Sly

Soumare, El Khannous and Winks have started really well.

This is going to be a very, very open game isn’t it. Just watch Kristiansen, his positional all over the shop at times. His press is awful.

We’ve cut straight through them three times

First save from Stolarkzyk

Even though they’ve been losing a lot, they’ve dominated possession in most games still.

Justin needs to attack that back post

Suspended.

Full back - Jon Armaburu / - Diego Moriera Centre Midfield - Rocco Reitz / Andrey Santos Left Midfield - Alberto Moliero The get Patrick Durgo to cover the midfield / defence! .

If it’s a bad achilles injury, he’ll be done for the season. We Re having some horrendous luck with injuries.

I’d imagine it’ll be something like this:

Sunderland fans

Skipp is a pointless signing.

Gives Ricky some company!

Players availiable on a free transfer come July 1st 2025. Player Age Trent Alexander-Arnold Right-Back 26 Mohamed Salah Right Winger 32 Alphonso Davies Left-Back 24 Joshua Kimmich Defensive Midfield 29 Jonathan David Centre-Forward 24 Leroy Sané Right Winger 28 Heung-min Son Left Winger 32 Kevin De Bruyne Attacking Midfield 33 Jonathan Tah Centre-Back 28 Virgil van Dijk Centre-Back 33 Frank Anguissa Central Midfield 29 Olivier Boscagli Centre-Back 27 Tyrick Mitchell Left-Back 25 Amad Diallo Right Winger 22 Angel Gomes Attacking Midfield 24 Sean Longstaff Central Midfield 27 Dominic Calvert-Lewin Centre-Forward 27 Kyle Walker-Peters Right-Back 27 Lionel Messi Right Winger 37 Cucho Hernández Centre-Forward 25 Ferland Mendy Left-Back 29 Yarek Gasiorowski Centre-Back 19 Thomas Partey Defensive Midfield 31 Kenny Tete Right-Back 29 Harry Maguire Centre-Back 31 Christian Nørgaard Defensive Midfield 30 Neymar Left Winger 32 Ola Aina Right-Back 28 Josh Brownhill Central Midfield 29 Mario Pasalic Central Midfield 29 Marco Verratti Central Midfield 32 Tom Bischof Central Midfield 19 Devyne Rensch Right-Back 21 Tariq Lamptey Right-Back 24 Walter Benítez Goalkeeper 31 Alex Meret Goalkeeper 27 Cristiano Ronaldo Centre-Forward 39 Sergio Reguilón Left-Back 28 Callum Wilson Centre-Forward 32 Rayan Right Winger 18 Nicola Zalewski Left Midfield 22 Krépin Diatta Right Winger 25 Jakub Moder Central Midfield 25 Josh Dasilva Central Midfield 26 Kieran Tierney Left-Back 27 Nélson Semedo Right-Back 31 Adama Traoré Right Winger 28 Victor Lindelöf Centre-Back 30 Jorginho Defensive Midfield 33 Sead Kolasinac Centre-Back 31 Koke Central Midfield 32 İlkay Gündoğan Central Midfield 34 İrfan Can Kahveci Right Winger 29 Roony Bardghji Right Winger 19 Dániel Gazdag Attacking Midfield 28 Will Hughes Central Midfield 29 Mario Lemina Defensive Midfield 31 Fabian Schär Centre-Back 33 Matías Zaracho Attacking Midfield 26 Javi Puado Left Winger 26 Pablo Rosario Defensive Midfield 27 Bright Osayi-Samuel Right-Back 26 Arnaud Nordin Right Winger 26 Reinildo Mandava Left-Back 30 Paulo Dybala Second Striker 31 Ben Davies Centre-Back 31 Eric Dier Centre-Back 30 Abdoulaye Doucouré Central Midfield 31 Alexandre Lacazette Centre-Forward 33 Abdel Abqar Centre-Back 25 Akram Afif Left Winger 28 Cristian Arango Centre-Forward 29 Davide Calabria Right-Back 28 Abdülkerim Bardakcı Centre-Back 30 Thiago Fernández Left Winger 20 Christian Ordóñez Central Midfield 20 Juan Ignacio Nardoni Central Midfield 22 Christian Central Midfield 24 Most of those are clearly not joining us. However some would be decent additions and improve us. I’m looking at Tierney, Davies, Meret, Maguire, Kolasinac improve the defence. Meret in if we need to sell Hermansen to finance elsewhere?

Different league unfortunately. Cannon struggles in this league. He’s a better finisher than Daka but he doesn’t have the pace and on field positioning. He’s also can’t beat a man. Armstrong, Szmodics and Summerville got 67 goals between them last season. This year in the Premier League they’ve managed 4. Albeit Szmodics hasn’t really played. Cannon and Daka are both in line with their xG stats this season. So neither is really performing better than the other. Cannon has also had 4 penalties, scoring three of them, which increases his numbers.

