Finnegan

Centralised badges mostly work for national teams. When you've got a sponsor and a kit supplier there in the normal position it just looks weird. It'd be a good Wolves kit if the badge was just in the normal spot and you didn't have the strange gold flashing on the shorts. I definitely don't hate it.

Wtf is Sudu

To be fair, what I think you overlook is that the novelty would wear off in football. It would be ****ing terrrible for a short while whilst the chavs went nuts but people would just adjust.

My girlfriend bought the ps5 version, I thought it was awful personally. It's an incredible game but the controls felt so bad on controller.

I mean we're talking about an 18 year old kid that's probably only ever gone North of the M25 on a Chelsea team bus and a Leicester lad that's been on the books at City for sixteen or so years. Possible the deals were all signed and sealed a couple days ago but they're just being given time to go talk to their families and get their affairs in order before they get bombarded with PR obligations, especially given it's summer holidays at the moment. Everyone gets super impatient about all of this stuff and forgets the human element. It's being styled like transfer deadline day but it isn't actually, it's still very much the off season and as long as the accounts are balanced, the big announcements can wait.

To be clear, I absolutely hope this kid ends up in the first team and an absolute star. Genuinely. Second coming of Muzzy Izzet, hopefully. But we'd buy a ****ing stationary cupboard, a bag of match balls and a stock of Mars Bars for the canteen for £4m if it counted towards PSR, we could amortise it and it enabled Chelsea to bid £30m for KDH in the 23/24 period.

We have so few midfielders I'd definitely be tempted to offer him a contract but his interest probably left with Enzo.

Yes. PSR. It's pretty obvious that we needed Chelsea to meet a certain threshold buying KDH for us to clear our losses and finish the year within scope. They've obviously turned around, checked their own finances, and let us know how much they need us to spend back for them to be compliant their end. They've gone "er, we need you to spend four million" we've said "got any midfielders for that?" they've gone rummaging around in the stock room and come back with Michael Golding. I feel fairly confident the money we've paid was given way more consideration than who or what we actually got back for the cash. Edit: and that's not unique to us btw, it'll have been similar wrangling in half these other "deadline" day deals Newcastle, Everton, Villa et all have been doing.

"We should keep our expectations grounded guys" "HE'S GOING TO BE THE NEXT MUSIALA" FoxesTalk™

To an extent but if Chelsea suspected this kid had a high probability of going on to be a solid, top half Prem player they wouldn't be letting him go for four mil. They've been laughed at historically for letting talent like De Bruyne and Salah slip by but even back then they sold the two for about £20m each. Chelsea are in the money printing business. They don't waste too many opportunities. I'm not trying to write Golding off, I just think people should temper their expectations. We've seen too many times what happens when this place gets over hyped too early, they'll be booing this kid by Christmas if he's not the second coming of Frank Lampard.

Tbh we have so few midfielders on the books we almost can't sell him atm

Poundshop Danny Tiatto.

Let's be extremely honest, Southgate could absolutely have shithoused his way to a major trophy as a manager but for a bit of luck, a penalty or two, it wouldn't make him good. Southgate and Deschamps very similar as managers. Both are absolutely crap coaches that are blessed to have wonderful squads. Just in Deschamps' case he has by far and away the best talent pool on the planet at his disposal.

That's a ridiculous foul on Castagne

Didier Deschamps is the French Gareth Southgate.

No. We've just signed him for four million. I think people are getting a bit carried away. We've signed him so they'll bump the KDH fee up a bit to the cut off point we needed for FFP. But he is well regarded by Chelsea fans who go and watch their academy. There's still a very real possibility he never plays a senior game for us and we won't care.

It's alright yeah. Decent recovery. But Carasco was shocking there. Had to shoot sooner.

Is he seriously, that's huge for them. I thought he'd be off to Europe league chasing team somewhere if I'm honest.

It's rolling years so it's not necessarily a "new" period. But it definitely does get a little bit healthier every year. We probably still have at least another year or two of pain and consolidation though frankly. I wouldn't expect us to spend billions. Although the squad is so thin we clearly have to do something, we have basically zero midfield for a start.

Not just to make the fans feel better but we're trying to convince the league that the KDH deal is for the 23/24 books but the Fatawu one is for 24/25. It's gonna look a bit weird if we make a big show of getting Abdul's deal done first. We aren't going to announce any new signings until KDH has gone officially are we.

Florentino Luis =/= Abdul Fatawu. Florentino Luis grew up in Lisbon and has been on the books at Benfica since he was nine or ten years old. He's been a major long term project for one of the top 5 youth academies in the world since before puberty. They know everything about him, he's played hundreds of youth games for Benfica and Portugal and he's been a first team stalwart for a couple of years now racking up seventy to eighty odd senior matches for Benfica. They will have a very clear idea of his financial value to them, how long they plan to retain him and what sort of package they'll be after when he goes. By contrast, Abdul Fatawu is a kid Sporting took a punt on from an overseas league who played next to no senior football. He then messed around for a year in their B team while they tried to get an idea of his value. They got it wrong. We came in and offered them about £15m, they laughed in our face and immediately cashed in. It was a gamble that his value wouldn't rise all that much because they weren't too impressed with what they'd seen and they thought we were overpaying. Sad trombone noise for them when he goes on to light up the Championship. To be fair, they don't often miss. There is zero incentive for Benfica to loan out Luis with the same clauses we got with Abdul. The only reason a selling club in their position agree to a loan with obligation is if they can use this sort of deal to significantly inflate the asking price. In this instance, the buying club is paying more for the convenience of being able to kick the transfer fee down the road in to a later PSR / FFP period in which they are struggling less. We may very well see Leicester make a deal like that this window for exactly those reasons but Benfica won't give us an out in the form of "obligation IF we survive." There's no incentive for them to do that at all. We'll be paying it regardless or they won't do the deal at all.

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If this thread has taught me anything it's that a lot of people seem to wildly over value KDH.