Didn’t the things that I mention happen? Can you honestly not see how difficult it would have been to beat City and Ajax without our best players and how exceptional that manager must have been to engineer that even with the luck. With a squad that most people are saying was done!
That’s the issue
Chelsea didn’t luck their way to the final, they were extremely hard to beat hence they also won an FA cup that year. It helped that Munich bottled the final you can’t win the Champions league or even get to the final with just luck.Chelsea in 2012 say ‘hello’
In cup football anything can happen
You’re right but in general as Bill has shown, the Cups are still generally won by the clubs with the biggest resources.
Yep
That isn't actually true in reality..... If a new player comes in on big money players tend to be happy as it gives them a reference point in their next set of negotiations, we were upping our wage bill at that point anyway. Wijnaldum's contract at Liverpool was £500k a year more than Sissoko's at Spurs... So over the 5 years it has actually cost us more to have Sissoko than it cost Liverpool to have Wjinaldum.
Maybe?.... The fact that we didn't offer Saudi Sportswashing Machine the required transfer fee means we'll never know.
The clubs finances were fine for us to pay £5m more for Sissoko several weeks later in the window though. That is what I mean by our transfer business often having no logical sense and us needing a proper DoF and Levy moved as far away from them as possible.
So your saying we should just pay more wages
Not sure it is actually possible to have a rose tinted view of a run to the CL final?
That isn't actually how it works though. Players tend to know their value in the market through their agents. Contracts are negotiated based on that market worth. Just because Mane comes in on £90k a week, doesn't mean that (e.g) Ben Davies is automatically worth more money.
We should ABSOLUTELY pay more wages for better players. We have the lowest wage to turnover ratio in the whole PL. Better players tend to earn higher wages, hence why just about every trophy in ever league in Europe goes the highest wage payers. Very, very few clubs operate a rate as low as the 40-45% that we operate at. Instead of paying for a brilliant player in Mane we got Clinton Njie (or was it Nkoudou?) had to pay them and lose a bunch of transfer fee on them and also had to sign Bergwijn on big money years later.... Probably would've actually been cheaper to have bought Mane (who was already proven in the PL).
I guess we remember it differently. They were extremely lucky against both Barca and Napoli as far as I recall…
I think certain players we know that we're not going to be able to compete for. Especially at present when we have quite a few reinforcements to make and can't afford to be spending £70m on a single player
But we have upped the wages we pay as out turnover has increased havent we?