I wasn't making sampling biases, my point is that pricetag is not inherently linked with quality. Your evidence was cherrypicking bad transfers and my point is that I could just as well cherrypick good transfers. Spending more or spending less does not inherently make a good or a bad deal. I never said there were guarantees when it comes to signing players or football in general, but don't try to make it sound like the indicator with the highest probability of success is pricetag. We're a professional football club, we should have people able to make technical decisions instead of hedging our bets on spending more and not ending up with a flop.
And what then, may I ask, is "inherently linked with quality"? Price is the only quantitive and objective criteria we have on our disposal, or you're trying to say all clubs are clueless and value and price players on a whim? Prices are based on quality, more or less. If there are cheap quality players, where are they? Where's the current Vidal, or Pogba? If we're going there, then we shouldn't be discussing transfers or coaches, as success stems from management and scouts, we have no way of knowing what's going on there, so I'm discussing how I'd like the club to behave in regards to acquiring talent in the current circumstances, in the sense of us not identifying young cheap talents for some reason.
Or maybe we just started doing that? With Caprari, Roger Martinez and Julian Illanes, hopefully.
Developing youth players is not inherent to being a selling club. That's the point you made and that's the point I replied to. Whether or not our Primavera are future world class players has nothing to do with that point. Developing youth players is not inherent to promoting a stream of players from the Primavera, and just for the record I've never said that we should do this. Saying that we shouldn't sell Benassi for 3 mill is not the same thing as saying that we should promote a lot of Primavera players to the first team.
We sold Benassi for 3M, cause no one wanted to pay more for him at that time, and here we go again. Torino saw something we didn't and had something to give to the player we didn't - playing time. But are you saying that Benassi would work better than Brozovic, for example, in our midfield? Let's not take our shit for gold, will we? Just like when we were selling Caldirola and Donati.
Bottom line is that we don't have the money to simply spend our way back to the top. That's all there is to it. If we could do it, by all means, do it. Developing youth players isn't out of preference but necessity. We should be building the best team within our financial constraints, and right now, if we want top talent we need to get it earlier and less developed. That's with young players.
Well, on the contrary, we now have money thanks to the new owners, who last year spent like 110M on two European bench players. We can't use that money tho, because of FFP, which doesn't make any sense. I'm not advocating for sheikh behaviour, but investment when acquiring a company in order to get it on its feet as fast as possible is the only way I see. I sincerely hope they'll renegotiate and loosen up a little our current FFP contract at some point, so they have freedom to use their funds as they please. Again, nothing against young players, buying and developing, farming out, whatever. We're doing it already, actually for a long time now, it just doesn't work miracles for some reason.
We've been in the green the last two seasons? And how does that contradict whether or not we've spent >100 mill on players?
We spent that money cause we had it in the first place, and when you draw the line, we're ahead with some quality players like Miranda and Perisic, that are certainly the backbone of the team for next season.
Pellegrini is definitely a better coach based on his work at Villarreal, Malaga, and his first year at City. The negative of changing Mancini for Pellegrini relative to preseason preparation is a lot smaller than the negative of keeping Mancini over Pellegrini next season.
You're cherrypicking examples again. Guess what, Barcelona appointed the "prodigy coach" in Guardiola and succeeded, Milan appointed the "ready for a step up" coach in Allegri (if not Lippi, Ancelotti at Juve in years past). The point is that these profiles are irrelevant to technical characteristics. Similar results at a similar level does not imply they share technical characteristics. Again, this is a professional football club, we shouldn't just be looking at age, results, and profile of the club managed and profile of the competition.
I could also say we hired Mancini and Rafa in the "proven coach" mould and it failed.
These profiles mean nothing.
You open that sentence with me cherry-picking and then you do exactly that. Pellegrini is
clearly a better coach? How, weren't those profiles meaningless? Yeah, Allegri came out of Milan, so what? They fired him, cause he was underperforming, he does win with other team now. We also fired Ranieri, now he won the EPL. Milan also "promoted" Seedorf and Inzaghi, care to say something about them, why didn't they turn out like Guardiola?
All I'm trying to say that there are a lot of factors in play, and again I'm only aiming to minimise the chances of failure with the hypothetical appointment of a new coach, in Mancini's place. I think we both would agree that the wrong coach is a huge waste of time and energy on all fronts. So, Simeone seems like the only candidate with an above-average chance of succeeding, based on common observations, albeit biased probably, as every other prediction made in the world. So if you're saying we can't get Simeone, that would be alright, maybe we can't. But then again, what makes you think we can get even Pellegrini and what makes you think he'll do better than what we currently have?
And even if we want to say that Napoli, Roma, Juve all have better players than us, that doesn't prove Mancini has done a good job. That proves we don't have more quality than those sides, that's it. If you give one manager the fourth best side in the league and he places 4th with 50 points, and you give it to another who places fourth with 60 points... see my point?
Way I see it, the biggest gap in quality between us and other sides is with the manager, and there are better options available. Our gameplay last season was dreadful. And no, I don't think Napoli or Roma has an outright better squad (and don't forget that the lack of balance in our squad is also Mancini's fault). Roma certainly didn't have a better squad before the winter break, and even so, the advantage we gained from our early season form should have gained us a CL spot ahead of them. And I quoted you on that, in your own words "Prandelli would be as bad, if not worse than Mancini".
I don't see any praise for Mancini's work coming out of my posts. Well, sure, there are better coaches, and there are worse ones. So? Clearly, some coaches make the difference. And the again, some players make it. Luis Enrique failed miserably with Roma and now he won the CL with Barcelona, I don't know what's up with that.
Considering the scarce options for a coaching replacement currently available though, then we can at least get some proper players and deal with a better coach later on.