Finnegan

I love football fans. If someone, say, I dunno, Chris Sutton came out and said that Leicester fans were going to stop supporting the club and go watch other teams because we've had a couple of shit seasons you'd all be absolutely outraged. Frothing at the mouth, ranting about how your club is for life and we've been down to League One and we're still here blah blah. Ruud makes a fairly harmless (and accurate) statement that the fans of the club will always support the club regardless but that they need to do better to give us a club we can be proud of and all of a sudden they're taking advantage? There's been a lot of people going out of their way to be outraged by everything this year. This isn't defence of the club particularly, by the way, but I definitely think some of you need this season to end so you can go spend a month or two touching grass.

I love you man but at some point even you have to check your bias a bit They're almost certainly going to comfortably walk the top four. The Big Six absolutely rolled out the red carpet for us in 19/20 and 20/21 and we still tripped over it. Comparisons to 15/16 are beyond silly but they've done a better job or cracking CL qualification than our Rodgers teams did. Rate Nuno as a manager of people significantly higher than Brendan. He's done a superb job turning a squad of random, scatter gun mercenary signings in to a solid if simple team.

They're just having a bad year They've scored an absurd amount of goals during his time there and have played some ridiculously good football winning basically the everything. I reckon their fans are pleased idk?

He's the executive Woyo

Fiorentina have been brilliant this year. Were genuinely pushing the top four earlier in this year. Moise Kean really having his proper coming of age season. They've dropped off a bit but still been great to watch.

Behave man. You haven't been in a title race for months. Nobody has. Liverpool had this wrapped up at Christmas and that's being kind. There's been only one title winner this year since basically September, anything else is just Sky Sports feeding you a lie to keep you interested or standard Arsenal Fan TV delusion.

TNT / BT

Get yourself on the old Serie A. Been brilliant this year.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this is the least enjoyable season since the relegation to League One. At least that team put a shit in, they were just very crap.

Under no circumstances should King be put in to the spotlight and mired with this shit. Let him progress his coaching career sensibly.

You must be mistaken, there's no such place.

I mean he's just not very good.

I feel that we are, and were, a victim of the growing gap between the Championship and the Premier League but not necessarily in the way people most commonly think. When we were relegated, we suddenly became Man City. We were relegated as recent Premier League and FA Cup winners who had been competing for Champions League spots and The Best of the Rest shortly before and had a wage bill to match. The entire Championship saw us coming and absolutely dropped their collective guts. Almost every club in the league went out and bought themselves an extra large new team bus to park on the pitch. I firmly believe that Enzoball was the most practical way to ensure we won the Championship in that context. Possession football is still the current (I hate I'm about to use this term) meta for winning a 30-40 game domestic title when you are by far the biggest club. It's why Pep has been so consistent for decades, it's why Klopp struggled to win as many titles and it's why Slot has come straight in to Liverpool and romped the league with the same squad. It's also why Leeds, who probably had a better squad than us last year, fell short of the mark because they just couldn't convert those draws in to wins because they lacked the same structured play that we had. The problem is, though, you have to earn the right to play that way. You need to be dominant, really, to play that way. As soon as we got promoted it no longer became the most intelligent and efficient way for us to play, as soon as we got promoted, all those players that were essential last year (Vestergaard, Faes, Winks, etc) became liabilities in the Premier League because what we really needed was a Morgan and a Huth, absolute battlers who are up for the fight. The most effective tactic for a newly promoted side will be to have a strong defence and a counter attacking game, sadly, to play like Forest currently are and like we were once famous for. But we're getting relegated again and we need to rebuild the squad again and ultimately the sensible thing to do here is to focus on possession again because we're still going to be a huge big fish in the Championship, people are still going to park the bus and we're still going to need to break that down. Then if we get promoted again we'll be ****ed once over. We're almost victims of our own success because we're too big to be able to approach the Championship as underdogs but we've made too big a mess of our squad to be able to approach the Premier League like an established side and play the way Top wants us to, a la Brighton. I don't think the blame rests with Enzo and I don't agree with trying to be tactically versatile, having a plan B, not committing to one philosophy or another, etc. This is Football Manager thinking, this is unrealistic fan thinking. Slot was asked earlier in the year before the Brentford game what made them so dangerous, he said that the length of service of Frank made them a problem to play against because Frank had been there long enough to coach in multiple styles of play. He said this takes a long time because when a coach first joins a club it takes a long time to drill and to perfect just the one system let alone two or three. Enzo said this repeatedly when he was here, he was always keen to emphasise it's a journey and that we were only just beginning and that we had to constantly improve. He was right, obviously his time here was cut short but he was still right. It's naive and foolish to think a coach is going to come in, be tactically flexible and teach a squad that needs a huge rebuild how to play multiple ways all at once. You need to pick a lane and get in it. If you want your coach to have a plan B you have to invest him over time and let it grow. It takes a lot more than one summer, football has become such a heavily systems orientated game it takes years for a squad to properly evolve it's relationship with the coach.

