Finnegan

Sure and remember when we hired Ruud van Nistelrooy, who was one of the most iconic figures in football, and he turned out to be shit? You can come from anywhere and be good or bad, what matters is whether or not you were qualified. Clive Woodward was in no way qualified to be the Director of Football at a Premier League football club. In fact, having looked again at what he's being tasked with at Brighton, I don't even think fitness is a large part of it. I think he's more there to drive culture and mentality to sustain high level performance over time which is something the All Blacks (and Crusaders) are pretty much famous for, it's not really a surprise that people from other sports would be looking for consultants and asking how the ABs kept that up for so long. Thomas Frank and Brentford's recruitment team have spoken multiple times about taking philosophy from the ABs when it comes to picking characters / personalities they want to bring in to the club, quoting "No Dickheads" as a cultural pillar. I just don't think it's that comparable to the Woodward situation, other than the fact they both had a rugby background and that makes it a snappy story for the tabloids. If Woodward had never been best mates with Southampton's owner, nobody would be batting much of an eyelid about Brighton now.

I know it was sacrilege at the time to say this out loud but Clive Woodward isn't any kind of genius. He was a pretty meh coach who was already something of a rugby dinosaur at the time who took an extremely strong England side who were all peaking to a world cup in which they were the best team. Because of what that meant to the English public he became some sort of mythical sports hero for a while. Redknapp hated him, they fell out, Redknapp left and they made Woodward Director of ****ing Football. A bang average rugby coach. What. In contrast, Brighton are hiring a guy responsible for fitness, conditioning and team culture and asking him to do a similar role in a different sport. Other than understanding that footballers need different body types to rugby players, I don't really think there's much difficulty there transitioning to the new job. Some things are applicable across all sports and some things aren't, really. If there was an incredible sports psychologist that had helped, say, Lewis Hamilton or Roger Federer win countless titles then you wouldn't object to them coming and working with LCFC right? But if we tried to hire Bill Belichick to replace Cifuentes you'd be rightly horrified.

I can see him going to a mid table Ligue 1 side in the north of France on a free transfer when his deal here runs out.

We've got a couple of players I can see leaving the club and doing OK at teams in Europe's top seven or so leagues. People can laugh all they want but Faes, Okoli, Kristiansen, Daka (yes really) and Mavididi probably all do pretty well with a fresh start somewhere else. I reckon even Soumare under the right circumstances, Sevilla was definitely above his level but that's not saying much. If not in Italy, Germany or Spain then you could see most of that lot thriving at least in Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey, France, Belgium, etc.

Might not be up to us.

Holy shit, Myron Boadu still exists. That's a flash from the FM past. Probably do OK in the Championship to be fair but why only a 1 year contract? Fitness concerns? He someone else that'd take six months to actually be ready to play? Completely irrelevant, anyway, we've probably never heard of him and with Carranza flopping, Rudkin probably won't be ready to take another "risk" for a few years. It'll be EFL experience or nothing, thank you very much.

What odds can I get on them not even vaguely considering the option

We have some weird fans.

Time for everyone's favourite catchphrase: lazy journalism.

Do they normally wish former players a happy birthday? Love the guy, he's pretty much my favourite ever player. But he's gone. ****ing loads of genuinely important stuff to be mad at the club for and people care about this?

Yeah, I don't really get it. It's just genetic hating something popular isn't it really. And before I'm accused of bias, they're north Welsh, they're disgusting.

Tbh usually when I see people blaming Seagrave it is people blaming the owners. They use it as an example of bad decision making by the club. Whereas, personally, I think it's one of the best things they've done.

Blaming Seagrave for our problems is just brain dead sheep talk. People parroting mouth breathers on Facebook. Such a weird fixation.

How are blogs still a thing.

I'll defend Martinelli. In fact, I think the opposition manager defending Martinelli said it better than I could. He obviously thought Bradley was time wasting which is a pretty reasonable assumption. As soon as he actually calmed down and realised, he was mortified and went and apologised and by all accounts was very sweet about it. Slot is right, the wider problem is the time wasting and play acting of footballers in general. The fact it was such a reasonable assumption for him to think Bradley was time wasting is the bigger problem.

Gotta love the fans voting for their combined team of the series on the BBC with 6/11 England players haha.

One thing I do think and I've said this before when people are arguing with @urban.spaceman for some reason, the two things aren't mutually exclusive. It's true that the club has been terribly run with some awful decision making and it's also true that the rules are not fair and were very specifically designed to keep clubs like us in our place and the big six in "theirs." You can and should be mad at both things.

Can you not just **** off again for another few years?

Streets are trying so hard to forget.

Showing your age there pal

Try doing that living on a hill in Yorkshire. Every tree outside is pretty much sideways. Bitter.

That's about 1m more than we'll be spending.

I think the only point of argument I'd inject anywhere is that the longer time goes on, the less I think we should use the term "Rudkin" and more just "King Power", to be honest. I very much based the maths on his tenure as DoF but I increasingly believe his actually day job doesn't really match his title. I don't really think the expectations of him are comparable to what is expected of Txiki Begiristain, Monchi, Leonardo, Comolli or whoever else. A lot of the decision making we're deriding was the work of Rodgers, Cooper and co' which is an institutional and structural failure of the club as a business. Essentially, I think our club is so badly run that we don't really know who actually has true accountability for anything so ultimately the buck just has to keep passing upwards until you get to the Top (see what I did there.) Don't take that as a defence of Rudkin per se, I just think it's less "the cost of Rudkin" and more "the cost of having no adequate footballing infrastructure." It sounds pedantic but it's probably an important distinction.

As awful as it might be, Okoli is probably our most competent defender at the moment. Granted, that seems to change week by week when they take it in turns making horrific mistakes. Unless we're selling him for much needed profit or his wages are significantly higher than Vestergaard and Faes (which I doubt), he wouldn't be top of my list of people to get rid of, to be honest. Mid to long term, absolutely, I think he's crap. But now? Eh.

There you go, that was it. So ~126m loss on players we sold, another ~254m on ones that walked out for free and to add to your list of pending ones that are about to walk out for free, Bouba cost us another 20 odd, Vestergaard we'll probably be stuck with for another year and that's another 15m. What I didn't bother calculating because the data isn't reliable is the cost in wages over that time for players that don't actually play. So that's either cases like Soyuncu, Vestergaard, Daka, Soumare, etc where handsomely paid footballers are peripheral squad members or even frozen out entirely or even cases where a player has been loaned out to clubs repeatedly (eg Praet, Slimani, etc) who won't be paying anywhere near their full wage. I know every club will have stories like this. A certain percentage of transfers always fail. But the volume of money we've pissed away over the last 5-10 years is ****ing tragic.