we can only hope that emery will continue to misuse verratti so that we have a shot at getting him next summer. this winter would be fiction (if psg was to be still in CL by winter).
i understand people writing that they prefered pogba to stay, but if you just put it into pure effect, we basically swapped a midfielder who would (in his best season yet) score now and then against somebody who is basically a goal guarantee as striker. would you rather still have pogba and need to rely on frigging mandzukic to score the chances ? as many already wrote, we went from a world class midfield and mediocre strikers to world class strikers and mediocre midfield. of course i am exaggerating the "mediocre" part.
in theory having world class strikers should be more effective, since there are tactics to bridge or even skip playing through the midfield alltogether. you could basically play long balls and let the midfield cope with defensive duties mainly. you would probably score more than having a great midfield that in the end needs to pass to some scrubby forward that will sky the ball most of the times.
the world class midfield allows you to have more possession but it will be useless possession (apart from that being in possession means the other side can't score) since you do not make the most of it which we saw when we still had pogba, vidal, pirlo and marchisio.
we basically switched from one unbalanced system to another. the occasional good pass our midfield produce will result in a higher scoring chance since we got higuain while before we needed to hold our breath that mandzukic had his occasional good performance and score one of the many chances. if you look back, even with that world class midfield we often struggled and complained about not having good enough wing backs and lichtsteiner not properly feeding mario mandzukic.
i think we can cope with thise unbalanced system and a mediocre midfield better than others, since we have a luxury basically very few other teams have and that is a defensive player in bonucci that can play the long balls that will lead to scoring chances.
lets hope sturaro finds his form fast and can be the working horse we need to make up the numbers and free our other creative midfielders of their defensive duties.
our squad right now reads like a blueprint with a whole in the middle. getting back marchisio would makes as a very good team, filling that void with verratti would make us a force to be feared even by bayern or barca.
just imagine having three players that can open up play and give the deadly pass in pjanic, bonucci and verratti and dybala would not need to fall back that often so he would be a bigger danger as well.