Finnegan

I will never, for the life of me, understand why "reaction videos" became a thing. Who believes this performative shit?

Hasn't he done a decent amount of Sky Sports EFL stuff? I'm sure I've seen him on the TV a few times and been impressed.

He's got a door and a window

Don't worry, I absolutely can be a raging hypocrite sometimes, just like everyone. But my stance on the so called eye test vs statistics has been fairly consistent over the years.

No, Dahnsouff used to routinely refuse to acknowledge the worth of Iheanacho even when his statistical output was excellent. In both instances it was me defending the performance of our players based on numerical evidence.

Yeah, Sky Sports FanZone.

Yeah but a named Lillian made a Leeds fan have a meltdown live on national television.

Wrong way round. The second one our performances were about even for most of the season, we just got caught. The first was an absolutely shameful collapse. We'd been in a title race at Christmas. 👆

I don't let that get in the way of hate. You need to up your loathing game.

They're not exactly a large studio though are they, it's all resources. A huge chunk of their devs are going to constantly be shackled to getting the next game in the cycle ready which is why there's never much significant change between versions. We don't really know how many devs have been doing how much work on the side for the last couple of years. Or what specifically they were working in.

I think both are really good examples of how under rated psychology is in professional football and how the vast majority of fans give zero consideration for the relationship between mental state and performance. Other than occasionally trotting out clichés about "confidence players" or something on those lines, it's largely over looked. Maguire the Leicester player was a superb defender who, whilst not worth 80m, was a pretty natural candidate for a transfer to United. He has that level of talent and ability but he absolutely collapsed under enormous public scrutiny owing to both the fee and the expectations that come with playing for United. The staff at United spectacularly failed to deal with this, whether it be sports psychologists or even just man management, nobody seemed to know how to rebuild his confidence and stop him spiraling. Cags is another. At his best he was absolutely excellent with us but he was completely appalling under pressure and his mistakes had a habit of snowballing massively. You can't always blame coaches and staff, some people just aren't cut out for that kind of stress and pressure. It's a lot of what makes Premier League level players genuinely elite. I think there's a certain amount of that with Cags but I also do think he was horrifically badly managed by Rodgers and was and is an objectively better player than Amartey.

Even better, they should have taken two full years to develop 26. This was always going to be ambitious, they wanted to reinvent the game from the ground up. Doing it in a one year game cycle was dumb. Probably not really their fault, SEGA need to take a big share of the blame. They could have sold a 24/25 season DLC for 24 with an official database update and updates to the in-built graphics which, let's be honest, a couple of interns could have put together and they'd have made a bit of money and the community wout forgive it. Now they're substantially setting back development of their road map and they're still going to be playing catch up.

Something something Kelechi Iheanacho incredible goal contributions per minute in the Premier League something something Dahnsouff eye test something something

Damn, there goes Sergio Ramos

Around about the same time Sam Allardyce likes to tell everyone he nearly signed him for one of the Lancashire hamlets. The real ones know I signed him first from Lech Poznan circa FM 2009.

Sweet prince.

With a squad that should have been top 6.

This is an appalling take. He had absolutely no idea at all how to coach attacking football and his man management was no better than Rodgers (the whole Vardy saga was insane.) Rodgers definitely benefited from inheriting Puel's defensive organisation and his tenure saw mostly solid recruitment but let's not fall in to Puel revisionism, he was a largely awful manager who had to go. What I would take would be an NFL style set up of Puel as defensive coordinator, Rodgers as offensive coordinator and Pearson as head coach. With Walsh as GM. Dynasty worthy that.

Did you read the thread title at all

Football Manager 2021 wonder kid, Renyer.

The current team managing it at a higher level are aspiring to be COD and want one year game cycles. It won't be.

Also, a better question would be: Do you trust the combination of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Martyn Glover and Jon Rudkin to keep us up if Top took a large gamble and got the cheque book out? Not just this year, but again next year with -6 or so points? With millions of next year and the next year and the next year's budget then spent in amortisation?

It's just largely paranoia. They can take action against us for the season we were there. A season in which we did almost everything in our power to reduce cost. We lost a bunch off the wage bill like Tielemans, Soyuncu and Amartey and had a lot of the remaining on wage reduction clauses. We sold Maddison, Barnes and KDH for just short of 100m collectively. We kept our spend relatively low and we benefited from parachute payments. We were also objectively good for the league, bringing in additional viewers and media attention. Other than the fact we had a light tangle with them for trying to get involved with our beef with the Prem, there's not really a great deal there.

Nobody in here is qualified to answer that question, especially not while emotions are running high. You'd need actual access to our books and a professional level of understanding of the rules and the nuances of how they're implemented. Even the Kieran Maguires of this world are only making educated guesses until they see our returns. What I would say is that amortisation is a trap that leads to the death spiral we're currently in and too many of us, myself included, end up erroneously thinking "yeah it'll be fine to spend twenty million because we just sold Tom Cannon for a few million profit!" That's obviously not healthy and obviously not sustainable, especially when you're rushing to make bad choices and recruit sub optimal players in this constant papering over the cracks. I know I'm in the minority but I'm quietly relieved Woyo was our only nonsense panic buy of the window. It's bad enough we're stuck with Skipp for the next four years, clogging up our amortisation and wage bill. We'll be in a strong spending position in the summer. I think people, again including myself, have been a tiny bit melodramatic about what's waiting for us in the EFL. We're not definitely going to get shafted, we made a lot of money selling players in the last year. The EFL might be a bit mad at us but they only tried to embargo us because they wanted to know our plans and we said stay out of it it's nothing to do with you, haha. Not because we'd actually done anything wrong at that point. Yes, Rudkin will still be here, we won't really have learned that lesson. So we're going to be reliant on who the manager is. The good news is we'll be the big dogs again, we'll be in a stronger financial position than last relegation with a smaller wage bill and less PSR drama. So we'll be an attractive prospect for one of the best Championship level managers and we'll probably be able to pull off another round of Winks and Fatawus, getting in players too good for that level. Obviously limping to survival would be better, of course it would, but I think if we'd done it by shackling ourselves to more deadweight losers for the next three to five years, we'd have been setting ourselves up to stay in that cycle of doom for the next half decade, doing an Everton, permanently circling the drain. I'd rather not, personally. Doesn't mean I'm letting the ownership off the hook but it does mean I'm not wildly unhappy with not spending and I am just accepting we're going down and coming to terms with it.