dsr-burnley

Some clubs get a quarter of a billion pounds injected by the owner; others don't. The ones with the quarter billion are richer, all else being equal.

He's under contract till 2023 with an option for another year. He also gives every impression of being very level headed and willing to take advice, and that advice from several public sources (don't know about the private sources of course) is to stay put for another year, jkeep playing every week, keep learning and improving.

I agree with all of that. Leicester has vast potential - it's a big city, no rival clubs in the area, there is no reason why Leicester couldn't have been where Man United or Liverpool have been for the past fifty years or so. And maybe for the next fifty years or so you will be. But you aren't, yet. And Dyche doesn't sign players who spend too much time on social media if he can help it. He got stung that way with Andre Gray!

I didn't say you aren't a bigger club right now. You've got more money, and a vastly bigger catchment area, and a moderately bigger crowd (or would have but for coronavirus), and a more recent League Championship. I'm just saying that on the "clubs in order of size" list of Man United > Leicester City > Burnley, the gap between Man United and Leicester is bigger than the gap between Leicester and Burnley. Apart from the probable increase in wages, Leicester don't represent the "big club - I must leave" cachet that other bigger clubs offer.

Bigger club? not by much. Burnley have played in the Europa League as well.. Say "bigger wage" and you will have a point. Ben Mee is still at Burnley because he isn't a great ball player. There are few better defenders, but his attacking play isn't good. Hopefully from our point of view, Tarkowski will be seen the same way (as he is by some of you) and we can keep him till he's past his best - another 6 years or so, perhaps.

You'd get Ben Gibson for that. You won't find an England player for £10m.

The club accounts say that Mike Garlick takes no salary and no dividend and no income at all from the club. If it's different, then ask the auditors. The point about "lack of funds" is that the club has TV money plus gate and sponsorship, but nothing else. The directors don't have hundreds of millions, they don't even have enough to guarantee loans. Clubs like Leicester have a wage bill £62m p.a. higher than Burnley and a squad which cost £170m more than Burnley's simply because you have more money. Other clubs do it differently - Bournemouth are about to go down £200m in debt, with half of that owed to other football clubs, and heaven alone knows how they can ever pay it back. That's because they borrowed and borrowed and blew the lot on wages and transfers. The Burnley board are careful to build a reserve so that if we go down, like last time we went down, we don't have to sell all the best players just to pay the wages of the ones who are no use. That way lies Hull and Bolton. Hence the £42m in the bank as at June 2019 (latest accounts) and Sean Dyche's comments about wanting to spend more. That £42m has to cover future events like ground development, future signings, relegation costs, and unexpected pandemics - and will result in us coming out the other side of this pandemic with cash in hand and a fair chance of raiding the championship for bargain price players from clubs that are skint, we hope. The strain between Dyche and Garlick is because Dyche (apparently) does not have the final say over signings. He presumably has a veto over who he doesn't want to be signed, but the players he does identify won't be signed if the price is too high or the wage demands would blow a hole in the wage structure. That's Garlick's decision, under advice from someone else whose name I can't remember but who Dyche apparently doesn't like. It's been fairly clear for a few years that Dyche would leave if he got a better offer. As would every other manager of every club in history, I suppose. I reckon he's making it clear that he's available if someone wants to make him an offer. So all we can do is pray that the "right offer" doesn't come. At least there is no doubt that his, and the players', hearts are still in the job! Now do us a favour and beat Sheffield United and Spurs, please. Pretty please? Just do it!

Other clubs have other sources of money besides TV money. For example, Leicester's owners have put £240m into the club; Burnley's owners haven't. It does make a difference.

Mike Garlick didn't say anything of the kind. I reckon before you start making accusations of multi-million pound fraud, you ought at least to check the odd fact. I know that public forums are renowned for innacuracy and stupidity by people who care nothing for truth because they're anonymous and they like muck-spreading, but that doesn't make it right. What Garlick said was that if the 2019-20 season didn't complete, and the 2020-21 season hadn't started by late August, then it would cost Burnley £50m.

What a bottom-licking article by "Four Four Two Staff". It's clearly a paid-for advert, and I thought you weren't allowed paid-for adverts without making it obvious. I don't agree the game needs revolutionising anyway. They could revolutionise it by making the goals twice as big and not letting the goalkeeper handle it - but it wouldn't be an improvement.

Dyche's tactics tonight were based on (by the end of the match) having only 11 players available who have ever played first team football. With 7 injured, 3 cleared off early because they didn't want to play, and Gibson sulking up at Middlesbrough, he was short of options. 4-4-2 is hard to paly when you only have 4 specialist attackers and midfielders - hence Pieters on the wing and 5-3-2 after Cork went off. Incidentally, what a man Ben Mee is. I know it's a long time since he played for you; this was his 300th league game for Burnley. He's captaining, playing 3 times a week, representing the club especially on BLM, and has a new baby daughter in hospital born 16 weeks premature (she's 6 weeks old now).

