Finnegan

I don't understand all the hand wringing over the Burnley comparisons tbh. Last year's championship was shit. If last year's Burnley were in this year's championship, they wouldn't be anywhere near the top four. Tbh, if this year's Burnley were in the Championship they probably wouldn't be in the top four. We've got a better team in the second tier after relegation than they do now in the Prem. And even more bullish, I'd happily put money on our coach having a substantially better career overall than theirs. Don't think Kompany is on Enzos level at all.

Gabriel Barbosa is out of contract because he's just been given a two year global ban for a doping violation.

The nuance here has just gone miles over your head mate, hasn't it? Nobody, including me, is defending their business practices or denying they've breached the laws put in place to pretty deliberately stop them. But plenty of clubs around the world are playing with, basically, the money cheats on and are still getting it wrong. Having a significant amount of resources at their disposal doesn't stop it being immensely impressive that they've consistently put the right team together and coached it superbly. You can acknowledge the money they have is disgusting whilst still also recognising the footballing side of the business is an example clubs should be learning lessons from.

You really can't have travelled much. I see a lot of Bradford since I've moved up here, also had a few visits over the last year to Wigan, Preston, Blackpool, Barnsley, et all. That's without talking about anywhere in Wales. There are many, many worse city & town centres than Leicester. We're not just talking boarded up shops, we're talking considerable urban decay, majorly run down buildings everywhere that are both hugely dated and disgustingly dirty, in a state of considerable disrepair. There's a massive, massive lack of money and investment both publicly and privately going in to maintaining and improving so many spaces all across the country. Leicester's nothing like that, it's just got too big a city centre for it's needs now that the world had shifted and a lot of lower and middle cost retail has moved online. Streets like Church Gate, Charles Street and Gallowtree Gate that used to be fairly thriving shopping streets now have a lot of empty lots or lots taken up by extremely cheap vape, takeaway and tat shops and that's just something that's happening all across the UK to former "high streets" because the retail sector is mostly online these days. The areas of Leicester that are pretty nice, stretching sort of across the "top" of town from High Cross right up to New Walk are all predominantly service-sector. Bars, restaurants, cafes, etc. But Leicester's got a limited need for these because the surrounding catchment area isn't overly densely populated and it's also got "hotspots" dragged out from the main centre, like Melton Road / Golden Mile. There isn't really an obvious fix for that until the population of Leicester and Leicestershire naturally grows up to a point where there's a big enough demand for service and entertainment sectors to fill those now dead spaces across the city. Living in Leeds I've been blown away by how much is on offer in the city centre and how thriving the place is but it's easy to lose perspective of the fact that it's catchment area and volume of people coming in to Leeds for shopping and leisure is massive compared to Leicester, its not just Leeds and it's metropolitan area alone, people come from Bradford, from Wakefield, etc, all in to Leeds for their weekends - Leicester will probably never have that.

Odd choice of career move really given how entrenched Ollie Watkins is. Also Unai Emery demands a lot of physical graft from his players, I think he'll have the same reservations about Iheanacho previous managers have had. Think he'd absolutely mop up if he went to Spain or Italy to play at a different pace but a Premier League manager is never going to be able to carry Nacho's defensive work rate for long, especially there.

It is absolutely bananas how many injury time, really late injury time, goals Leverkusen have scored this year.

I reckon a 50 year old Jay Jay Okocha would still be a better signing that Rachid Ghezzal tbf.

Toni Kroos and Luka Modric?

But to be clear, they really, really, really don't care.

No footballer should receive hate just for playing the sport, it's a game ffs. But I don't like Kane and that's not an England Wales thing. He's just always been someone who talks about individual records and achievement first and the team second. Bit like Ronaldo really. Just not something I like.

In that case I take everything back he'll be a great signing and I'm sure he'll really come in to his own next year

Not really sure about that to be honest. Stephy Mavididi was cheaper and is probably both a better fit for a Premier League club in general and also our needs for a winger. There's also the loan market to consider and the fact Fatawu will likely be first choice. I'd be confident in Glover and Co finding a better player than Akgun for 10m with the draw of the Premier League tbh.

For his holidays or for good? What have you read? Not gonna lie, I'm not sure he looked like Premier League quality tbh. Had a touch of the Knockaerts about him.

TLDR: we can't register players for the EFL at the moment which is irrelevant because our next registration period will be for the 24/25 Premier League season.

It's not racist if what he means by "they" is the Chinese government or organisations "unofficially" financed by the Chinese government, though, is it? I think the Chinese, Russian, Israeli and Saudi governments (purely for example, there are plenty more) are objectively evil. That doesn't make me racist towards Chinese, Russian, Israeli or Saudi people.

