How do you judge them though?
Results have stayed the same as before. We've dropped one place in the league because Liverpool primarily have bought their way back in and Everton had an outstanding season. Both have got off to a worse start than us this season.
Well, you can judge them by watching them play and combine that with their stats, and then mark that against how much they cost and how they have done against the previous performances of players that they have replaced.
Someone like Soldado has been an utter failure because he has hardly scored, cost loads of monery, and we could have had a traffic cone upfront in his place and got just about the same amount of points (someone else could have taken his penalties!). As a replacement for Defoe, in terms of output and cost, he has been a bad signing.
Paulinho just looks awful in nearly every game, with a couple of good performances chucked in. As a replacement for either Hudd or Livermore, given the huge amount of money he cost, he's been a bad signing.
Chiriches looks pretty bad at all aspects of defending. He replaced Caulker, who wasn't great either. So we sold one bad young defender and replaced him with one who is also bad, with the added bonus of being poor in the air. Bad signing.
Chadli has done well this season, he also didn't cost too much. As a Dempsey replacement, he is proving to be a good signing.
Eriksen did quite well last season and is doing ok this season. I guess he has replaced Sig in the squad, and has done better for us than he did imo. He also didn't cost too much, he's been a good signing.
Capoue -- for me, he isn't good enough defensively for a defensive midfielder. I don't see any improvement over Sandro/Hudd and imo, has so far proven to be a poor signing. Hit and miss, but more miss.
Lamela. I think he's been a poor signing, although unlike Soldado and Paulinho he has youth on his side. But for £30m, he's been really bad value for money, and assuming he's a Bale replacement, he hasn't given us anything like the impact. But as I say, he has youth on his side. For me though, poor value and would have to go down as a poor signing.
IMO, we'd be no worse off if we simply hadn't signed Chiriches, Paulinho, Soldado, Capoue and Lamela and used Caulker, Bentaleb, Defoe, Huddlestone and Townsend in place of each of them respectively. We wouldn't really be any better with those players, but we wouldn't be worse and we'd have saved a lot of money.