Finnegan

We're all laughing but this is ****ing grotesque. On every level. We're getting relegated because rules designed to protect Chelsea and co vastly limit the money we can spend. We have owners that can afford to build one of the most advanced training facilities in the world and who consistently turn their loans in to equity yet apparently we couldn't let them spend another twenty odd million on players this year that might have kept us up for "our own good" because "sustainability." Meanwhile Chelsea can make hundreds of millions of losses one year and make it back the next by sham selling their own women's team to themselves. Everyone's wound up about Man City and their dodgy sponsorship deals but time after time Chelsea have the brass ones to do shit like this, over valued back scratching sales to Saudi, selling youth players for inflated fees, selling buildings to themselves et all and just completely get away with it. ****ing rank. It winds me up that the British are so apathetic about injustice being done to themselves that we'd all just have a laugh at the black humour of it instead of ****ing marching on FA HQ like we should. Edit before the inevitable apologists chime up: just because we've made bad transfer decisions it doesn't mean this isn't an enormous injustice. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

What I admire about you Ric is you always stay grounded and never let your imagination run away with you

It's because we got the managerial recruitment right. It should be pretty obvious by now that we don't operate a DOF - Head Coach model, as we should. We have a DOF in name only. We surrender all control to individual managers and are at their mercy to dictate transfer policy. Maresca knew what he wanted exactly and gave Glover clear instructions and a reasonable amount of freedom to operate. It went well. In the case of Rodgers and Cooper it went ****ing largely appallingly. There's little to no chance Ruud is still the manager next season so it's basically all going to come down to a dice roll or coin flip again. Will we make a smart choice on manager? We seem to do so one in every three or four attempts so yknow. We aren't going to "learn our lessons" and change the operating model of the club any time soon so it's just going to come down to that one decision. Hopefully we get it right and this time he doesn't get poached after one season. If not, we'll be down in the Championship much longer this time. Until we know who the manager is going to be next year, speculating over who's coming in or who'll be sold (other than very sellable assets the board will let go to cover losses) is pointless because it won't be Rudkin deciding it'll be New Guy.

It's Sky obviously trying to tap in to that market. It's the same as the BBC saying they understand MOTD needs to change in response to all of the highlights just being online now. The problem is you have old, out of touch executives trying to do what "the kids" want and that has never, ever really worked haha.

The football itself will be entertaining. The promotion around it will be cringe as **** for anyone that's not a 12 year old YouTube / Twitch addicted boy.

One of the biggest differences between tiers of player is often just mentality. I don't think Daka or Soumaré are either particularly strong in that department. They both seem like they have extremely fragile confidence, Daka especially. People that have played with Ronaldo talk about how hard he works in training and the almost psychopathic fixation on self improvement but he's also never, even as a kid, not had a complete arrogance in his sense of confidence. Daka - like Iheanacho before him - just seems hugely vulnerable in that regard. I do think we haven't helped him here, I think the way Rodgers handled him when he arrived damaged that. But there's also a point where you just have to say, I'm sorry, if you aren't strong enough mentally to find consistency even in a challenging context then you probably just aren't ever going to be an elite athlete.

Then it's obviously confusing you because that's exactly the point. Did you even read what you quoted? They're not expecting to actually get 100m.

It's pretty obvious it's either the first stage of negotiating and they're going hard or they straight up refuse to sell him and it's **** you money. It's obviously not what they think his realistic value is. Not sure how statements like this still confuse people.

Forest won the European Cup when it was a short format knock out played in the dark ages of football in an era that can barely be considered professional by modern standards and acted like it made them massive for about half a century afterwards and convince themselves Liverpool are massive rivals. Leicester won the Premier League, FA Cup, Community Shield and got to a Champions League quarter final all in the last nine years and our fans still think we're a tinpot nothing club that deserve to be second tier

He isn't though, is he. He isn't even the worst striker we've signed in the post-title winning era. We paid more for Slimani who was objectively worse. I know everyone's desperate to block it from their memory but we paid almost the same for Ahmed Musa who was objectively worse. I know the meme is that Daka is my favourite player but he's a long way from it, I defend him as much as I do because there's just so much ridiculous hyperbole spoken about him, disproportionately more so than any other player. Yes he's been a disappointment, yes we need to sign a better striker but the idea that he's the worst attacker in the current squad is frankly stupid let alone the worst we've ever had. Perez, Slimani and most recently Skipp were significantly, significantly worse signings than Daka in context because all of them absolutely tanked our spending power at the time when we were in incredible positions to push on and take the squad to the next level. The signing of Daka caused nowhere near that amount of harm to the squad, to the club and to performances in general. Right now we could have Prime Ronaldo up front (7 or 9, or **** it, both together) and we'd still not be scoring goals because we create absolutely nothing at all. It's not like Daka (or Vardy, who I've also seen scapegoated lately) are missing hundreds of chances. They're living off scraps.

