Finnegan

The way the story has broke, who has broken it, the fact we do genuinely seem to have watched this guy for most of last year and the timing of the rumours feels a bit different. Obviously you never know, another club might see us move and table a rival bid that the player prefers. Could have another Soule situation. But it doesn't feel like that. I'll be surprised if Ioannidis isn't in the squad for, at least, Fulham if not Spurs. I think we'll wrap this up with some urgency unless Panathinaikos feel no need to sell and try and bend us over for the price.

Yep I agree. I'm cheering myself up by reminding myself that Cooper will only be around for about 1/6th of Fotis' contract.

They're just quoting other rumours and citing the sources. They don't post their own rumours. They post good and bad. Percy has confirmed our interest in Zaha. But Percy will only write when he's actually sure of something, meaning he's often a bit slower on the uptake when it involves foreign clubs that have a huge itk network and massive online presence. The Gala ITKs broke the Yunus news before anyone else and they were spot on about it tbf. If high tier Gala ITKs are saying this is imminent then quite frankly I believe it.

Very rightly. He's worse than what we have. Zaha and Fotis much better options.

He's someone we watched all year and is clearly our priority target in the 9 position. We're just in a situation right now where we need 3 or 4 players and probably only have about 30 odd million to spend so we need to decide what positions we cover with loans and what we use the money on. Until Daka got injured, it looked like we were going to use our second loan on a striker from Atalanta but now that he's hurt and Zaha is available on loan we'll probably spend the money on a striker and loan in a winger / attacking midfielder. Don't think it's panic to be honest, it's just responding to situations.

Halloumi?

In fairness, Kramaric wasn't really cut out well for the Premier League. He's neither quick nor really strong, it's an extremely athletic league and our style of football definitely didn't fit him anyway. This time we're signing an absolute unit with great feet for his size who is deceptively quick and holds the ball up well. He'll suit the league well.

I think this is semantics to be fair. I think a lot of people have their idea of how transfer finances work from Football Manager and similar computer games. The reality is going to be a lot more complex and variable and I think over the last few years with football finance experts becoming journalists etc we're starting to change our language and our understanding around transfers. At the end of the day, what's essentially being said is that it's going to cost us 8m to loan him. You can consider that a fee or us paying part of his wages it doesn't really matter does it tbh. Tomayto tomahto. It's all just money for Zaha.

Percy confirms talks ongoing.

It's a browser plugin for fbref yeah.

Szmodics is a midfielder who's had one good goal scoring season. You want to play him up front instead of a six foot, mobile, international striker?

We mostly use fbref for percentile charts and they only measure the top X few leagues in Europe. 👀

Can we confirm his surname is four syllables? Need to make sure I've got the chant right for his debut. Du du du, Fotis Ioannidis.

Tbf you say that like he's 29. Hes 24 years old, just coming in to his prime isn't he.

Imagine this will happen very quickly but we'll probably get bent over for a few mil extra as they'll know we're desperate. If not in for Spurs then second game you'd imagine. We're not gonna start the season with only Cannon fit and if we've genuinely been watching him a while we'll be pretty certain.

Not particularly sold on Tom C but I'll call it 2 for now. Last thing he broke Fab confirmed and it would make sense tbf.

If we splash the cash on any striker before we invest in a proper midfield then we'll get relegated. Daka, Vardy, Cannon or even Mavididi will score more goals with a good midfield behind them than a better striker would score with a bad one. If we line up with BDCR at 10, Mavididi being forced inside in to a 10 role and have VK as the wide left outlet then paying 25-30m for the next big thing centre forward is just pissing money up the wall.

Why? Clubs do this to us all the time. You think Torino covered all of Dennis Praet's wages AND gave us a fee? Ditto Slimani to Fener, Ghezal to Fiorentina, Hamza to Watford, etc? Gala pay Zaha silly money because the Turkish clubs and them in particular got massive financial windfalls from their government and have been the highest spending clubs outside the Prem for the last few years. They're just looking for a club to come in and take as much of that financial burden as possible off them for a year because his wages are too high to sell him. Familiar story?

@Izzy your mate is off again

It's a reflection of how awful our squad management has been over the last five years that he's even still at the club.

Don't think the players did either.

When they came in we were newly promoted to the Champ after years of decay. They turned that in to a title win and FA Cup as well as several decent forays in to Europe. They're obviously a net positive. That said, Top isn't the businessman his father was and he does appear to lean too heavily on a director of football who isn't qualified for the role and is only in post because of the owners' reasonably admirable values of loyalty and family. I don't want them out but I do want Top to come of age, discover a bit of his father's ruthless streak and get rid of Rudkin and the members of staff here who aren't of the quality their investment in world class facilities deserves.

That's not what has been said. Gala pay his wages, we pay a fee that equates to just over 100k a week.

Did someone really compare Wilfred Zaha to Jesse ****ing Lingard. Look, I know we're all depressed AF right now but Zaha is still an exceptional Premiership player and would be a great bit of business for us on a loan.