serghei
Senior Member
Salah went up a whole tier at Liverpool. He was good before, at Liverpool he became great. If he was incredible at Roma he would've cost around 70-80m. He was half that. Malcom money or so.
I agree players should do most of their developing before Barca. It's normal. But there has to be some developing at Barcelona too. And it's just not happening for any player, even De Jong. When De Jong is named best midfielder in the Champions League at Ajax, and his level goes down at Barcelona, there's no doubt that the club is the problem.
We are not signing nobodies, to develop them fully at Barcelona. Never said that. Nor we should do that. We are signing high rated young players, like Dembele, Arthur, De Jong. But every young talent we sign performs worse for us than for their weaker initial teams. That's the opposite of what happens at teams who are managed and ran well.
Anyway, this whole talk can be simplified in a couple of sentences. In my opinion, it is not only the job of the player to make his way at a new club in bad conditions. The clubs is equally responsible to ensure the proper conditions are met, so that the player can naturally move up a level. Or else, players will stagnate, or even worse, decline.
It seems to me based on your comments, if I'm not misinterpreting them, that you put this weight almost exclusively on the younger players. If we keep this mentality, that the younger players have to somehow force their way into a team that is catering only to veterans and amigos, then we'll waste years and a lot of money, and will still get nowhere.
To sum up, I believe that what you say can happen with some players, but there are also talented players who could make it with proper management and a solid team structure, and we're missing out on this whole group. We're limiting ourselves by setting up too high individual standards for these young players, while our team structure is decaying more and more, season by season.
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