I’m disappointed we beat Pisa
I am not saying I don’t love to see Napoli win (especially when McTominay and Rrahmani score) but today I just couldn’t get on board with the win here. I believe that the club’s future is determinedly worse as a product of us qualifying for the champions league. The first point of course is Rasmus Hoijlund’s buy obligation. Rasmus Hoijlind is NOT a terrible striker to preface what I’m about to say- but he is not a €44M striker and there’s no evidence that he’s going to be able to work out the issues in his game. I’ll start with his positive side- his conversion rate is good, and he’s definitely got above average vision for a striker, especially his size- but- in terms of his size- his aerial duel success rate is quite poor. He’s not physically dominating opponents like his physical profile might suggest he could. He recently is averaging less than a shot a game, which is frankly very poor for a lone striker even with us being mid table in terms of chances created. He doesn’t create his own shots, he finishes them at an average rate (his xg and goals are fairly even), he doesn’t use his physical attributes well at all, and that’s before getting into his abysmal dribble success rate. It’s genuinely horrific, within the bottom 15% of European top 5 leagues forwards from what I understand. He’s a good poacher- but that’s all he is- and there’s no indication that will ever change. Second is Conte- I’m worried that we will hold onto conte too long trying to prove that we are worthy of him while he builds up more and more anger until there’s a press explosion where he does serious reputational damage to the club and its ownership. This is exactly what he did at spurs, and that’s not his first catastrophic departure. It’s incredibly concerning to me that our current situation strongly represents Conte’s departure from Chelsea and Sarri’s appointment (why are we repeating that) but with an even older and less valuable core- Conte left behind role players like Moses and Zappacosta and forced a level of spending that we know the club can not and absolutely will not do. Speaking of our spending- conte’s acquisitions haven’t addressed the structural issues we have. Anguissa is probably leaving. Our only physically strong defensive midfielder. We need a replacement for him. But instead we want to replace Lobotka who is actually planning to stay with Perrone- another technically gifted but tiny, weak midfielder. We’ve spent so much recently to the point where we should be solidly 2nd in serie a squad value- but we aren’t. I don’t think it’s even close. I love to see Napoli win and I love to see Champions League nights at the Maradona but this is not a good path to go down and it’s incredibly disappointing.