by Dumbledore7 » Thu Apr 26, 2018 12:33 am
You need a coach to plan a squad. Higher management set the objective, speak to the coach well before the window, talk about how the coach wants to achieve the objective, figure out the players you need, identify gaps, and then plan transfers with the help of a sporting director and/or scouting system.
Pep at City and Mourinho at United are the best examples of this. Remember that infamous leaked photo of Mourinho’s drawing board with Pogba in the line up long before he was signed? That’s squad planning, whether the plan was effective is a different story.
The closest we ever got to attempting this model is with Pep and we got very close to it. Pep wanted his players, but there were some clashes (Neymar) and that’s fine. We figured it out. De Bruyne, Sterling, Sané were all wanted and we ended up with Costa. Cool. But Pep realised we can’t keep cutting corners and he jumped ship. Rummenigge was desperate for him to stay but despite a supposedly massive offer, we couldn’t offer complete alignment over transfer targets.
We did similar with van Gaal and Ancelotti but their ideas are so misaligned. Pep got along well, but his demands were deemed too extravagant.
The Goretzka signing is a double-edged sword. On one side, he’s a top top player who I’ll happily take in the team no matter what. However he was also signed during a time where no one knows what coach he’ll play for. From a footballing sense, Tolisso was already around and their profiles are the same - it feels like it’s inevitable one of them will be wasted. That’s the “typical Bayern signing” - buy anything that sounds good at a bargain, but I can’t see how much foresight went into it (i.e. planning). This is the old Bayern way, the policy that indeed brought us top players like Gomez and Neuer, but it was arguably a simpler time where you can get away with “collect as many good players as possible, have the coach do what they can, and rinse the coach when it stops working”.
It seemed that we wanted to go away from that by hiring Pep. Rummenigge and Uli also seemed keen to take him for the very long term to change our old approach but we’re not ready to change. This approach is the same as what made Barcelona buy Andre Gomes, Paco Alcacer.
I would hope Kovac is allowed to build out his squad. If something doesn’t fit, fire immediately and keep searching until we get someone like Pep who can be more aligned with our willingness to buy, to build the squad for more than 3 years. Standards have already dropped, and Kovac seems like a darling to the higher management. If the football’s not a disaster, let him stay for 5 years to give us some structure. The Pep gamble didn’t quite work, but with reduced expectation, and the hope of us realising that we need to rebuild, let’s try that gamble again.
Edit: and the higher management needs to take some sporting advise too. Didn’t want to pay Kroos the salary he deserved because they didn’t understand the value he brought (even when the coach was pass-crazy like Pep), ended up selling one of the best German players of all time for peanuts. Blunders like that need to stop.