I've actually seen them before, about the time the first album came out. I was extremely salty that they made the main stage at Reading while the far superior Datsuns didn't. Although tbf, tent stage far more the vibe for a proper garage rock band.

Because expectations are non existent?

Pretty sure we're still in denial that we can get out of the mess tbf. Ruud will have no plans to be our manager next year so he's definitely not going to be succession planning with the squad.

Jesus ****ing Christ, it's 30 years old

We've wasted a decent amount of money but we also make some pretty decent transfers and find some good players when we have the room to do so. We wouldn't have signed Steve Cooper, BDCR or Jordan Ayew this season if we aren't trying to stay extremely under budget. Our entire year was defined by trying not to spend anything. Who knows what the window might have looked like with financial freedom. Like I said, anyway, the two things aren't mutually exclusive. We have made bad decisions, yes, but don't pretend for one second we're playing a fair game.

We're all laughing but this is ****ing grotesque. On every level. We're getting relegated because rules designed to protect Chelsea and co vastly limit the money we can spend. We have owners that can afford to build one of the most advanced training facilities in the world and who consistently turn their loans in to equity yet apparently we couldn't let them spend another twenty odd million on players this year that might have kept us up for "our own good" because "sustainability." Meanwhile Chelsea can make hundreds of millions of losses one year and make it back the next by sham selling their own women's team to themselves. Everyone's wound up about Man City and their dodgy sponsorship deals but time after time Chelsea have the brass ones to do shit like this, over valued back scratching sales to Saudi, selling youth players for inflated fees, selling buildings to themselves et all and just completely get away with it. ****ing rank. It winds me up that the British are so apathetic about injustice being done to themselves that we'd all just have a laugh at the black humour of it instead of ****ing marching on FA HQ like we should. Edit before the inevitable apologists chime up: just because we've made bad transfer decisions it doesn't mean this isn't an enormous injustice. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

What I admire about you Ric is you always stay grounded and never let your imagination run away with you

It's because we got the managerial recruitment right. It should be pretty obvious by now that we don't operate a DOF - Head Coach model, as we should. We have a DOF in name only. We surrender all control to individual managers and are at their mercy to dictate transfer policy. Maresca knew what he wanted exactly and gave Glover clear instructions and a reasonable amount of freedom to operate. It went well. In the case of Rodgers and Cooper it went ****ing largely appallingly. There's little to no chance Ruud is still the manager next season so it's basically all going to come down to a dice roll or coin flip again. Will we make a smart choice on manager? We seem to do so one in every three or four attempts so yknow. We aren't going to "learn our lessons" and change the operating model of the club any time soon so it's just going to come down to that one decision. Hopefully we get it right and this time he doesn't get poached after one season. If not, we'll be down in the Championship much longer this time. Until we know who the manager is going to be next year, speculating over who's coming in or who'll be sold (other than very sellable assets the board will let go to cover losses) is pointless because it won't be Rudkin deciding it'll be New Guy.

It's Sky obviously trying to tap in to that market. It's the same as the BBC saying they understand MOTD needs to change in response to all of the highlights just being online now. The problem is you have old, out of touch executives trying to do what "the kids" want and that has never, ever really worked haha.