Sanchez was the key, should have been made a condition of the Barca deal. Get him in your window and you can suddenly attract a few key players. Would have tried harder for Shaqiri, gone for Moutinho, Garay and a few youth prospects. Remember that you had Bertrand on your want list, nice and cheap. Good squad player even if he wasn't quite ready.
I think there was a higher quality of player out there for the same money for sure.
Dowie is a mong and doubt he could name anyone but I am sure you could yourself.
Agree completely about Sanchez. With Suarez's release clause though, the ball was always in Barca and Sanchez's court, we couldn't insist that he be made part of it
We should have gone for Griezmann afterward. Garay was a massive oversight on the part of every semi-decent team looking for a centreback. Think he's better than Mangala, clearly better than Lovren, and Man Utd would be twice as good at centreback if they has him. Now though we're seeing first hand what a fallacy 'Premier League-proven' can be with our signings from Southampton.
Markovic and Balotelli, I can't defend at all. Didn't like them at the time, like them even less now. Summer was not the time to piss about spending £20m on prospects from the Portuguese league in the hope that they'll be good enough in 2017, and it may well have cost us the chance to go for someone better than Balotelli, depending how much FSG were willing to spend past the Suarez money. Wish Borini had left for the same reason.
Balotelli is just a horrendous lone striker, and a fucking idiotic purchase considering Sturridge's injury record, and the fact that we therefore knew that we'd probably be playing one up front more often than we'd like.