Sol thewall Bamba

If you're invested in the club right now and can't fathom why an increasing proportion of our supporter base is getting disillusioned and alienated, I'm not sure what to say.

This is what the Facebook groups think our owner does.

We haven't gone 2 nill up at any point this season have we? Oh no Palace we did.

No one is paying any money for Winks. And he won't leave anyway because no one would get anywhere near to matching his wages. Being happy with him "running the show" in the NPower, I guess that's indicative of how far the expectations of this club have fallen.

Blimey that's a relief. I was going to say I can't believe he's on 90 bags a weeks but on second thought I absolutely can.

Oh my god is it actually another 3 years of Harry Winks? I feel sick.

Yep. After today we have an absolutely dreadful run of fixtures that really could result in another 7 straight losses until the Wolves game, which by that point it could be all over.

I'm in a weird place that I genuinely would enjoy next season more if we were put under a transfer embargo and were forced into using youth. I have no desire to be watching the same faces again.

Surely he starts for us next season. I would be gutted if not and we roll out the same overpaid cloggers again.

Yes.

Not a chance in this league unfortunately.

You can tell he's worked in a footballing culture where fans consistently and directly call out underperformance.

What is the purpose of the academy if not to improve the first team then?

Yeah those were the kind of figures I would expect. And like you say they'll be salaried.

Careful now.

£10k a week

Unconvinced that he'll make a huge difference after yet another injury. Still, better to have the option that not.

Absolutely agree, hence why I said in my first post that we have to provide a route to the first team for youth players, otherwise we'll lose them. Exactly like what happened to Bassey.

How does this relate to my original point that there hasn't been a youth player to improve the first team since Barnes/KDH?

Some of these names are absolutely desperate, and none of them improved the first team more recently than KDH/Barnes, which was my entire point. I clarified in my other post that it was either Barnes or KDH who was the last academy product to improve the first team. No one can provide any more recent ones because there aren't any.

That's a lot of waffle to be honest. The job of the academy is to produce players to improve the first team. That's the be all and end all. It hasn't done that since Barnes/KDH whoever broke out second I can't remember. That might be too black and white for you but it doesn't make it wrong.

He's roughly a centre circle player.

That's just a long form way of saying Semper Eadem.

Yeah that's more like it

From a 2 second Google search and a nice agentic generative AI summary: "According to recent data, Thailand welcomed approximately 35.5 million international tourists in 2024, marking a significant rebound from the pandemic lows, with the majority of visitors coming from the Asia-Pacific region followed by Europe; this figure is close to the pre-pandemic level of 39.8 million visitors in 2019." So it's lower by 10% or so.