This is where the frustration lies - it should have been BOTH Skriniar and Bremer. Not one or the other.
Seriously. The MVP defender of last season was available for a mere 30m. We had a deal with the player nice and early. We even had tradeable assets Torino were willing to include in the deal. But then we completely shat the bed due to our incompetence and our failure to plan ahead coming back to bite us in the ass.
In the end poor interisti have to tell themselves "I prefer Skriniar" in an attempt to cope or justify this unjustifiable failure.
Marotta did an excellent fucking job of devaluing our own asset (de Vrij) and making it hard to finance other moves through his sale.
Marotta has known this entire time the specifics of our financial situation. He should've had a robust long-term strategy to selectively renew and sell players at max value but he failed to demonstrate any existence of such a plan, let alone execution.
Example:
- We didn't want to commit to a long term contract and a big pay raise for de Vrij at his age. We decided we wanted to cash in on him instead. So why the FUCK did we enter contract negotiations with him in the first place? We sat down at the negotiating table then changed our minds and walked away, letting de Vrij run down to just a year remaining on his current deal. (Same with Skriniar and Brozovic by the way. It's unacceptable that we let our best players run down to their final year before renewing them)
- The uncertainty over his future contributed to de Vrij having his worst season in an Inter shirt culminating in capitulation in crucial moments such as the derbies. Obviously, a significant part of the blame is on the player himself for being a mentally weak bitch. But we destabilized his frame of mind with our treatment of him.
- de Vrij would've easily fetched 40m following our scudetto campaign. Fast forward a year, now, the result is we have a 30 year old player whose market value has plummeted following a disastrous season (in terms of his personal performance) and whose expiring contract situation handicaps us further.
- Now? Most of us would gladly accept 15m for him. I've personally lost all my trust in him as a defender to even begin with. The guy got fucking humiliated by fucking Giroud of all people. How is he going to fare against Vlahovic, Di Maria and Chiesa? Abraham, Zaniolo and Dybala? Leao? I'll be surprised if de Vrij isn't a complete liability this season.
Despite everything I've written above, we STILL should've been able to sell him this window. Despite his dogshit season, are you telling me there isn't a team out there who wouldn't take a chance for 15m for an experienced international?
This is just one failure where we can point to the origin and it's long-term effect. It's bullshit like this happening on a wide scale which is why we "have to" try and sell our best players to keep the fucking lights on.
I see it this way. Let me break it down this way:
- Failure to develop or execute any kind of long-term, collaborative plan where all branches of the club work towards a common goal
- Failure to develop saleable assets due to spending significantly on old players like Dzeko, Kolarov and Mkhitaryan who will not bring us any potential resale like a younger player would
- Wasting enormous sums of money terminating these old players mentioned above. Sanchez and Vidal alone will cost something like 10-15m gross and Dzeko should've been terminated as well
- Wasting even more money on disastrous signings like Correa (and IMO Gosens too)
- Failure to properly manage the few non-core assets we do have such as de Vrij as described above. We should've also been far more proactive in selling the likes of Pinamonti, Calhanoglu, Correa, Dumfries etc. Calhanoglu especially should've been a prime candidate for sale considering he joined on a free and he's entering his late 20's on massive wages
- Failure to raise ANY money from all the promising youth we've loaned out FOR FREE. Esposito, Satriano, Mulattieri, Vanheusden, Agoume, Pirola have all left the club without bringing a single dollar in.
All the above puts us in a fucking ludicrous situation where the only way to buy even some 15m shitters like Milenkovic requires the sale of one of our precious few crown jewels. Another issue being the plan to begin with: that Marotta would immediately jump to the sale of a Skriniar or Bastoni instead of addressing the above and implementing changes.