Similar situation with a different market ATM. Like I said, it sucks to buy strikers now. There are very few out of favour options that would be a good fit for what you need and for the benchwarming you need them to do.
Lol why? Choupo-Moting came on against Liverpool and nearly scored if I remember correctly. Every striker with a bit of experience is capable of being a positive influence. That's all you need him to be. A 19 to 22-yr old La Masia kid will just crash and burn. Every time.
Brits really are mostly mongoloids, unless they go to a country where English is culturally treated as a dialect of sorts (anywhere away from the Mediterranean) and is spoken widely due to less traditional westernised popculture. Owen lived in a hotel for a year. Bale still hasn't learned Spanish after 6 years and if you can't mold into a foreign culture, as a non-extraordinary player, there's no hope you can understand the different style of football and be able to fulfill basic tasks on the pitch.
Of course it is haha! Like I said, the absolute minimum is communication and knowing where you're best useful on the pitch. If you're out there and you don't know what your teammates are asking you to do then you're just a fitness robot. Only physical freaks do OK in these circumstances since by any country's standards they'd be above average and would rinse fullbacks at top-speed. If you're average though, you really do need to know the language of your peers. None of your forwards, bar maybe Coutinho, speak English.
We are talking about loans here and while the market is not flooded with opportunities there were and are to this very moment much better or at least better options out there than a 32 year old KBP who has not played even 25 games as an attacker in his career and who is not a goalscorer.
Look, KPB on his own is not such a bad or horrible player on his day. Even today when he is approaching the end of his career and is no longer as dynamic as he once was. I would be less negative if he was an actual fit in terms of being that proven goalscoring veteran full of experience that the local press were writing about repeatedly in recent weeks. This is basically my main criticism and the fact that there were/are better options out there.
Mújica and Ruiz were never real options (in my ideal world) but I would prefer them over half-arsed solutions such as this one until proven wrong which I happily would like to be, as that would mean that KBP would do his job, much like Paulinho ended doing and even more than just that as it turned out that we earned a 20% profit on him 12 months later.
I know. Tell me about it. Spain is flooded with them (English people) and although you have many stereotypes (some accurate some less so), being a footballer and interacting with a close-knitted and well-functioning group like ours with quite a few English speakers, is not really that much of a challenge. Even the thickest of the thickets footballers would be able to survive. Take a look at Vermaelen. He has been at the club for close to 4 seasons now and he is incapable of speaking Spanish for more than 10 seconds at a time and yet he seems to be a very well-liked figure although he mostly is seen together with Cillesen (fellow Flemish/Dutch speaker) and Ter Stegen.
Did not stop Bale from delivering when it mattered the most, in particular in the CL.
I thought we were talking about intelligence here? But yeah, of course it helps knowing a very similar language but not sure if that makes KBP a bette footballer or a better fit. Doubtful.