Yeah, so, footballers are people. You can't legally own a person, we don't want to actually buy Abdul Fatawu. When money changes hands between Leicester City and Sporting, what we're really doing is buying the rights to legally acquire his contract. We could theoretically do that at any point, there's no reason you can't wrap up a transfer in October or March, for example, it's just that that player cannot be registered by his new club so there's really no point. FIFA's published regulations on The Status and Transfer of Players doesn't actually talk about transfers per se, it talks about registration and the rules therein. This is what a 'transfer window' really is, it's what FIFA calls a Registration Period and every association is allowed to define when two of those fall within their calendar. If you read the Embargoes page on the EFL website, you'll see that they state the limitation on players is a limitation on registration, written as "Clubs under Embargo with 23 or more players of Professional Standing cannot register players." They can't directly stop us giving money to Sporting. However, obviously clubs that are under embargoes are normally being vetted financially for over-spending and going out and spending more money whilst essentially being audited for Profit & Sustainability breaches would be spectacularly stupid. All of this said, the embargo the EFL has placed on us isn't actually because of a breach of rules - unless I've misunderstood - but because we've refused to comply with their request for us to "provide relevant information relating to Profit & Sustainability rules", basically we don't ****ing have to because our financials for this season haven't been published yet and won't until next year and our 22/23 financials are the absolute sum of **** all to do with them and they can sit on their pencils and swivel.

I think people will actually enjoy Enzoball next year if he's still here. A lot of it will depend who we have at centre back and how well they hold up to the pace of the Premier League. But generally speaking, I don't think people quite have it in their heads still that Enzoball involves a lot of intense pressing and counter attacking. We've scored goals this year that were the most rapid we've gone from back to front since we won the Premier League. We also close teams down and win the ball back a LOT. Certainly with a lot more intensity than we ever did under Rodgers. You're going to see a lot, lot more of that next season. Just because Maresca's preference is to have control of the game as much as possible, that doesn't mean we'll always be able to or that teams are going to play along. The best way to be a successful side is to have both in your locker, to be able to attack from anywhere on the pitch, whether or not that's your own six yard box or whether or not it's camping outside the opposition area because they refuse to come out of their low block. Enzo's got the team doing both which is great news. You coach a team ONLY to play devastating counter attacks and you end up like David Moyes or Roy Hogdson, completely unable to beat any team in the league with an organised defence that are prepared for your one trick pony. That's why Vichai and Top wanted us to change our philosophy in the first place because smash and grabbing your way to a title only really happens once.

I'll be really honest, I'm not sure I saw a player that seems particularly ready for Premier League football anyway. Don't get me wrong, he's very young and he got unlucky with injuries but I think it said a lot he couldn't really get his position back despite looking like he was a specific pick from the manager himself. He could probably do with being first choice all year for a top end Championship team again.

You're comparing JJ to full backs and Pereira to centre-backs and then overlaying the results together to get just... a bit of a mess. I don't really think this is the best statistical comparison you could have done. Edit: to reinforce what @Ric Flair hinted at, you also need to consider the vast difference in status and potentially play style between Leicester and them. Gil Vicente average 49.3% possession in matches, are comfortably in the bottom half in their league for pass completion rate across the team, despite attempting some of the fewest long passes but only in Arouca in the league (outside the Big Four) have attempted more passes over all this season. Gabriel Pereira has made the second most passes in his team this season at 1720 with 413 considered short (between 5 and 15 yards), 956 considered medium (up to 30 yards) and 310 long. Interestingly, he is most successful (93.2%) at medium range. Unfortunately, FBRef doesn't track progressive passes in the defensive third so it's hard to say whether or not a lot of these mid range passes were through balls breaking the line in to the midfield or were just sideways across the back four (which is probably more likely.) He also carries the ball more than anyone else in his team, which is similar to Vestergaard, having the most carries and the most yards carried of anyone in his squad. I wouldn't have chosen to compare him to JJ at all tbf.

We're all Dortmund aren't we

Yep. We won't get much mitigation, there's no real argument. You can't say "well, we went down anyway..." We'll definitely get a points deduction. It's just it'll probably be as pathetic as Forest's and Everton's.

You're very generous with the word fan.

Honestly it's a bit pointless answering this until we know more about points deductions and the actual budget Glover and Co are going to have to work with. For all we know we might have to asset strip, we might lose our manager, we might lose our player of the season, we could end up worse than Derby and Sheffield United. In which case the objective is just to financially recover, do a Norwich and pocket the Prem money without spending and just ride it out. Or we could actually be over the worst of our problems, just eat the FFP punishment, try to do better next time, get back to the recruitment that had us the envy of most of the league and then I'd hope we'd be looking at a cosy 12th to 14th finish with no relegation drama in sight. Honestly, we aren't going to know more for three or four weeks yet.