i think some making too much fuss about how much we spent on potential- we could be laughing a year or two from now when Markovic, Moreno, Sterling, Coutinho, manquillo, Can and origi are 22 or 23. i think a bigger problem is that we've spent 61 mil on Lovren, lallana and Balotelli when we could've kept agger, and thrown some or all of that cash at real or Dortmund for Di Maria or Reus. We could still see all three of them turn out well, but they were all supposed to hit the ground running and only Lallana has been relatively good. For me that's where we went wrong, not the younger players who were always expected to take time to fit in.
edit: in addition to that 61mil, sell Borini for 14mil and that's more than what we got for selling Suarez that we would've had sitting around, with all the potential buys we made complete.
I'm fully behind this sentiment, and it really bothers me when people use our young signings as examples of this summer's "failure." As others have said, however, the likes of Di Maria and Reus were always going to be pipe dreams. Di Maria would have likely cost well over the entire Suarez fee when you factor in wages, and Dortmund would never have sold Reus.
Markovic and Lallana are now part of our attack, and I think that by the end of the season they'll have turned out to be solid signings. They're both mobile and technically skilled, and that will come in handy once we have a striker back who's got similar capabilities. They're abilities, though, that are entirely wasted when their focal point is a Balotelli who ambles around the pitch like a hungover dad refereeing a kids' match on Sunday morning. I'd feel a lot differently if Balo had his scoring boots on, but at the moment I see absolutely no reason for us not to be playing Borini. His movement, after all, is his strongest suit.
