Give me more boring summers please instead of losing our best players every summer
On one hand, I do get this, it was nice not having a repeat of 2021 when we force-sold one of our young starlets and then saw another guy - the guy we should've sold all along to cover our asses financially and I screamed this repeatedly when Hakimi was on the selling block - walk as well, but as
@YoramG pointed out not that long ago, there's also the feeling that we don't have as complete a squad as we would like to have, and that we didn't do much to add to it is disconcerting.
I see some positives. Deadweight like Klaasen and Sensi are gone. I guess you can add Cuadrado to that list as well. (Alexis wasn't entirely deadweight for me.) When I think of some of Europe's best teams, the best thing I can say about them is the lack of wasted roster spots they have. Real Madrid last season won the double and about the most useless players I think they had were Ceballos and Garcia, and even in those cases they weren't complete deadweight, or at least their places in the squad could be argued with a decent degree of merit. Our squad, on the other hand, often succeeded in spite of itself, the depth was paper thin when you see what some of our depth "options" were; legitimate teams aren't using Davy Klaasen in extra time of a CL 2nd leg.
Problem is, we still have useless guys clogging spots, we actually got one of them back even. Arnautovic and Correa are completely fucking useless since it doesn't seem like we can find a buyer they're interested in and it doesn't seem like we're going to buy them out of their contracts (June 30, 2025 can't come soon enough), we're stuck with them comprising 40% of our forward position. Taremi is still a question mark to be had as well. The thing is, I'm not foolish enough to think that we can have legitimately great players as backup forwards - we just saw Julián Álvarez leave Man City this week because he found his role in the squad insufficient - but it's a position where you'd like to either have developing players, or if you're going to have a veteran like Arnautovic it's so much better if they're a Dzeko-type where even if they're unable to play to their old levels with any consistency anymore, they're just too old, you still know what they've been capable of in the past, the class they have, and the standards they have for themselves. In other words, you'd rather it be a has-been instead of a never-was. Across all comps in a single season, Arnautovic peaked at 15 goals with Bologna a few years ago. Dzeko topped 15 goals many times. This isn't to relitigate Arnautovic vs. Dzeko debates, I know the problems that existed there (we [wrongly] prioritized Lukaku over Dzeko, and then when Lukaku went rogue Dzeko was already gone to Turkey), it's just to give an idea of what a veteran backup forward ideally would be, what they've accomplished when they were at their peak.
We added two free transfers, neither of whom inspire me too much. Oaktree meddled and turned down a 29 y/o CB who I'm not the highest on but at the reported wages and term along with his CL experience (and a 2021 La Liga winner) would've been a great get. Not something you want to see. Our midfield even with Zielinski still feels too shallow for me; we've got a minimum of 46 league + CL games (hopefully more) and our aim is retaining the Scudetto and hopefully making the CL knockouts again, we desperately need the money the CL knockout stage offers. I've said many times that I think our Scudetto success last season was in no small part thanks to the fact that we weren't battered much by injuries and, when we did suffer them, key players didn't tend to overlap. Our longest injury of consequence was when Pavard missed a couple months. Bastoni also missed Juve/Lazio in that time, when Lautaro got hurt Pavard was back, when Thuram got hurt Lautaro was back, somehow I don't think any of our starting mids missed much time through injury despite basically never getting any rest...maybe there was just superlative fitness, maybe there was just a good deal of luck. I just worry if we find ourselves at some point next season with an injury in defense, midfield, and attack all at the same time (pick whichever starters you want), it could be a real problem.
I'll also just say this about Oaktree - they want to give more focus to youth development, which sounds great. "Sounds". Every club wants to give more focus to youth development, they know that supporters will always eat up the idea of developing players from within and not having to splash huge transfer fees to bring in marquee talent. It's so much easier said than done, finding dirt cheap young talent is something that you throw 10 darts at the wall and maybe 1-2 of them stick, it's not a great success rate. Doesn't mean it's useless to do, just that expectations are best kept in check. We still need that U-23 team - Juve's U-23 team has funded their mercato and catapulted them right back into Scudetto contending status - and more work done with our academy. We were hearing good things about a 20 year old from our academy during pre-season...lol, think about the 19-20 year olds who already have extensive top flight playing time at other big clubs. Doesn't mean our guy is shit, I don't know, it just means we're loathe to give playing time opportunities because we're chronically afraid of our own shadow, that the stakes are too high at Inter to risk anything even though somehow that doesn't stop other clubs who are chasing league titles from doing the same thing. Either we're too afraid to be bold, or our youth talent (by extension, recruitment and development) is garbage, or some combination of the two, in any scenario indicating that we have a lot to work on and improve in those areas.
