Marotta has made some good signings but he is also made a lot of bad ones.
Krasic 15 (sold for a fraction), Elia 10m (sold for a fraction), Vucinic 18m, Matri 15m, Quagliarella 13-15m, Giovinco (sold 50% for 4m, bought 50% for 12m), Isla (9m for 50% - 18m for Isla is a big valuation.....you can now get Nani for that).
There is a lot more. The thing is......We probably spent >80m on attacking players with not one of them making a real difference. Aguero for 40m seemed like a lot (and probably still was) but HE definitely would have made a difference.
We have bought a lot of so called depth players. But we have a tendency to spend ~8m to 15m on these types of players. You buy a lot of them and it adds up. Conte doesn't exactly rotate the squad enough to justify spending that kind of money on such players.
For the money we wasted on average attackers, we could have brought in Aguero and Van Persie and used youth players as the squad players.
My fear is, we will sell Quags and Matri for less than 6m each or 12m for a combined acquisition cost of >30m.
For this transfer campaign, we don't need depth players. Peluso, Giaccherini, Padoin, Caceres etc are already there.