Ric Flair

If they did deploy a front two then I could see them getting a tune out of him, not necessarily consistently but enough to be a valuable squad player where they'll be competing in 4 competitions. Watkins is a very good presser and off rhe shoulder striker so Kel dropping in to play those slide rule passes he's excellent at would be an option and likewise the space Watkins would create for him would allow him to bumble in to the box and finish. His pockets of form for us have almost exclusively been in a front two with Vardy or Daka and the games he did well in in front 3 was with strong runners ahead of him like Barnes and Under in the 2020/21 Europa League campaign.

Monday night pal. All of us have been away at various points this week.

Maziz from Leuven would be a very shrewd pick up too. Would be much cheaper 8/10 than Yunus would cost us. I know O'Hare is available on a free but Maziz for £4-5m would be a better signing IMO.

Christ, things must be bad here.

I know our club are desperate to bring through a player of Thai heritage and make it in to the first team. Erawan Garnier at Lyon looks to be a fantastic prospect.

Yeah quite possibly but they were still at a time where some of the decision making makes you wince. We possibly viewed the ability to extend Ricardo as a huge opportunity due to the risk around his injury proneness as opposed to him being one who'd have looked to leave if he hadn't suffered and gave him a big whack ala Fofana.

You'd have to be very idiot not to want in on this.

Curiously Albrighton disclosed that it was the players who'd become less brave on the ball in the final months of the season, not the instruction to do so. There was an intervention to try and get them to take more risks again.

Yeah and I've already tried to factor that in but maybe it still needs further uplifting. E.G it's hard to see how we could have justified giving Coady and Winks £65-70k in the Championship (£50k maybe) and Mavididi £35-40k but you never know with us 😂

I'm doing this on the hoof but let's make an attempt. Hermansen - £45k a week / £2.3m Stolarczyk - £10k a week / £500k Ward - £50k a week / £2.6m Iversen - £25k a week / £1.3m Ricardo - £110k a week / £5.7m Justin - £100k a week / £5.2m Souttar - £50k a week / £2.6m Thomas - £40k a week / £2.1m Kristiansen - £55k a week / £2.8m Faes - £60k a week / £3.2m Nelson - £20k a week / £1.1m Coady - £65k a week / £3.5m Winks - £65k a week / £3.5m Choudhury - £50k a week / £2.6m Soumare - £90k a week / £4.7m KDH - £75k a week / £4m Mavididi - £50k a week / £2.5m Wanya - £10k a week / £500k McAteer - £10k a week / £500k Fatawu - £50k a week / £2.5m Daka - £90k a week / £4.7m Cannon - £35k a week / £1.8m Total: £60.2m That's without Vestergaard, Ndidi, Vardy and the likes of Praet, Albrighton and Iheanacho. Without any further outgoings we'd be looking to add 5-6 new players to this squad if not more which would be £15-20m in wages ? I've been very economical with the wages though, you could probably add 20-25% more on but it would suggest we are very much reduced from the highs of £150-180m (including all staff)

Possibly, but it's the area in most need of investment. Even before KDH's probable sale we need 2 more 8's (to replace Praet and possibly Ndidi) and probably another deeper lying midfielder. The free agent market or loan market will need to be utilised but we have to get the midfield spot on next season otherwise the defence will be exposed significantly at the highest level.

The only thing they could do is create a " Sporting Director " role which is basically what any dynamic DOF would do and they sit under Rudkin but are responsible for doing the stuff that's required to get the playing side of the club ticking with the manager. If that is enough to save face and get us back on track then do it already. The issue will be how compatible that role will be with Rudkin and the board.

I know but what I mean is, we'll be asked to explain what our strategy was for complying in recent years. Chewing over the scenarios and what Rodgers said on occasions would point towards selling players like Tielemans and Soyuncu who weren't interested in signing new contracts. The difficulty was evident. The players were in control and could refuse to leave if they wanted to. The irony is Soyuncu wasn't on a large salary, he never signed an extension and Tielemans didn't either. Whether we demanded too much for them in the summers of 2021 and 2022 remains to be seen but it would you surprise me. Anyway, the defence that we planned to sell such players and couldn't will be counteracted with the plan was flawed as we didn't manage to sell a single one of them. Zero. We lost over £100m of players. Couple this with the Rodgers liability hanging over our heads and there's plenty of damning findings that show our strategy for compliance was bordering on impossible. We'd backed ourselves in to a corner and we have paid the price.

The structural changes seem to point largely towards the remit of Rudkin and fresh new blood in to that role. Is Top going to remove Rudkin or move him aside? Find it very hard to believe. More chance of us finding £80m + to give Enzo on transfers this summer.

Morgan and Fuchs went on to contribute when called upon in the first two seasons under Rodgers helping us achieve far greater than Puel could get us to do. But let's not ignore him trying to phase Vardy out as our number one striker, using Demarai Gray through the middle on occasion. Vardy went on to become the top goalscorer in the Premier League once again the following season. His treatment of Andy King was appalling too. That said, I'd have liked to see what he could have done with moving some players on in that final horrid 18 months under Brendan 😂😂

If he went then I think we should look at a pragmatist like Carlos Corberan (if West Brom) don't come up. Done well at Huddersfield and West Brom with minimal funds and at times in turmoil.

The option/obligation isn't £10m but even at £6-7m or whatever it works out to be I think I'd look elsewhere. He's got plenty of ability but not quite sure he's suited to English football. He really got his head down and wants to make it here and I respect him for that. He did his bit at times and I wish him all the best if we don't take up the option.

@kingfox what do you make of this? fbref having an instance of unreliability or is he a victim of the way Gil Vicente play that means his ability gets lost in the stats.

If it did cost us £30m to get rid of Rodgers and his staff this is utterly staggering and meant we signed off on a £50m liability at any given time when we extended his contract in November 2019. Having to pay that at a pro rata'd rate in full in the year in question meant our ability to comply with PSR was under threat at any point the club started to decline. Mind boggling negligence if true.

He played 40+ games for them the season before, I'm not so sure they didn't want him but you're right we offered them a good fee. The point is though that a mid table PL side vs the best team in Portugal who'd won their league that year + played knock out CL football can and will be beaten on wages. That is why players come to the PL over teams such as Porto, Ajax, Milan etc.

Roger Fernandes from Braga is available on a free this summer by the looks of it. Only 18 and got immense potential. 7 assists and 2 goals in 14 league games this season. Can play on either wing.

But the retort will be, if we were forecasting tens of millions in sales of such players that with everything else would then be how we'd attempt to comply, we were negligent to rely on that given we didn't sell a single such player.

Only caveat to this is, the (hopefully) old Leicester would trump Porto on wages hence why we got Ricardo in his pomp. I'd hope with a sensible wage structure that if we went up against Porto now that they wouldn't choose us just for the money.

There's a very real possibility Vestergaard doesn't remain at the club. He's free to leave and at his age he may well get a better off than we will give him.

Our amortised transfers we'll owe for 24/25 without any outgoings or incomings (except for Fatawu) is around £28-30m. It was more nearer £40m this season but Praet and Vestergaard drop off at around £4-5m each. As I've said, if we can get our wages down to somewhere near £100-110m and revenue between £175-200m. Then spending £70-80m this summer (although perhaps we should keep it more to £50-60m) would add around £15m to the £30m amortised transfers fees to about £45m. Whether that would get us to comply with a 3 year cycle loss of £83m is tricky to completely gauge, will depend how much we breach 22/23 and then possibly 23/24 by. But basically we need to have cut our wages by 40-45% IMO. We will have made a very good start on that in the last two summers.