First order of business for Xabi is "don't get yourself fired". Pretty much half the team lines up by itself and and is not up to Xabi.
Yes because the German league is SooooOhhhhh competitive. Teams going undefeated for whole season then get dunked on in the Europa League.
It's a rigged system, it's far from perfect or perfectly rigged depending on how you look at it. I guess Cristiano is only 0.2 goals per game scorer in Saudi Arabia because if in Portuga 1 goal only gets you half credit then Saudi's got to be less than that. So in the CL if a team from Spain scores a goal against a team from Portugal or Ukraine or whatever, the goal only counts for half a goal. This is all news to me, here I was thinking a goal is a goal and all that. What about Mbappe's accidental goals where he slips and falls and the ball bounces off him into the net. full credit for those because they happened in Spain.
Or if Mbappe scored the ones he missed..... One thing I hope to see some improvement on is his conversion rate. He'd have crushed it if he was scoring some of the bad misses he had this season.
Saying a player has the potential to do even better if he works on a weakness isn't nitpicking. Its stating the obvious.
All the best players these days are wingers (Dembele, Salah, Yamal, Rafinha, Vinicius, Saka, Kvara, Martinelli) and I could see Dembele or Salah playing up the middle in the Messi type false 9 and kill it. Vini did it last year It's definitely weak spot in general for the sport. I'm not sure where he would have ranked against prime Benz, Suarez, Lewandowski, Ibra. He had a better year than Haaland and I'm sure Lewandowski will take the trade off everytime someone else wins the individual award but he wins the title. None of them are the all around threat and total package. Arguably every no.9 we had in the past us better from Di Stefano to Hugo, Zamorano, R9. Even Morientes had a great all around game to go with world class finishing.
The problem isn't that strikers have gotten worse, it's that creators have become more valuable and made the pure number 9 worthless as a starter.
Should have been Fed. Decent season by Mbappe but a slow start and some pretty forgettable and underwhelming performances in big games is not evidence of a season where he was consistently the best player. Second half of season sure but not over course of entire season, pretty sure Flo has his thumbs on the scale here.
I would argue that Fede had a bad run towards the end of the season. And it's difficult to go against the guy who is the top scorer by a mile.
He has played the most minutes this season, if that isn't an indicator of importance to the team I don't know what is. He's proven he can be a gol scoring threat, but, because of negligence that goes up the chain straight to the top, he was stuck playing RB for much of the second half of the season.