Quote Originally Posted by I am invisible View Post
Yeah, I get what you’re saying, and if he was actually providing quality depth then this would be a different conversation. But he isn’t, and the situation looks pretty straightforward to me.

I started writing a response last night, outlining all of our financial woes and why we should care - the lack of CL football, the lack of crowds, the owners buying up our stadium debt, the mass redundancies, the fact that we had to ask the players to take a pay cut, the fact that we’ve had to apply for a £140m bridging loan to see us through to May, the current squad trimming, etc - but having slept on it I actually think all of that is irrelevant. If we want to be a top club again then we need to have the highest standards and that means regular audits on the squad, regardless of our financial health - anyone who isn’t delivering value should be moved on and replaced.

I appreciate that form and circumstance play a big role here, and that players need to be assessed over a reasonable period of time (half way through their current contract might be a good time to review), but by the summer Pepe will have been here 2 years - if he isn’t showing that he’s a CL quality player by then (which is what you expect for those wages) then I think we need to cut our losses and reinvest whatever we can salvage.
Good points. But on the other hand I suppose we need to look at on costs. Pepe costs £100K per week - making him our 10th highest wage earner, but the 7 next highest earners are all within 20/25K of him. We overpaid for Pepe transfer wise, undoubtedly, and there is a good argument that he is not a good fit for our system, but which of the players we have would we like to see play instead of Pepe on the RW. Definitely not Willian. I would like to see AMN tried there more regularly, but after that?

We can no longer look at the player's transfer fee. This is water under the bridge and not really relevant going forwards.

Would the money we are likely to get for Pepe in the current market, plus 100K wages buy a better player? Perhaps - but unlikely that this would get a ready made player in his prime who would not be first choice.

I still think that Pepe could make the breakthrough, given that following a period where we have not played with the fluency and imagination that would suit Pepe's game, we are starting to become less rigid and predictable. I would like to see Pepe used more for the rest of the season before writing him off - and lets face it it is only playing time that will potentially preserve some of his re-sale value if we do decide to sell.