Phil71 wrote:swipe right wrote:jayramfootball wrote:DiamondGooner wrote:jayramfootball wrote:Saka is already a world-class star. His age doesn't really matter.
Rubbish.
Its this type of hyperbole that makes us as a club a laughing stock, we over praise players.
He is not world class .......... young Ronaldhino was WC, Mbappe is WC, Neymar is WC, Messi is WC.
I don't know what your talking about, in fact how can you be a WC winger without end product which is exactly what we're discussing above.
Your standards have dropped so far down you can't even tell what WC is anymore.
Saka already has end product.
If world-class means Messi level - well no, he isn't.
Depend on your definition.
We just had the Euro's - Saka was amongst the stand out players.
As for hyperbole - it's the other way round.
Too many over rate the big transfer high PR players.
I mean Neymar? F**k off with that.
Neymar is not world class? Wot?
He has world class talent. Whether he applies himself completely and uses that talent to it's best is very much in question. He's more often than not a lazy sulker who stops playing when he's not getting his own way only plays well when he feels like it.
In my opinion that impacts his world class status.
He also makes the entire game about himself, loses the ball far too much (a la Sterling) through his greed, dives quite ridiculously at every opportunity and cries a lot.
To emphasise your point about his commitment, he's been playing for PSG for 4 years and is yet to manage more than 20 games in the league for them in any season (it could be he is just fragile and can't stay fit even playing in the French league, bust most likely he just pulls a sicky with the slightest graze). He hasn't scored 20 league goals for them in a season even once. In his 12 years he's actually only scored more than 20 leagues goals twice. Consider he has been playing for Barca and PSG - the top clubs in leagues with huge disparity in quality. He does find it easy to score in the weak French league , but his lack of games is the problem. For Barca his goal record was about 1 every 2 games - not particularly great. He's never won anything of note with Brazil either.
He's quite simply the poster child for players whose reputations are built on PR. You could put a Number 10 Brazil shirt on a donkey and it would be touted as a top player, for starters. When you think of Pele and Zico for example, Neymar is so woefully short of that level. It actually grates when I hear people compare Neymar to Messi. Utter madness.
He does have a few circus tricks that mostly don't work, so he falls over to try and get a free-kick and yes, playing for top teams against weak opposition he can score some goals. In the PL he'd spend all his time on the floor looking around for a camera to cry into.
Quite the contrary to overestimating our young players as has been claimed, it's actually more of a case that the high profile and big transfer fee players are way way overrated a lot of the time. The gap in quality is nowhere near the gap in transfer fees we see and it's just a sad fact that some players' reputations are more to do with a great PR and media machine along with associations to top agents with the best contact lists.