Finnegan

At least it's familiar to him. Help him settle in.

#nocontextfoxestalk I have no idea what's going on in this thread but clicking on it to be greeted by Doris Day was not on my bingo card.

Hmmm. I know everyone's happy and all but unless Souttar is back imminently, we're a bit thin on the ground if he goes.

No, not us, but with a number of Belgian / BENELUX agents. He doesn't know what's going on with BEK because we're leaking it to him, he knows what's going on with BEK because Bilal's agent (or someone in his entourage) very obviously talks to him. He knows when Bilal takes a shit. I do genuinely believe most, if not all, of what Tav has said about BEK is grounded in truth but you also need to take with a certain pinch of salt because he quite obviously has an agenda.

Before everyone starts quoting Capology, can we just establish straight off the bat - it's absolute rubbish.

You can just feel the sulk coming through that Tavolieri tweet.

To be clear, I completely believe we're willing to sell them and that both players would happily leave to go back to the Prem. But I can both clubs finding better and more affordable options. If Pino is willing to go to Palace (and for less than we want for BEK) that's a hell of a coup.

Not entirely convinced, personally.

Yes. It's not a PSR fiddle. It's just... a sale. No idea what he's on about.

Exactly why we'll sack that off and spend the money on a big, bumper contract for Andros "Premier League Experience" Townsend instead, to link up with his pal Jordan Ayew.

From now on, I want all of our finances expressed in these terms.

An Ipswich fan on TWTD. Oh you poor thing.

1. McKenna is a head coach, not a director of football. 2. Whilst we make some honking transfer decisions and I'm not defending them, it is a little bit nuts to pretend we're the only club out there that do and the only club that makes mistakes or scouts using poor information and based on perceptions and reputations as much as data.

100% nailed on he scores a winner against us this year

None at all. He's linked us to about fifty people this window alone.

So before the Premier League, no big club ever came along and took our best players? The wealth disparity has gotten worse, I'm not denying that, but it's obviously always been there and the best players have always wanted to go and play for the biggest and most succesful clubs? I'm not trying to claim that the current situation is brilliant and that we should all just stick our heads in the sand, ignore all problems and bend over and wait for the Big Six to lube up. But I do think that "what's the point" is grossly hyperbolic by any standards and is utterly bizarre coming from fans of a club that have managed to win every major piece of English silverware in my life time and the two biggest pieces of English silverware in the last deade. I mean... that's obviously The Point™ right there. Which we did... despite FFP/PSR? Edit: And, to iterate, ESPECIALLY when what we're really doing is pouting, not about the current state of football in general (again, Crystal ****ing Palace just won the second biggest prize in our domestic sport), but about the current state of OUR club. And, again, we did that to ourselves, with very little help from the outside.

Chelsea obviously had a higher ceiling than us, we all understood what he meant and having any resentment over it is daft. He won the Champions League there. Come on. We also bought him for roughly 5m and sold him a year later for 32m. He's also the only one we had no choice about selling, by the way. We all complain about the Big Six but without Chelsea we'd have been in this mess far, far, far earlier. We've absolutely taken them for a complete butt****ing for KDH, Fofana, Chilwell, Drinkwater and Enzo who - combined - are probably worth about 1/5th of what Chelsea gave us. It's how we do business (when we do it well) and as for "what's the point?" my answer to that would probably be, erm, it won us the FA Cup (which Palace also just won?) and the Community Shield? What the **** else is the point if winning trophies isn't?

People act like this is a new thing. Tell me about the great career Gary Lineker had at Leicester, the 500 games he played for us, the trophies he helped us win, the records he broke? Joachim played more games elsewhere than for Leicester, Heskey played more games elsewhere than for Leicester. The nature of football is that there's always a bigger fish. I'd actually argue it's gotten better for Premier League clubs over the last decade because their best players can't really be taken by many European clubs and if clubs on the continent can't offer Champions League football then ever mid-table teams over here can poach them. You talk about Palace but Palace are looking to raid Villareal to pay relative peanuts for Yeremy Pino who already has 15 Spain caps and is incredibly highly regarded. PSR is a problem, the Premier League is a problem, the Big Six is a problem but they aren't really OUR problem. Our problem is the only business intelligence we had at this club went up in a literal cloud of helicopter smoke and ownership of the club is apparently hereditary? We got in an extremely strong position despite the Big Six and then we shot ourselves in the foot repeatedly and then made the surprised Pikachu face when we fell over. Or, in meme form:

I've repeatedly said Daka's finishing from Elland Road onwards was awful and can't be excused. I've also repeatedly said we need a better striker this season and I hope he leaves. You probably need to work a little harder on your gotchas.

Pino is a lot better than Bilal.

I'd say the flip side of that is that if we weren't in such a mess, Kasey McAteer is exactly the sort of player we'd have sold years ago because selling your academy products is part of how you generate revenue in football. They clearly can't all make it and McAteer is a great example of one we should have sold to lower leagues for a couple of million because he shouldn't be anywhere near the squad. But then Hamza is another one but instead of him playing X leagues below us, he has the ****ing armband

That's fairly overly simplistic to be honest. Credit where it's due, McAteer managed 6 goals in about 12.9 lots of 90 minutes in the league, without taking penalties. That's not to be sniffed at for a wide player in his breakthrough season. It equates to 0.47 goals per 90 which is more than KDH and Mavididi. But you just can't ignore the sample size, Mavididi and Dewsbury Hall both scored double figures and started over 40 games each. It's also hard to ignore the cluster, with four of his goals coming in a four game period between match weeks 4 and 8 and him largely doing nothing else. He contributed 0 assists in the entire 23/24 season and wasn't even let down by bad finishers, he had an xA of 1 all year. This isn't surprising, given he managed less key passes per 90 minutes than Ndidi, Casadei, Ricky, Doyle, Marcal, Daka and Cannon as well as all the obvious suspects. He even made less passes in to the penalty area per 90 than Callum Doyle, a centre back in a short-passing system and less crosses per 90 than JJ and Wilf. Overall, his shot-creating actions per 90 minutes were more comparable to Hamza Choudhury than any attacking player. He came nowhere near Fatawu and Mavididi for succesful take-ons per 90 minutes, even ranking below Iheanacho (ouch.) His progressive carries and carried distance per 90 was below all other forwards with him managing roughly around half of what Fatawu and Mavididi managed, per game. In fact probably the only dribbling metric in which he ranked higher... he had more miscontrols per 90 than any other winger in the squad. I love Kasey's work rate, I love his aggression, I love that he's an academy product, but he's been dining out on one purple patch in September 2023 for his entire spell here. He's a League One player with a reasonably League One ceiling that we insanely turned down near 10m for. If he wasn't one of our own, he'd be the subject of incredible pelters, his combined goals and assists per 90 minutes in the Championship over 12 lots of 90 was 0.47. Patson Daka contributed 0.99 and was ridiculed as shit. Sell.

Does nothing on the pitch either, tbf, davie.

Rudkin just saving up, adding Kasey to the kitty, getting closer and closer to his Bamford target.