Mateo Kovačić

Jombi said:

You of course include yourself in the "everybody", right? Why did you hail their signings and their mighty midfield?

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I hailed their midfield in sense that they have both technique, strength and pace.
Unlike our midfield which has only technique.

So, I am talking about a balance of their midfield, not about the age of their players or about the prices of their players.
People here were hailing RM's board for buying:
1. young
2. cheap midfielders

My post was related to Tricky's:

Trickykid said:

Another RM signing where we apparently missed out badly and were schooled by the superior transfer strategy of Los Merengues which would herald the coming of decades of RM dominance.

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Where I agree with him.
Again, I liked Real's midfield balance (technique, pace and strength) and NOT their transfer strategy.

Regarding Kovacic, I had hopes about him when he was at Inter and wanted him here.
But he has some sort of beta-male problems and he is not a leader.
He has enough of talent, but he is just not a kind of a guy who will take the ball and reigns in his hands.
And he will never be able to fix those mental issues. That's just who he is. Not a leader.
He can play well only when the whole team is playing well and when he has players/leaders like Modric/Rakitic/Kroos who will fight with the opponents and pressure, alongside him.
If you remove them, he will suck as a key player.

BBZ8800 said:

I would add:
1. everybody hailed RM's awesome young signings in Isco, Kovacic, Asensio and similar. They will dominate the world forever.
Yet, when you remove Zidane and CR7 from maths, they are quite average.
2. also, everybody hailed RM's mighty midfield, which was the reason for their CL's success.
Again, remove Zidane and CR7 from maths and their midfield and results are not out of this world at all.

Zidane and CR7 were 50% of their success.

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Ah, so it turns out it wasn't the workhorses.

BBZ8800 said:

I hailed their midfield in sense that they have both technique, strength and pace.
Unlike our midfield which has only technique.

So, I am talking about a balance of their midfield, not about the age of their players or about the prices of their players.
People here were hailing RM's board for buying:

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So you are criticizing everybody but do not include yourself in this as usual?

So their midfield is really just shit, forget what you have said in the past, and it was all down to Zidane and Ronaldo really?

For most of the last 5 years Real's midfield has been great and their defenders have typically been great. Modric has played a ton the last 18 months, and is getting old, and Kroos had a bad world up hasn't come out of it.

Until Real settled their midfield, Barca was much better than them across all comps, Ronaldo or no Ronaldo. Croatia didn't get to the WC finals because of their strikers or defenders.

The acquisition of already developed Kroos and acquisition/emergence of Casemiro, Varane & Carvajal was as critical to Real's success as any form Ronaldo hit and confidence/stability offered by Zidane.

te amo barca said:

Looked like a bright talent in his Inter days, either his transfer to Madrid ruined him (hi Wolfe) or he just was not that great to begin with.

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He wasn't that great to begin with. He seemed to be a hot prospect but beside some flashy moves and some great matches here and there he didn't prove he has a bright future ahead of him. He lacked consistency and nobody exactly knew what was his best position. Inter fans have mixed feelings about him but now many don't think selling him was a bad idea, even though they thought the opposite back then.

He looks lifeless at Chelsea. Barkley will probably bench him soon.

Havent watched Chelski that much, but from what i have seen, he is just...running around and....well, just running around?

EdmondDantes said:

He looks lifeless at Chelsea. Barkley will probably bench him soon.

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Called it.

Chelsea are playing Man City and he's on the bench.

Hope he improves just a little bit, so Chelsea might be interested to buy, dont want him back here.

[tw]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">.<a href="https://twitter.com/Mateo_Kova23?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Mateo_Kova23</a> is here to stay! &#55357;&#56908;</p>— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) <a href="https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/1145726097306324997?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 1, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>[/tw]

The rumoured price is around 50m

Cant believe how much better they sell their players. We needed to sell atleast 3 players to gather 50m. We are buying so wrong and selling for nothing.

cro-man said:

Cant believe how much better they sell their players. We needed to sell atleast 3 players to gather 50m. We are buying so wrong and selling for nothing.

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They are rumoured to sell Raul De Tomas to Benfica for 20m. A 25 year old nobody.

cro-man said:

Cant believe how much better they sell their players. We needed to sell atleast 3 players to gather 50m. We are buying so wrong and selling for nothing.

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Aye. And it stems from how you deal with clubs when buying players actually. Nice combination of terrible transfer targets and the massive amounts of leaks from the club structure feeding the media leech 'insiders' like Gerard Moreno (or whatever his name was) who leak dumb shit mid-negotiations just to get the first scoop over how much who is going to earn that a whole herd on BarcaForum eats up posting tweets from some random accounts at any opportunity

Targeting has-beens or flops like Vidal, Murillo and Boateng as a last resort option..
Ending up fluffing the negotiations with any higher profile target starting with Coutinho, Dembele, through Rabiot, all the way to Griezmann..

Literally only guys like Arthur and De Jong who care about the colours end up joining you with no faff, because they really want to be a part of the club so negotiations are positive. In each other case there's some negativity for one reason or another.

It's what you get when you settle for Bartomeu as a president. Can't expect anything else. Nobody respects you as a business, so why would anyone pay up to take Denis Suarez off your hands?

[MENTION=20446]Sorin[/MENTION]
As for Raul De Tomas, he's a relatively young striker with 15 goals in La Liga and another 30 in Segunda. A bit of respect.

Been impressed with him of late.

Should be a starter for Croatia without a doubt (if he's not already).

Has anyone done less to win four champions leagues? I don't recall him being important in any of those campaigns.