TWar

Not inspite of Howe, definitely a decent lower league manager. Didn't do much at the top level considering the spending though.

£££

Dreadful decision. He's one of the best managers in the league for constant overperformance of spending.

Kwp and Livramento are both amongst the top in the league for ball carrying too.

Agree with most of this, not sure we need a winger as I we very rarely play with wingers, we normally either do a 4222 with two attacking mids or a 3 at the back with wingbacks. Would like the important signings done early, wouldn't mind a little money held back till near the end to see if we can get a bargain after other deals have fallen through. For me priorities are 1) CB (weakest position by a mile imo) 2) attacking mid (we don't create enough and when Moi and/or Stu is off form we struggle 3) GK (would have been number 1 at the start of the season but Forster has impressed, I'd take Johnstone on a free as he was decent in the prem and its lowish risk, he has had a poor season though so won't lose any sleep if we miss out on him) 4) Striker (our league top scorer is Che on 7 which isn't good enough, don't blame Che as his game is much more provider and hold up but we need someone who can put the ball in the net more if we want top half/europe more consistently. It's only 4th priority as JWP pitches in a lot otherwise we'd have a big goal problem) 5) CM (Romeu needs a successor and it isn't Diallo, who while handy doesn't play the same role all that well) 6) 2nd AM (only if we clear out Redmond and Djenepo and maybe send Smallbone on loan, cheap punt on a young player, maybe an academy of a big team.)

This "the size of Bournemouth" thing is the problem, Bournemouth are not a small team anymore. They spent top 10 money when in the league. Rafa did better than Bruce at Newcastle and Lampard at Everton. After he left both teams declined. Maybe it was the squad. Howe had two teams with top 10 budgets performing to a mid table standard and got one of them relegated. Anyway, we've had this argument enough times. You can pretend Howe was leading some plucky league two side if you like and that the biggest spend in europe this January was just small change but it is pretty silly.

The figures do lie if you specifically pick 3 players who make your point and lie saying 3 more players always overperform when they objectively don't. What you need is a meta analysis across all top strikers, like in the source I posted. Thinking cherry picking 3 strikers out of thousands is statistically conclusive is the sort of data analysis you'd expect from someone who fundamentally doesn't trust stats. Maybe leave it to those who know what they are on about.

Bournemouth when they were in the prem were loaded. As you well know. We trying to compare getting promoted to the prem to winning the CL, such an achievement...

He also has a champions league. Give me a shout when either Moyes or Howe manage that.

It doesn't, and when Howe achieves anything near what Moyes has then maybe the relegation will be overshadowed but a few midtable finishes with big budgets ain't doing it for me.

Vardy doesn't overperform every season, he has underperformed 2 out of every 4 seasons, last season with a big one. Benzema has underperformed 3 of his last 6. Aguero is generally pretty good but he underperformed his last season. Of your three Kane and Messi both are underperforming this season. All you've done here is shown that over a big enough dataset with the correctly selected players you can find overperformers. But each of them frequently have seasons they underperform. I know you are new to statistics but this is a textbook example selecting a data set arbitrarily to prove your point rather than for any actual reason.

It's certainly not a good thing...

Not sure what you think you are proving here. Sometimes players will overperform xG, no one is denying that. It just isn't the mark of a good forward. Benzema across the season is performing pretty close to xG. Just like Salah, Kane, Ronaldo etc. I don't want to reignite this argument but if you think a good player overperforming xG over 2 games means anything to the overall point I don't think you really understand the article you are replying to.

Not sure I buy recruitment, how come we have so many youth players come through and do really well Shaw, Lallana, JWP, etc. all top top players at their peak. We improve our own products - JWP, Shaw, Lallana, we improve previously unproven players - Mane, Tadic, VvD, we improve players who have previously not done well and need their career reviving - Ings and Bertrand. I think we just make players better.

He got 11 goals for Burnley in his best season, for us he got 23. The season after he got 11 and we considered that a bit of a down year. We definitely took him up a level. Regarding JWP who knows? We shall see this summer I imagine as a big club will probably be interested. Last summer apparently spurs enquired and we said no.

I think Ings had a big step up in quality, he just moved to a bang average team who don't use him properly and also is plagued by injury. To be honest I think we are getting better at retaining our good players now. JWP is just as good as some of those players who left for big things a few years ago, we just have managed to keep hold.

If its just that we give them prem exposure than how come we have so many elite level talents - VvD, Mane, Tadic, Lallana, JWP, Shaw, Wanyama, Fonte etc. go through this club. Have a look at another midtable side like Palace or Brighton, even a rich team like West Ham or Everton and see if you can assemble such a list. Our reputation of improving players is well earned imo.

We improved him, like we do lots of players. It's not a coincidence so many players in the last 7 years have left saints so much more highly rated than when they joined. Sure we have misses but improving players if definitely our strength.

So you think VvD was a £70m when we bought him and all he needed was to prove himself? I think that's nonsense. We made him into the £70m player.

If vvd was rated anywhere near the quality he was after we improved him we wouldn't have had a sniff at signing him.

Answered this earlier.

Salisu had started a full season in La Liga. He was a tonne more well thought of than Bednarek who had only ever played in the polish league. And to be honest I don't think the Polish U21s is much of a sign of quality.

This is your defence, nothing. After claiming he played at a high level because of games against KR Reykjavík and Ferencváros

Sub-Hoedt.

Getting good after leaving the scottish league is not proof the scottish league is good, we made those players good too. Also Moi played all of 180 mins in the CL qualifiers against KR Reykjavík and Ferencváros which I'm sure was very formative...