Finnegan

It's just good man management, isn't it? It's dopamine for days. You want someone to do something more, you give them an attaboy when they do it. Soumare can track back and can put a decent tackle in, the biggest problem is he switches off and drifts and doesn't look particularly committed. Some people are more motivated by criticism, maybe a manager comes out and challenges him publicly to work harder. Obviously Marti doesn't think that's the right approach with Soumare and he probably isn't wrong.

It's relative though isn't it. Soumare has what for competition? Skipp? Or we can play Hamza there who doesn't have the positional sense to play DM for Anstey Nomads u8s. I don't begrudge Cifuentes playing him at the moment, he probably is our best midfielder after Winks. Nor can you fault him for trying to talk him up, he's always looked like he's struggled for confidence.

Someone else said this and I thought they were joking. Surely this is a joke?

We're not letting Okoli and Faes both leave unless we really are just selling up everyone and giving up.

Evans is way behind Rak-Sakyi in his development and Reid is shit. Why on earth would we turn down a loan for a player whose wages are probably pittance and who won't have much financial burden on us? Anyone still being snobbish about us "developing other clubs players" given the financial situation we are in needs a stern reality check. We're very obviously going to need loans.

This is just getting ****ing absurd now. I'm sorry man but this is so wildly over the top. Literally 99% of this anti Winks stuff is based on people making assumptions after one disagreement with RVN was leaked and then a whole mountain of hysterical confirmation bias after the fact. It might be the single most extreme case of manufactured hate I can remember seeing against one player. You all need to calm the **** down.

It's hard to know how good and bad Vichai was really because he sadly passed before we were truly tested. He made some hideous mistakes, he was the one that gave Rudkin the job, he didn't see the value of actually having a genuine DoF. He had a love of big names and image and it feels like he lucked in to Pearson's success a bit. He definitely was more of a force to be reckoned with, though. I have a hard time imagining we'd have been taken for a ride financially as much as we have under Top. I also don't see Rodgers surviving long enough to get us relegated.

I think this is actually, in a weird way, where the problems start. Nigel Pearson built an absolutely fantastic club here. He got recruitment bang on, modernised stuff like nutrition, sports science, data analytics, sports psychology, etc. Brought us in to the 21st century. But he did it from the manager's office. The fact that a manager has so much control over all of that in the first place is wild, piecing most of that together should have been done by the club at an executive level. But we've had success letting the manager do it so we think that's what works. Hence why Ranieri was then allowed to disassemble it all. Because it's ultimately the manager that chooses how the club is run, whether they're qualified to or whether their ideas are poor or not.

I've just put a Google Sheet together on my lunch break because I'm a sad case. Figures were all what can be publicly lifted from Wikipedia, Transfermarkt or AI. Wikipedia tends to be the most generous to the club and provided the most numbers. Obviously most are educated estimates. Since Jon Rudkin became Director of Football (14/12/14) I make it we've signed 53 footballers of note (I've excluded development squad signings and players who both signed and left for free.) Of those 53, 37 have left the club. Of the 37 who have left the club we received a losing fee for 8, sold 10 for a profitable fee and lost 19 of them for free (retirements, agreed free transfers or contract expiry.) Of the 10 that left for profit, only Kante, Maddison, Maguire, Fofana and Hermansen left for eight figure sums. Others included Zieler and Luis Hernandez who left for nominal fees. The total spent on the 53 is a combined £681m, the total spent on the 37 who have left is £460m. The total we've received in fees for those players* is £334m representing a loss of about £126m in ~9 years. On the 18 players we've sold for a fee, we've actually made a profit of £128m. But we get absolutely destroyed by the fact we've spent about £254m on footballers who left us for free, significantly painful being Tielemans (40m), Slimani (28m) and Perez (30m.) All in all, it's just a horrific track record and is completely unsustainable. We're a football club that should carve out it's existance by buying and selling upwardly mobile players, never spending much on anyone over the age of about 23-25 and always making sure to move those players on in their prime for a significant profit. We CAN do it, we HAVE done it, it's the only reason we aren't far worse off than we are. But the fact we're making those losses is awful, the fact we lose so many players for free is awful and the fact we have to paper over these cracks by cashing ine arly on home-grown players for pure profit is just tragic. He's just objectively failed as a DoF. (*I haven't included money received for players developed by the club or signed before Rudkin became the Director of Football but then I also haven't considered losses we're highly likely to make for players still at the club who cost a **** load, ie Soumare, Daka, Vestergaard, etc.)

Actually confirmed anywhere?

You've seen our third kit right?

Think you're adding a dramatic narrative to something that isn't that deep. They've got a large amount of money for Eze, they've just won the FA Cup, they're doing well as a club and they've got the opportunity to reinvest that money in one of Europe's most exciting young players? Pino is very highly regarded, is already a Spanish international and is just generally an all round better player (at this moment in time) than Bilal. He's also a more like-for-like replacement for Eze.

And Jurgen Klopp was minutes away from being our manager.

Repeat after me: THERE. IS. NO. TRANSFER. EMBARGO.

Daft coming here then, we'll have appointed Martin by March.

It would also have been announced by all mainstream UK news and sports media with huge big glaring headlines, all over Sky, the BBC, etc. People are just ****ing stupid and will believe anything they see on Facebook.

The price we need to sell him at to make a decent enough profit after his amortisation, fees, bonuses, etc, is just more than anyone wants to pay for him.

If Bilal goes we don't really have a 10. Stengs last full season (he was injured nearly all of last year) was his best season to date in professional football. He played 35 matches for Feyenoord as a central attacking midfielder, chipping in 8 goals and an excellent 16 assists. Stengs is very much being lined up as a BEK replacement, if the rumours are true. He's a decent footballer, he'd be good at this level, but it's still an absolutely braindead signing because his injury record is appalling and we'll almost certainly never make a profit off of him, which we absolutely must start doing more with our signings.

Happens, if at all, with blokes pushing 40 sticking around to play for tinpot clubs. Stengs is a 26 year old Dutch international, a former Next-Big-Thing, who put up his best ever numbers last time he played a 'full' season uninjured. He's going somewhere on a solid contract with a decent wage.

This is a very Brendan Rodgers signing. "Broken player", 26 year old that was considered to have potential, is going cheap because hasn't delivered on it. The injuries help being the fee down. High wages, little chance of selling for profit.

What you want to bet we wouldn't have been allowed to.

For 10m we've had their pants down, tbh. Decent squad player for a Prem side especially if he can get his confidence back but there's got to be better for that money.

Even that would be a stretch tbh. I'd have straight up deleted it if the forum wasn't so slow.