Finnegan

I've just realised it's already started. I thought it was on at 8. What a twat

If you set your vpn to Ireland will we be able to watch it on RTE's website online for free?

It might just be a polo shirt but in fairness that is banging.

****ing hell

If we replace Jordan Ayew with Lyndon Dykes I give up on football permanently.

Topps Tiles 2.0 incoming

Whyyyy say that now

I'd wait til you see the dross we're putting out before getting smug

Womp Womp

For the record I mean physical development I was reeling off players that were pretty decent athletes or mature for their age at 16, 17 years old not a list of players I thought were world class

I've said since I first saw him that he lacks pace. However, he's 16. Not everyone develops like Bale, Rooney, Owen or Walcott. You don't really know what his body is going to do in the next two or three years. Could gain a fair bit in strength and pace still. I think he looks very much like a child when he's playing and that's fine because he is.

Don't you worry. It's going to be a crap generic template with too much tacky gold on it and an awful fake company sponsoring it with a massive, ugly logo.

He's signed a pre-contract agreement with us but I don't think a 16 year old can be held to that if another club want to come in and sign him still before he actually signs a pro deal with us. As I understand it, it's more of a statement of intent to sign here that will, at best, push up the compo we get? The bit I don't quite know is what happens if nobody has offered him anything by the time his birthday comes around. Does what he signed last year automatically become a professional contract if nothing else has happened before that? No idea. We won't get any sell on fees, it's not a conventional transfer, it's a free transfer with compensation being decided by an independent tribunal. We'll get more for Monga than we did Nyoni because the fact we've had him on a pre contract deal and we've been using him as a member of the first team squad will influence the figure. But it'll still be horrendously low because the compensation fees always are. As a 17 year old on a professional contract, a player of his hype and reputation easily goes for north of 10m if not double that. We'll be lucky to get 2.5m.

Yeah literally none of it makes sense unless it's some swindle and the Saudis are going to lump up some extreme back hander to Barcelona in the form of sponsorship or something. Barca don't have crazy money, they've been walking a tight rope for a couple of years and could do with calming down their spend. Rashford is there, has done OK, is a better player than Gordon, wants to stay and is more than half the price? Gordon struggles to match Barnes' output and is somehow treated by the English press like a star of the game. I don't get it. I always thought Grealish was over rated but Gordon? He's in the Barnes & KDH bracket of English talent, nothing more.

Gordon isn't going to get a kick there. How the **** did both Bayern and Barca want him? Am I really out of touch and he's some absolute statistical beast or has he got the world's best agent? He's the most over rated English player for generations.

Exactly, yeah. They're basically the Manchester United or Real Madrid of Germany. Even without the Champions League money they'd be massive. In the mid-late 90s to early 00s when the sport started to blow up massively globally and the commercialism of the sport started reaching new levels, those clubs really lead the charge and started gaining masses of followers all round the world. There'll be decent sized Bayern fan clubs in probably well over half the countries in the world.

Yeah there's still obviously problems at the very top. The biggest though isn't exactly a problem with German football specifically it's the fact they don't exist purely in a bubble. The Champions League is such a ridiculous cash cow and being one of Europe's biggest clubs these days brings in absolutely gigantic revenue from overseas. Bayern are playing with the money cheats on relative to the other clubs. It wasn't always like that. Yes, they've always been one of the most succesful clubs but if you wind the clock back to before the millennium and look at the winners of the Bundesliga it's a much different picture. It's Bayern passing the title back and forth with Kaiserslauten, Stuttgart, Dortmund, Bremen, Hamburg, Koln, Gladbach and Co for decades. But everywhere below Bayern its still very variable. I can't think of another of Europe's major footballing countries where such big clubs routinely drop to the second tier and relative village teams pass them in the opposite direction.

The collapse in that game was Brendan Rodgers in an absolute nutshell. Still have PTSD thinking of that Spurs game.

Almost like hugely curbing billionaire owners and (mostly) enforcing a majority fan ownership is generally better for creating a more even playing field.

It's worth reading the article in full tbf because he says himself it's kinda bullshit. Although I do like that he originally did it to prove predictive modelling was nonsense.

Christ there's more than a couple of future I'm A Celebrity contestants in there innit

The only time Nixon had gotten anything right about us (as far as I can tell?) was Jordan Ayew. Looking through his previous claims around that time he seemed to have a decent amount about Palace and Charlton right. All of these guys are only as good as their sources and their intentions. I assume someone around South London talks to Nixon. O'Rourke and Nixon just can't ever be considered credible until verified by someone else, though, because they only care about the clicks and will post literally anything to drive revenue. They don't give a **** about their credibility the same way Percy or Collomosse do.

People are desperate

It's a joke he passed the fit and proper test.

Neither did we.