TRANSFER WINDOW
The real reason we are not scoring
Four league games in and the goals still are not coming. Everyone with a microphone wants to make that about the players. I want to make it about the calendar, because that is where this problem actually started.
De Zerbi already said the quiet part out loud after the weekend. Players arriving late in the window, barely training with the group, still working themselves into match fitness while the fixtures keep coming anyway. He called it a lack of physical condition and confidence. I call it a club being punished for doing business properly instead of panic buying in July like everyone else.
Here is the part that never gets asked on any of the shows. Why is a transfer window allowed to run so late into a season that is already live? Every other business on earth has a deadline that means something. Football lets you finish signing players after you have already started playing the games those signings are supposed to help you win. That is not a coincidence. That is a system built to reward whoever panics fastest in June, and punish whoever waits to do it right. And ask who votes on the length of that window. The clubs. The same clubs who benefit from it every single August, sitting around the same table, deciding the rules of a race they are already winning.
Late arrivals, same old headline
Nobody wants to write the honest version of this story, so I will. New faces arrive without a proper pre-season. They are short of match sharpness through absolutely no fault of their own. The team takes weeks to find any rhythm. Then the same media that ignored the structural problem in August spends September writing about a crisis, as if the players simply forgot how to finish.
Four games without a goal is a real number and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I will not accept is the framing that gets attached to it, because that framing conveniently skips the part where this squad was still being assembled while the season had already kicked off.
Judge us in December, when everyone has had a full pre-season together and the calendar stops being the opponent.
What actually matters right now
The stadium is still full. The fans are still singing louder in the bad moments than most clubs manage in the good ones. Nobody has walked away from this. That patience is not blind, it is informed, because plenty of us can see exactly where the actual problem started and it was never on the pitch.
So keep the takes coming. I will keep watching what actually happened, which is a club that trusted a proper process over a rushed one, currently paying the short term cost for a decision that will look completely different by the spring.