I don’t think the talent pool is small. It’s that the talent pool earlier (say 10-15 years ago) had much greater variance in terms of quality – players ranging from absolute shit to average to fucking brilliant. That variance is gone, and there’s a greater standardisation in player quality. No one truly brilliant anymore, but no one truly shit either.
This is probably a function of the massive improvement in coaching across the world. The sheer number of modern and progressive coaches has increased substantially, but they all coach the same way – focus on pressing, structure, fitness, efficiency in chance creation, and reduction of risk-taking and wastefulness.
The net result has been a larger pool of players who’re technically decent, fitter and stronger, but an overall reduction in the number of players who are other worldly.
In terms of recruitment, what that means is your focus is not finding someone who’s genuinely brilliant, but simply finding someone in their athletic prime with enough first-team experience to handle big game pressure. Thus the focus on finding players in 21-25 age bracket, who have 2-3 years of first team experience at mid-table / Europa League level clubs.
This is evident from our needs as well. Our biggest needs are at the three positions where our age profile doesn’t work anymore: CB (van Dijk - 33), LB (Robertson - 30), DM (Endo – 31) and RW (Salah – 32)
Seen from that perspective, it is baffling why our strategy always seems to be either our primary target or no one at all.