OK, so we can argue over the semantics of what "top player" means. Personally, I was convinced by what I saw at Ajax and so far at Barcelona to believe that, while he's not a generational talent, he'd be a very good player in a balanced team.
I know it sounds like I'm making excuses for players. But I want to see in the team a framework and a system that are in place no matter who plays. And for years, we've been nothing but an incoherent sum of individual players, with some managers applying short term measures to keep this team from falling apart at some point or another. Going from worse to worse with each passing season.
You say sure, team is misfit and all, and continue. I stop there. That is priority zero. Everything goes from this. The team should be fit, motivated, coherently put together (to want to run, to be able to run, and to know how to run). These are all basic things for any serious competitive team. Then we can talk about individual performances. It's about management in the end. If the management is crap, the team will play like crap probably. The cliche that football belongs to the players is total crap. There's a whole world of football that exists outside of the 90 mins you see each week or twice a week on the telly.
For me, top players are the players that play well consistently and are decisive when most of the things in a team are working, so a platform has to be there and that platform doesn't depend on what the players do on the field. Until we have a team that is working collectively, I usually give the benefit of the doubt to players when I rate them. Call it leniency, finding excuses, or whatever. I'm the opposite of BBZ, who starts rating every player from zero coins and undervalues the role of the club. You are closer to BBZ (just giving him as an example because he is extreme about this), in that you also apply a lot of pressure on our players in terms of expectations very fast.
