Finnegan

Yes, yes, give me that copium.

Oh stop being so serious. Years of moderating this mess, I think @davieG has earned the right to have a harmless bit of trolling during an extremely quiet period of the off-season. And it's obviously relevant news to us, being our former owner.

What terrifies me most about Top selling to be honest. It could get a lot worse, I do think some on here don't appreciate that there aren't actually that many "good" owners at all in football. Top is mostly just one Director of Football appointment away from being an OK owner.

A good manager IS a good director of football. That's what a manager is/was, it's both the Head Coach and Director of Football roles combined. The British public have struggled with the semantics of Manager and Head Coach for the last twenty to thirty years, not helped at all by the English media refusing to get on board. It used to always be with a big eye roll and talk of "The European Model" and even as it's slowly become more entrenched in best practice in this country, the likes of Pep are still referred to as "manager" and Man City's transfers are still referred to as "his." Most successful modern clubs realised a while ago that splitting the role in two had several advantages. As football gets more tactically and structurally complex, the Head Coach who has more time in his day to focus solely on coaching the team and worrying about less off-pitch issues is obviously going to have a huge advantage. Moreover, the club that has a longer-term sporting director to maintain consistency between coaches and to hire not just for himself but for the benefit of the club, also has an advantage. Win win. All of this is a ridiculous conversation to have in this thread anyway. Again, not to just sit bashing Sly but how anyone, with a straight face, can tip someone as a potential Director of Football and then in the same post reference that he signed Benkovic, Diabate, Ghezzal and Danny Ward (all of which for hilariously inflated fees) is beyond me. Puel would never be a good fit for a DoF, he's just a fitness coach that managed to rise too far for his talent. Edit: oh and as for "he built our best midfield" blah blah blah. Ndidi was signed under Ranieri and Puel had Madders dumped out on the left ****ing wing, isolated and alone in every game.

DCL is abysmal.

Extraordinarily little

I had a dream last night that Watford had gone up in the playoffs. You're welcome to this premonition.

WE clearly aren't doing anything. His agent is shopping him around. I haven't been this sure we're not signing someone since I deleted about 50 threads about Alan Nixon claiming we were making Jordan ****ing Ayew our main attacking transfer of the summer.

The only thing Claude Puel is good for is using as a measuring stick to compare just how bad Brendan Rodgers is at recruitment and coaching a defence. Puel wasn't amazing at those things, Rodgers was just absolutely abysmal. This is the man that insisted that Liverpool sign Tom Ince instead of Phillip Coutinho for **** sakes. Puel only comes off with any credit because of Rodgers unbelievably huge flaws. It's like the idiots trying to defend Cooper by pointing at the fact Ruud is a terrible manager. At least, to his credit, Rodgers also had some very good strengths to (mostly) balance things out somewhat. I mean Benkovic, Ward, Ghezzal and Diabate is a combined outlay of, what, 50 - 55m? And people like to wank themselves off over how great a builder he was?

Yeah, my friend is mad about survival games, we've played a few now. Had a go at Ark, played a season of Once Human, even did a bit of V Rising. This is by far my favourite take on the concept. The atmosphere alone is amazing.

I'm so addicted to Dune

No. You are wrong. This is clearly the most superior chocobo theme.

I think you'll find FF8 is the greatest mini game ever. Triple Triad is the best main series Square title.

Oh **** me, more Puel revisionism.

FF8 ❤️

Given that their idea of a relaxing massage is to let a bony, four foot tall elderly woman beat the living shit out of you and the food hygiene is so bad that dysentery is given a quirky local nickname, it's a wonder they get any tourism at all.

A foot long Toblerone has better resale value than Jordan Ayew.

More recent promotion experience, marginally less awful football and probably cheaper to sack.

The fundamental difference is that a city centre needs businesses to survive. You don't go in to town just to look at boarded up shops. Airports would survive without duty free. Nobody is going to an airport purely to buy perfume and massive Toblerone. People are always going to need to fly (especially when they live in the Pacific) and airports are always going to be essential. The airport might be less profitable but it'll survive. The retailer somewhat less so.

Being pedantic, rent isn't the right word. But basically, yes, they aren't profitable anymore so they want to pay less money to the owners of the airports.

He was extremely average here, he put up numbers nowhere near those of Barnes and showed absolutely zero indication he was going to blow up the way he did in Serie A. We literally could not afford him anyway so it's moot.

You have to love the irony of Top moving a senior executive (in this case himself) out of the way to bring in a more qualified, experienced manager to run the practical and technical side of the business. Wonder where else those lessons could be applied, Aiyawatt.

Sheffield United had relegation confirmed, their official website was putting out media with Wilder planning for the next season before their Prem season had even ended. Norwich in 21/22 exactly the same thing with Dean Smith. Clear in no uncertain terms that the managers were staying. Both actually had their post-relegation statements made on their websites BY the manager as the spokesman for the club. We've had radio silence with journalists close to the club confirming even Ruud has no idea what's going on. He isn't staying.

No idea what you're on about.