Zero transfer contribution. Weaker team than last year. This is last years team. So this year is complete disaster for maldini. With 50 million we couldn’t even get a bench player who come in and help for 30 minutes for 3-4 matches. Another way if we had a transfer ban last summer it would have zero effect on this years team performance even would be better because we would not have to give time to 50 million garbage (until now) we bought. Also we couldn’t sell anyone. So this year
1-50 million garbage we bought, zero transfer contribution
2-we opted in garbages (messias)
3-we go on with injury prone players ( rebic , florenzi )
4-no kessie replacement
5-missing perfectly scouted players who perform excellently (enzo , botman etc)
So Maldini this season is 0/100. The only good thing is bennacer renewal. Maybe we can give 5/100 because of that nothing more.
You can say maldini was successful last years and he is the soul of the club , he has right to make mistakes ok. But saying he is successful or even not disaster this year is delusional.
About team performance we were just 4 points away from 7th place before juves fine and have lazio away game on the last day of the first half and in champions league going through is what should be. We were in pot 1. Again last year success. We eliminated salzburg and Dinamo Zagreb , it is very normal not a success we just didn’t fail
Most of the fruits that got us the scudetto last season were planted in 2019. Bennacer, Leao, Theo, Krunic... All were bought that season and all had a massive impact in their third season winning the title for us. This is my point. Maldini is not building for the short term. He's totally fine with having CDK have a garbage first season. It's not something he
wants but it's something he's totally fine accepting because it comes with the whole 'trusting youth' thing.
To judge him so harshly because we again decided to build long term with Vranckx, CDK, Adli, Thiaw... That seems like you're purposefully ignoring our entire strategy. They said it a million times, we're not building this squad in the same way other teams are building theirs. That's the ONLY way we can compete and eventually challenge for the CL. We build LONG TERM. If we win in the short term like we did last season, that's great! But the idea is that we gradually ramp up our spending (on transfers and contracts) to match up with our revenue.
They made a big bet on CDK. That bet is a long term one in the same way we bet on the 2019 guys. If we were judging that group on their first season, we'd be in a perpetual year 0 like we've been in the past decade. You need to rethink your window for evaluating their performance. It's not a per season or per quarter thing, that's stupid. We don't need to justify quarterly earnings to shareholders. We can afford to not win the title this season. If Napoli keep going at this pace, no matter who we bought it would have been impossible to keep up. We're having a terrible January that's making everything seem way worse than it is.
They will spend this summer, that's if we take them at their word that spending will line up with revenue. We had a 60m loss last season, we're in line to break even or even get a small profit this year. That's massive. We're going from arond 270m in revenue to around 340-350m. That's without any player sales or the stadium. There will be a major investment, I have no doubt about that. Maldini wouldn't have accepted the renewal if it wasn't coming. So chill on that front.
The idea that the squad is incomplete, that's true. He had to literally replace every single member of this squad (besides Calabria) in 4 years. There was a lot of cheap filler in there that we can upgrade (FBT, Messias, etc). Thats the difference between Maldini and before, the new fodders are cheap and we can sell them easily when we decide we want to.
I'll run down your list:
1- 50m garbage you can't judge now. We'll see in a few years if it was a good bet or not
2- The garbages we got, like Messias, are squad players for now. He fills a role and he's cheap. I wanted Ziyech on loan instead, but it is what it is.
3- Every squad has injury prone players, we had Rebic on a long term contract and he wasn't injury prone before. Florenzi fills a leadership role besides being a backup RB.
4- It's hard to get a player like Kessie. He didn't want to reduce his demands. We decided to invest in Vranckx so that long term maybe he fills that role. We're willing to wait.
5- Every team misses some players. It's not a Milan specific complaint. It's a good thing that we're targeting the right sort of profiles, don't you think? The fact that we didn't close the deals is unfortunate, and has to do with competition inflating the prices (Botman) or teams moving faster because we had bureaucratic problems (Enzo). That shouldn't be a factor next summer, Maldini is fully on board and RB will have had a season to settle and decide what to do.
You can say Maldini was 0/100 or 5/100 for this season, go for it. I'm just trying to explain that nobody cares about short term assessments at the club as long as there is a viable path for growth and that in a few years the squad is where they want it to be. It's a much much longer game than what you're caring about.
Some seasons we'll overperform and underperform in others, as long as the general direction is upwards and to the right, that's really all that matters.