Fair enough re: not thinking about it, but it's started to go pear-shaped. For one reason - while we may have improved somewhat, other teams have improved considerably. We played one of them today - they gave zero bricks about net spend, and went out and bought James, Allan and Doucoure before any major sales. All of them outplayed and outclassed our midfield today.
While for us, we will always, always be limited as long as that utterly cowardly bald clam is in charge, as part of the Cheap and Cheaper duo. Parsimony personified, scraping signings here and there, always stuck to net spend, always cheaping out, 'never getting into bidding wars'....having an arse-licking clam like Steve Hitchen in charge of our scouting who 'hates' the January window despite it being one of the two opportunities per year for him to do his f*cking job.
I don't expect miracles this season, nor do I expect disasters. I do expect that we will improve on last season. But other teams around us have improved, and will keep on improving, year after year, because they simply spend more than us. It used to be applicable to Liverpool, City and Chelsea - now it is applicable to Everton, Leicester, Wolves and Arsenal as well as the above.
To compete with one hand effectively tied behind our back requires us to win out on the right players and the right manager, season after season after season. And inevitably, we can't keep doing that. We're seeing it now. And where once we had a world-leading analytics team to sign players and were the 5th-most desirable destination in the country, we now have Steve Hitchen in charge and are maybe the 8th most desirable. Our staffing no longer seems good enough to compensate for the innate disadvantage of having Levy and Lewis around.
So, yeah, I highly doubt we'll pull up trees this season. A motivated Ndombele and a capable backup to Kane, and, provided Mourinho isn't a spent force, we'll do reasonably well. If not, we will fail.