It's the same Barrow. They never went bust. There are one or two non-phoenix former league clubs dotted around the north-west. Nelson for one. Glossop NE. Workington. Until recently, Darwen, but they did go bust and re-formed.

Don't worry, they can be safely ignored. The usual arguments about "year 1 started on 25th March so the 20th century didn't end until 24th March 2001" have some merit. But the 2010's decade is the decade where the years start 201x. It's not called the 202nd decade, so it doesn't have to start 2010 years after the first.

I don't think any returning loan player will be able to play, because under normal rules they can't start playing for their parent club until they are re-registered in a transfer window. There won't be a new transfer window until the season has finished.

The obvious way to do it would be to say that all matches will be played at home grounds unless police won't give permission. That means if a club is unable to fulfil the fixture at home, it's their own responsibility and they will have to find another bit of grass with goalposts, somewhere else. Basically, that's the rule now - if a club can't get theri own ground licensed, they have to play somewhere else.

No, individual matches that are not finished are treated as abandoned unless the league decides to let the result stand. There is no hard and fast rule about what will be let stand; but two matches abandoned at half time on the last day of the season, the Bradford fire and the Blackpool Oyston protests, were allowed to stand (at least partly because they made no footballing difference). Denis Law scored 6 in a cup tie v Huddersfield that was abandoned with not long left; it had to be replayed.

Being as likely to be infected doesn't necessarily mean that you are as likely to spread it. Viruses don't use human logic; several tests suggest that children do not spread it - an Icelandic one in particular found that there was no case in Iceland of any child passing coronavirus onto its parents.

To be fair, the risk of coronavirus to a player's wife and (especially) his children is less than the normal winter risk of flu. At least according to the death statisitics. And they manage without flu tests and social distancing. The big danger is to older people. Obviously if players feel that training and playing football is more dangerous than their lifestyle of the last couple of months, which basically means they have totally isolated and not gone to any shops etc., then they have the option of either isolating from their families, or not playing. Kyle Walker, one assumes, is happy to play!

It might be as well if the players (and Bobby Barnes, PFA spokesman) were told that the number of children (under 14) who have died so far while suffering from cor navirus is 2. Wheras the number of children who die on average suffering from flu (hospital deaths only, though I think most of them would be in hospital when it is so serious) is 166. Point being, any footballer who is worried about coronavirus affecting his child will, logically, never play again because of the much higher risk of flu affecting his child. Or else they will realise the risk of either disease is small and carry on playing, of course.

The problem with money is that there is a blockage - or perhaps the reverse of a blockage. It appears that the players want the money to flow out of the clubs for ever and ever, even while the clubs are getting nothing coming in. This will not work. There are two ways forward, long term. One - play football, earn money. Two - don't play football, don't earn money. That's all. I don't think the players understand that. Incidentally, the reason it costs League 1 and League 2 so much money that they have to cancel the season, is because of player wages. They can furlough players and many of them (I presume) already have. Accrington furloughed all theirs on the day the season was suspended - they have only 4 staff left to maintain the ground and keep the office open. This is because they get relatively very little TV money and they rely on gate money to pay the wages. Of course, Accrington's players are not on much more than the maximum £2k per month so furlough doesn't affect them like it does the PL players.

The police are a bunch of moaning nellies sometimes. At Burnley, for example, they can close one road (the one they close on match days anyway) and two gates, and no-one can get within 50 yards of the place. I believe your ground is similar. So are many more. They already have powers to disperse crowds and to issue fixed penalties to those who won't go away. There will be no-one serving alcohol anywhere near the ground, there will be no noise coming from the ground, and they won't be able to watch it properly on TV. If people do congregate, then they can remove safety certificates. Why don't the police wait and see what happens and deal with it before they start waving their hands and shouting "I just can't cope"???

The FA Cup is a lot less urgent. They can finish that off anytime next season if they need to. Rough on the players who have left, and they will have to ease back on the cuptied rules, but not too much urgent depends on the result. (If someone wins it who didn't otherwise qualify for Europe, they'll have to have a place reserved for them next year instead.) Or they can have a Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday week at the end of the season to round it all off. I doubt they will try and fit it in between league games. It's going to be a fairly crowded calendar as it is.

Exactly. They'd look pretty stupid abandoning this season now, and then getting half way through next season and having to do the same again. Makes more sense to press on when we can, hoping for no further disruptions of course, but playing on as best we can, when we can.

The figures don't suggest that 1% die, or anything like that. Especially for footballers. So far in this country, up to 24th April which is the last full week that was available a few days ago when I last looked, the number of dead under 35 years old was 109. That's a bit less than 3 per million. The vast majority of those were already seriously ill. Yes, it may be that for every person in a million who dies, two or three more may have permanent side effects; but it's still not a big risk.