Yes, I had a Quick Look through 11v11 and the stats for the players from 10+ years ago aren’t that accurate.

Akinbiyi was a goal every every five games. Daka / Iheanacho is / was every four games.

A lot has gone wrong, however the honest answer is we’ve tried to play by the rules and had our fingers burnt with PSR I think. We were always sailing close to the wind and punching above our weight in financial terms. On the field Kasper and Morgan leaving left a massive gap in leadership. Ability wise, it took us 12 months to replace Kasper. Ward officially cost us 6 goals, and was ranked toward the bottom end of goalkeepers. Only Buzana, Travers and Mesiler were worse. We should have signed a goalkeeper in January. Evans was always injured, Soyuncu needed a leader next to him so we should have purchased a more experienced centre back partner. Rodgers insistence to play Amartey and Faes was borderline criminal though. Vestergaard / Soyuncu basically became outcasts. Faes / Vestergaard are major downgrades on Fofana. Perez was expensive, however he worked hard for the team, similar to Albrighton. Something subsequent right sided wingers in Under and Tete didn’t. We keep both of these in 22/23 and I don’t think we get relegated. I’m assuming now they were shifted out to cut the wage bill on PSR? We’ve so many injuries to players. Ricardo, Benkovic, Justin, Evans, Bertrand, Mendy, Ndidi etc. Even this season Fatawu, Ricardo, Ndidi, Stolarkzyk, Hermansen, Vestergaard, Nelson and Souttar are all injured longer term. The latter might have been pulled back in for improve the defence and selling Faes. Can’t do that now. Alves and Braybrooke were the next two talents from the academy. Both injured and neither have kicked on since. Off the field That transfer window when we didn’t refresh under Rodgers when it was evident we desperately needed new blood, was the turning point. Signing Smithies and Faes wasn’t an ideal situation. The January 23 transfer window when we signed Souttar, Kristiansen, Tete …. Wow. That was bad. If we pull the trigger on Rodgers earlier, even if we appoint Dean Smith 5 games earlier, I think we stay up. Those two losses to Villa and Bournemouth were hard to take. We’ve let Tielemans, Praet, Perez, Evans, Soyuncu, Amartey, Iheanacho and Mendy leave on free transfers. We have financial issues and we let the best part of £150m worth of assets leave for free. We under sold Maddison, Castagne, Barnes and Dewsbury-Hall cheap, as we needed to balance the books. We appear to have changed our philosophy on transfer. We were once the model to copy but Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford have definitely passed us now, using data analytics to basically moneyball signings. We were doing it. When and why this changed, I’ll never know. We’ve guffed so much money up the wall on signings that haven’t worked. We aren’t a Chelsea, Manchester City etc, that can afford to do that. I’m still not convinced that spending £20m on Soumare, then giving his £90k per week apparently was the smartest idea ever. Why we needed Skipp I’ll never know. Coupled with signing terrible players, we struggle to sell on. In an ideal world Thomas and Choudhury should have been sold to balance the books as they’re pure profit to PSR. We didn’t have a plan for when Maresca left. He was always going to leave at some point, Cooper wasn’t the right man to replace him and I’m yet to be convinced RVN is either. Do we have a longer term strategy, or are we sailing by the seat of our pants? On that, what’s the deal with RVN having none of his own staff?!?

Souttar injured then. https://www.foxsports.com.au/football/socceroos/socceroos-news-2024-harry-souttar-injury-acl-fears-scans-sheffield-united-world-cup-australian-squad/news-story/94255e5d82d3a6f88bef1c0c7cd0799f

By the end of January, we’ll have an idea what sort of coach he is.

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He’s an okay forward, that maybe needs more game time looking at it. Iheanacho record for the minutes he played wasn’t as bad. When you seem the records of some of the players we had in the Championship and their strike rates, it does make me smile when people call Daka the worst forward we’ve ever had.

I’ve just gone and checked myself. Akinbiyi was bad.

