[quote author=peterhague link=topic=42097.msg1192442#msg1192442 date=1286742565]
[quote author=mark1975 link=topic=42097.msg1192411#msg1192411 date=1286737847]
[quote author=peterhague link=topic=42097.msg1192351#msg1192351 date=1286719200]
money isn't 'wasted' if it's recouped, that's just a fucking fact, undeniable - that's why i don't like people putting a figure of £80m or whatever on what he wasted. they were wasteful in other ways, absolutely, and definitely brought doubt on rafa's judgement, so that's a valid criticism.
but money recouped is absolutely important in analysing overall how bad a signing is: take aquilani, if we do manage to get £16m back (big if, yes) then that tells us that he's basically a quality player who wasn't suited to the english game. signing diouf and flogging him for what, £3m was it, tells us he was just a shit player full stop, ditto with cheyrou and diao.
clearly neither are the sort of signings we want, but it's much better to make recoverable mistakes on a player's suitability/adaptability/whatever, than on his absolute quality.
basically i think it's misleading to say he wasted £80m. it implies we're out of pocket to that tune, which just isn't true.
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Peter, this argument is fucking ridiculous. Of course it was wasted because the money was there to spend on the team and improve us, and ultimately it failed, so of course it was 'wasted'. We recouped just over half on Keane and were denied the chance to reinvest it in the squad. If he'd got it right in the first place we would have been better positioned and he might have kept his job. Really, as Brendan said, who gives a fuck whether we got money back? Ultimately over the course of two Summers we invested £80m in players and only Johnson is anything approaching a success (and even that is debatable).
It's not like the point is that he threw £80m away, that's not the point at all, the point is he had £80m to invest and he fucked it up.
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right, i'm not suggesting he didn't fuck up to whatever extent, just that there's 'fucking up' and fucking up. you can't seriously deny it's better to make a bad signing of a good player you can sell on at a small loss, than to make a bad signing of a bad player you make a huge loss on, can you?
just to prove my point's valid - say in theory a player was signed one day for £20m, and over the next day the manager got cold feet and managed to sell hm back for £20m, would you then say 'he wasted £20m'? or would it be more like 'well that was a fucking mess, but at least we didn't lose any money'?
to blame benitez that we were unable to spend the money from the sale is wrong. that is a separate issue, and the fault of the owners. oh, and from what i can gather, the fee for keane was expected to rise to £16m very quickly, so that's probably a more accurate estimate than £12m. that would mean we got 84% of the keane fee back, rather than just over half as you claimed.
as for who gives a fuck whether we got the money back - i do, and you can bet the club do as well.
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Of course I care about us getting the money back, in relation to the fact that it softens the blow of us making a hash of a signing, but it's besides the point. You argue it's the board's fault we didn't get the money, I'd argue if Rafa had gotten it right in the first place there would be no issue. No one could account for the recession and the way the club went under, which is why it's imperative for a club of our stature to get it right the first time, because unlike Chelsea and City, we don't have money to throw at money. Yeah, all managers make mistakes, he could be forgiven for more than a few, but when you invest £80m over two Summers it's a fair expectation to have that at least 50% of what was spent has something to show for it, on the pitch.
