Let me preface by saying I like Mario Pasalic, and I want him to do well. He’s scored some awfully big goals during his time in black and blue.
But for the sake of argument, let’s ignore all of that and take a ride of the logic roller coaster. Fallacies are fun. They make you sound really smart when you drop one in conversation, “caught you in a red herring! Drop down and give me 20!” ‘No True Scotsman’ is another doozy and makes me think of the times working with two Scotsman who were impossible to understand. Does no true Scotsman speak coherently so the rest of the English speaking world cannot understand him (apologies to my Scottish readers!) But I digress, this article delves into the depths of one of the two things that makes people do illogical and irrational things: money.
At it’s simplest the Sunk Cost Fallacy is the failure to cut your losses and move onto another project or potential solution. Oddly in football, the carousel of managers bucks the trend of this fallacy, but players on the other hand is a different story. I imagine there are dozens upon dozens of snippets of pundits, commentators, and staff spewing some sort of the garden variety phrase of, “well we’ve got him, we may as well see what we’ve got.” In their defense, it’s really hard to cut your losses, as money causes irrationality. And when those figures start to creep into the millions of dollars, or if you’re Philip Coutinho hundreds of millions of dollars, that player leash gets longer and longer. So when is the best point to tap out and move onto a contingency plan? It’s tough to say, especially in football when it’s extremely difficult to make an accurate judgement of a player with less than 40 league games per season. But we can try, and who’s better to look at than the wildly inconsistent Mario Pasalic.
After years on the never ending loan train, Mario Pasalic was finally given a permanent contract by La Dea. It took spells with Elche, Monaco, Milan, and CSKA Moscow before finally finding a stable home in Bergamo. This laundry list of clubs Chelsea continually shipped him off to makes it even more difficult to think about having to get considering shopping him – given all the unstable country hopping he’s been thrust into. Atalanta did sign Pasalic permanently for $16.5M, a very hefty sum for a regional outfit. In addition, the signing was more expensive than inking Aleksey Miranchuk from Lokomotiv ($15.95M) and winning the Ruslan Malinovskyi sweepstakes from Genk ($14.96M). Edit: Since 2015, Pasalic, according to transfermarkt, is the third highest transfer for La Dea (unadjusted for inflation) behind Muriel and the loan fee + signing for Zapata. Of course, I’m not counting any loan fees Atalanta paid Chelsea for Pasalic’s services…. Still doubtful he’d reach the fees of the Colombians.
To sum it up, Atalanta have invested a substantial amount of cash into the Croatian midfielder, and to my dismay he has done very little to live up to his transfer fee. Granted he had a significant injury this year, but even before his absence he was marginal at best. I held out hope that he could play well in the newly minted trequartista role, but it is obvious that Pessina is the clear choice to roam up front.
So what does Atalanta do with him? Even if Ilicic does leave this summer, Atalanta still has Pessina, Malinovskyi, Miranchuk, Kovalenko, and maybe even Lammers all vying for starter’s minutes. Throw Ilicic back into the mix and it gets even more crowded. Gasperini has not been scared to say that Atalanta has too many attacking options. If the club continues to opt for two strikers more frequently, it makes midfielders even more redundant, and thus an incredible stretch to keep five or six on the roster. Especially when Atalanta is quite thin in other areas on the pitch.
To me Pasalic has to be the first causality of there is a small fire sale upfront. Previous spend is irrelevant; and current ability plus future potential should speak louder than previous checks cut. But it is still a difficult tightrope to walk. Before their storming bouts of form, I was nearly ready to walk away from Malinovskyi and Palomino. Palomino has become incredibly steady in the middle, and Malinovskyi is transforming into one of the best midfielders in the league. Does Pasalic have this peak in him? I don’t know, but I’m not holding my breathe, I I’m not willing to take playing time away from other players just to find out.
Atalanta has already demonstrated a quick trigger finger to ship off players they don’t think will fit in the squad. Cyzborra was gone after playing less than 20 minutes; dePaoli and Piccini barely suited up for the club, and Mojica was another quick casuality. The only difference with Pasalic was the previous success he has shown. On top of his fee perhaps that clouds judgement a bit, but I’m inclined to not think so given the club’s willingness to transfer stalwarts before even suiting up with the senior team regularly.
While Mario has been a valuable servant to the club and has scored some classic goals – I think his time has to be coming to an end. Talentwise he’s too far down the pecking order to justify his expense, and any excuse you could make financially to keep him traps you right into the sunk cost fallacy. Entrepreneur Seth Godin summed up how to buck the fallacy, “winners quit fast, quit often, and quit fast without guilt.” Atalanta has demonstrated time and time again they are winners, and I trust Percassi to make the right decisions. The right decisions are always tough, and this time around it may be recouping as much as possible of Pasalic’s $16M fee and doing what’s best for the club’s results.
