogan, maybe Raphinha, maybe Lewandowski, etc. Some of those players are hard to offload for various reasons, but there was literally no focus on this just a few weeks ago if the press are to be believed. So for me the planning is an issue, but we’re in a position to have to sell to buy, and not that we’re offloading a player who should be offloaded a lot of supporters are complaining.
