Exactly. The players with the highest pass completion percentages are often centre backs. It's all just short, sideways and safe, ala Meyer.

Frankly, I cannot understand this idea that Meyer is anything other than crap.

He was a promising youth and then young player, but so what? Half the players in any successful age group national team don't even end up as professional footballers. Of those that do, it's far more common to start at the very top but quickly fade than to stay there. For every Rooney there is a Jeffers, a Cadamarteri and a Solanke. Meyer is not some unique phenomenon. It's not some bizzare mystery that a great 18 year old is a crap 25 year old; That is by far the most common outcome with promising young players.

As to Palace (or Roy) having misused, misunderstood or ruined him by asking him to work hard without the ball, or asking him to impact the game without building the team around him, well I just don't see that. He's not being asked to do anything unusual for a professional footballer. Eze hasn't struggled, and even McArthur, Townsend, Loftus-Cheek etc have, in the same system, provided more in an average game than Meyer has in three years.

Perhaps he'll be one that got away, but I sincerely doubt it.

Firstly, observe how at no stage of his contract with us, regardless of how keen we would evidently be to shift him on, has anyone come in for him, even on loan with us covering part of his wages. Nobody from the whole of the Bundesliga, where they know him well, not his old club where he spent five years, not any of the clubs around Europe who scouted him before us, nobody. Nowt. Nada.

Now why might that be?

Secondly,if he was a proper footballer with the right attitude then he would have asked for a move by now, perhaps on loan, or maybe even asked to cancel his contract. Palace would certainly have taken that offer, and he could have started again somewhere as a free transfer. But no, he's just sat there and took the money whilst the crucial years of his career drift by. He's not a young player with time to waste. He's now closer to 30 than to 20, and he's prepared to train with our u23s for a living.

Third, and this is probably the clincher, just watch him play. He's awful. Skinny, slow, so lacking in power that I honestly doubt he could even shoot from outside the box.

A absolute shoe-in for the worst Palace top-flight XI of all time.

I am tempted to ask why Max has not fitted in with Palace.

His pass-rate is 89.1% successful.

No wonder, he doesn't know how to give the ball away.

You forgot the mic drop at the end of this post.

MM is the classic problem with a young player on a free transfer. The lack of transfer fee is converted into a salary package that is beyond the players worth. Result is that you cant sell him on as no one will pay the wages. I believe he is reputed to be £125k a week. £5k less than Wilfred.
He isn't worth in reality 33% of that.
Meyer £125k
Benteke £120K
Sakho £100K.
Son at Spurs is only on £140k a week! Sack all 3 and get someone decent.

This is very true. Unavoidable that Palace should have their share of expensive mistakes really, partly because as we are in the same inflated market as everyone else, but also because of something else that's become apparent in our dealings in the last few years:

It is sometimes possible to build a relatively cheap team to get a club into in the Premier League and/or stay up for a bit, but thereafter even the slightest upgrade in quality costs the earth.

More or less, we replaced Delaney, Jedinak, Parr, Murray, Dikgacoi with Sakho, Milivojevic, PVA, Benteke and Cabeye. Each new signing was simultaneously an essential upgrade in quality, a key part of us staying up, not really worth what we paid for them in fees and wages, and far worse value for money than their 'inferior' predecessors.

For me that's one key lesson from our longest stay in the top flight - a lot of signings will fail to represent value for money in the sense we are used to, but are essential nevertheless. In that context the Meyer signing can be shrugged off I suppose.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (13 Jan 2021 11.55am)