Ball retention, short-passing, defending, and ability to dribble the ball out of tight areas are his obvious strengths. Still cant finish but whatever. He's an upgrade because under pressure our MF just hoofs the ball wherever the fuck cuz the next option is just standing still.
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Agree with the others but I wouldn't say defending is one of his strengths at all. He puts in a nice slide tackle here and there but he doesn't run much. I've watched one Chelsea match this season but I did see a good amount of him when he was in Madrid. He doesn't track back enough and he doesn't cover a defensive zone very effectively IMO.
Kovacic is one of my biggest regrets of the post-treble dark years which we may or may not have come out of. I was furious when Mancini sold him, essentially traded him for that retard Kondogbia (typical dipshit Mancini move, all brawn, no brains). But I feel like he's essentially a marginally better player than when he left here. I feel like the rate of his growth has completely plateaued by spending 3 years on the bench. Doesn't matter if he's training with Modric and Kroos everyday, he would've improved twice as much if he'd played 30+ games of 90 minutes per year for those 3 seasons. I wanted him to do that here but whatever.
That said, I am completely unconvinced about bringing him back. I feel he'd be best suited to playing in Brozovic's role, but I truly believe Brozovic is a better player and far more useful to us right now anyway. What I want is a new starting midfielder to play alongside Brozovic.
It's really difficult to predict how we'll spend at the end of the season. I'm not one of those guys who's so skeptical about Suning and thinks they'll cheap out, even though we'll (hopefully) be in the CL places, and
finally free from that motherfucking settlement agreement. Nor am I so optimistic to think that we'll be able to compete with the likes of PSG and Man City for top talents like De Ligt or established stars like KDB.
I think realistically, we can expect either: a Rakitic-like move, which is to say, a (slightly) aging player from a big team, like we did tried with Vidal/Modric last year. Or, another Perisic-like signing - an experienced player of around ~€25m who has been playing consistently well at a medium-sized club, who we expect to take the next step up and become a core player at our club, like Perisic did in his first 3 years. Like Candreva did for 1 year before turning to unusable shit.
Ironically, Kovacic fits that second criteria pretty well. He's the right age, probably not too expensive, and has 'enough' experience. But his last few seasons have been too disappointing to me. In my eyes, he's a massive gamble and if we brought him back there's a big chance he could just be weak and ineffective and eventually fail to make the cut.