I've seen this asked a few times when comparing our forwards to years gone by etc So I've done the hard work and using the data on Transfer Market, I've put it into a table for all forwards going back to 1998, then added the historical top 10 goalscorers. Average Goals per game - based on the simple method of goals divided by games. I've then taken the played minutes on Transfers market, divided that into 90 minutes to give a "total 90 minutes", then given a goals per 90 minutes for this. Green - Still at Leicester Yellow - Still active but at other clubs Grey - Historical Leicester top 10 goal scorers Rowley must have been a folk hero of Leicester! Name Goals Games Goals / Game Minutes Total 90 Minutes Goals / 90 Minutes Chandler 273 419 0.65 Rowley 265 321 0.83 Vardy 196 480 0.41 35,076 389.73 0.50 Hine 156 259 0.60 Hines 117 317 0.37 Lockhead 114 320 0.36 Lineker 103 216 0.48 Springfellow 97 344 0.28 Duncan 95 295 0.32 Walsh 92 199 0.46 Fryatt 62 189 0.33 13,217 146.86 0.42 Iheanacho 61 232 0.26 10,868 120.76 0.51 Nugent 59 180 0.33 12,952 143.91 0.41 Dickov 40 125 0.32 8,860 98.44 0.41 Heskey 36 154 0.23 13,509 150.10 0.24 Hume 34 132 0.26 9,894 109.93 0.31 Cottee 33 98 0.34 6,743 74.92 0.44 Howard 32 169 0.19 10,585 117.61 0.27 Scowcroft 28 147 0.19 12,436 138.18 0.20 Daka 23 102 0.23 4,811 53.46 0.43 Marshall 23 95 0.24 5,736 63.73 0.36 Ulloa 20 102 0.20 4,735 52.61 0.38 Wood 20 62 0.32 3,262 36.24 0.55 Waghorn 20 116 0.17 5,393 59.92 0.33 Okazaki 19 137 0.14 10,792 119.91 0.16 Deane 19 56 0.34 3,959 43.99 0.43 Connolly 17 54 0.31 4,499 49.99 0.34 Perez 15 114 0.13 5,970 66.33 0.23 Beckford 15 49 0.31 3,178 35.31 0.42 Claridge 14 58 0.24 4,245 47.17 0.30 Roberts 14 49 0.29 3,764 41.82 0.33 Slimani 13 47 0.28 2,245 24.94 0.52 Ferdinand 13 31 0.42 1,713 19.03 0.68 Akinbiyi 13 66 0.20 4,872 54.13 0.24 Benjamin 12 90 0.13 3,789 42.10 0.29 Yakubu 11 20 0.55 1,640 18.22 0.60 De Vries 11 63 0.17 3,656 40.62 0.27 Hammond 10 71 0.14 3,697 41.08 0.24 Bent 10 35 0.29 2,669 29.66 0.34 Robins 9 38 0.24 2,561 28.46 0.32 Lookman 8 42 0.19 2,350 26.11 0.31 Sturridge 7 25 0.28 1,663 18.48 0.38 Vassell 6 45 0.13 3,023 33.59 0.18 DJ Campbell 6 49 0.12 2,273 25.26 0.24 N'Guessan 6 40 0.15 2,054 22.82 0.26 Dublin 6 65 0.09 4,868 54.09 0.11 Ayew 5 19 0.26 997 11.08 0.45 Collymore 5 12 0.42 755 8.39 0.60 Kramaric 4 20 0.20 980 10.89 0.37 Dodoo 4 4 1.00 275 3.06 1.31 Fenton 4 44 0.09 1,746 19.40 0.21 Joachim 4 27 0.15 1,855 20.61 0.19 Cannon 3 16 0.19 600 6.67 0.45 Fuchtas 2 12 0.17 320 3.56 0.56 Phillips 2 12 0.17 249 2.77 0.72 Kane 2 15 0.13 595 6.61 0.30 Hayles 2 30 0.07 1,310 14.56 0.14 Horsefield 2 13 0.15 808 8.98 0.22 O'Grady 2 25 0.08 776 8.62 0.23 John 2 11 0.18 570 6.33 0.32 Wright 2 24 0.08 587 6.52 0.31 Stephenson 2 14 0.14 288 3.20 0.63 Gee 2 11 0.18 473 5.26 0.38 Panayiotou 1 1 1.00 17 0.19 5.29 Vaughan 1 8 0.13 327 3.63 0.28 Kermogant 1 25 0.04 915 10.17 0.10 Cadamateri 1 11 0.09 164 1.82 0.55 Cort 1 15 0.07 849 9.43 0.11 Blake 1 15 0.07 535 5.94 0.17 Eduoard 0 6 0.00 113 1.26 0.00 Hirst 0 2 0.00 9 0.10 0.00 Hopper 0 3 0.00 78 0.87 0.00 Delfoneso 0 5 0.00 99 1.10 0.00 Bednar 0 5 0.00 247 2.74 0.00 Chambers 0 10 0.00 251 2.79 0.00 Sappleton 0 1 0.00 24 0.27 0.00 Morris 0 10 0.00 244 2.71 0.00 Moore 0 7 0.00 240 2.67 0.00 Petrescu 0 1 0.00 18 0.20 0.00 Mancini 0 5 0.00 314 3.49 0.00 Cresswell 0 12 0.00 446 4.96 0.00 Dudfield 0 2 0.00 56 0.62 0.00

Soyuncu didn’t actually get into the Bundesliga team of the season. I thought he did but I could never find it! Das Erste German national television channel named him in theirs.