I'm sorry but this is revisionism. He was. Sometimes transfers fail, I'm not arguing that he hasn't been disappointing. I'm happy to concede that even if he'd been better managed from the start and we hadn't tanked his confidence, I don't think he'd ever have been quite good enough for the level we were aiming at in the Prem. But on paper the transfer made a lot of sense and was a good one. There's always an extent to which you roll the dice when you buy any player. Vestergaard, Bertrand, Ayew, Reid, Ghezzal, Slimani, Perez, we've made loads of transfers that looked stupid at the time and turned out to be stupid. Daka and Soumaré were worth the gamble and if we'd had another coach here when they arrived we probably would have gotten a lot more out of them.

@Daggers

They've both been very poor pieces of business but Akinbiyi was, even now, pound for pound one of our worst ever purchases. Both Akinbiyi and Daka cost similar percentages of our spending power at the time they were signed. But Akinbiyi was a replacement for our then star striker who was played week in, week out. He was a League One standard forward that we threw enormous financial weight at because we'd replaced our then GOAT manager with a chump out of his depth. Daka was an intelligent piece of business with a great track record that was wanted bt half of Europe. He came from a club with one of the best scouting networks in world football where he'd scored for fun. He came in to a team that was spiralling downwards, a squad with zero morale where he was horrendously mismanaged and - ultimately - not particularly needed because our greatest ever striker was still relentlessly tucking away goals. I wouldn't compare their signings at all. Probably the closest in terms of context, outlay and return to Akinbiyi in the modern era would be the purchase of Ayoze Perez and even that would be a bit harsh to Perez. Edit: scratch Perez, Islam Slimani even better example.

BBC have had to take their feed of the Wales game down because some random is talking in the background in unfiltered detail about their night out and you can hear it all crystal clear over the commentary

Not a chance in hell he plays championship football is there. Bet we don't even get the fee he's worth.

Review from a reviewer I generally trust described it as basically a good Assassins Creed game but still just an Assassins Creed game. Basically Ubisoft as ever trying absolutely **** all new. But a tidy version of it's formula.

God dammit

I appreciate there's a level of meme in your post but I'll bite anyway. £5.5m in 2000 is not £9.8m now if we're talking purely in the language of transfer fees. Real world inflation doesn't vaguely match the behaviour of transfer fees over the last twenty years. As for stats, Akinbiyi played 48.3 lots of 90 for us, starting 33 of of the 37 games he played in in his debut season, managing 14 goal contributions (11G, 3A) for a return of 0.29 per game. Daka has played 43.3 lots of 90, never getting more than 15 starts in a season and having to contend with being dropped in and out of the team often (under Rodgers) essentially at random. Despite this he's still managed 29 goal contributions (17G, 12A) for a return of one every 0.67 games. If you want to make it Premier League only, Daka has played 31.2 90s with 10 goals and 7 assists for a combined 17, averaging 0.54 per game.

One of the most ridiculous comments I've ever seen made about a team game.

It is. Everything else was a bit meh. Biggest thing that stands out for me, besides the fact he's only ever played in pub leagues at 27, is that the Singapore league looks like it gets almost zero fans. It'd be an enormous culture shock for him to have to play in front of stadiums full of tens of thousands of people, he's basically never done it successfully. The amount of footballers in covid that all of a sudden had little purple patches, even Iheanacho really, because there was nobody watching live. We really under estimate I think how much difference it makes. Can't see this guy ever signing and making any impact.

In fairness, I don't think that's true. If we survived this season (and we won't unless somebody is docked an insane amount of points somehow out of the blue which they won't be) we'd be in a much stronger position. Our finances recover a little bit more every year as our wage bill comes down, our amortisation clears up, we lose dead wood through contract expiration and we lose some of our most debt ridden seasons from the rolling three year window. This year was a big make or break one from the club and we fluffed it.

Think so.

Bold you to assume I turned it on