Are you sure? He is a kid of 21 who has been playing on a regular basis in the German lge for four seasons, already has four caps for a major nation and yet there are some who are asking what is the problem that is is going so cheap.
21 years of age and the knives are out for him? sorry mate but that (imo) is madness. Lets accept that he is still a kid and has years in front of him to improve.
I agree, he's very young - by general, non-football standards, he's barely out of his teens, and given that the trend with the millennial and post-millennial generation is in many cases to only reach conventional 'adulthood' in your mid-to-late twenties (nothing wrong with that, though - just a symptom of the general success of Western societies at creating more comfortable environments)...it's harsh to expect him to be anything like fully-formed or maxed out at 21.
But I guess my point of objection is that, while he deserves a lot of leeway and a recognition of his talent (despite his underwhelming 16-17 season)..it doesn't necessarily have to be to the extent of plumping for him coming to us in particular. Maybe I'm a bit hypocritical about this, I don't know - but I'd like to think that I try to hold a fairly rigid moral standard when it comes to judging players. If it's *our* player, they get a lot of leeway - if it's a first-team signing, I'm generally trying to write off their entire first year as a learning curve, and if it's a young player, I try to have enormously lowered expectations and a lot of support for them when they're in our shirt, regardless of how talented they actually are.
But that's with players *already here*. For players at other clubs, I have sympathy for them and don't judge them on their exploits at their own clubs, but I still compare them to other possible signings and judge their potential worth to us accordingly. And while 17m is still a lot out of context (it's more than we've paid for any player in our history, barring Janssen, Son, Lamela, Soldado and Sissoko, more or less)...within this market, it's a little bit of a question mark, and when added to the other things I mentioned (poor form last year, Schalke's seeming nonchalance about letting him go), it brings some doubts as to why he's valued the way he is.
He is a fresh-faced kid. He will definitely, 100% improve - that is almost guaranteed given his age and his obvious talent. But is that a reason to sign him over somebody else who might be better suited at this stage? I'm not sure.