Ric Flair

The Stags Head up near Great Portland St is ran by a Leicester fan but he'll likely be at the game. They'll have the game on though and quite possibly be Leicester fans in there.

There's precious little we can do about Leeds and Ipswich's form, we had a chance when we played them to go further clear and we blew it. Our lead was going to be cut based on what both of them have done but we've been too cheap recently and dropped way too many points. They aren't going to do us any favours, we cannot scrabble about with anything other than top 2 form for the rest of the season. 6-7 wins and anything less and we run the risk of finishing 3rd or 4th. Both their runs are now as good/better than anything we've strung together this season. We no longer can hide behind being the best team in the league, it's much closer than that. Now it's a shoot out to the end and let's pray to God that Enzo can mastermind a change over the next two weeks because there's precious sign of any bottle since the turn of the year.

Why is it bad? It means it'll have to be shoehorned in somewhere and will be chaotic for both sides.

Pulled off some very good saves at Sunderland and Hull but agreed before that he's been sub par by his standards.

Seems we've taken a few players in and released some. That Umolu is from West Ham. 1-0 down already

Hermansen vs Sunderland (kicking 1st half aside) and Hull he was phenomenal again but I get your point about Stolarczyk. I just think at this stage of the competition against such opposition there's a need for elite distribution. Chelsea will punish us if Stolarczyk does what we've seen in some of the other games. Shot stopping wise he's brilliant.

Would much rather play our game in hand when Southampton are in the midst of 10 games in 33 days than having had to play it this week.

Stolarczyk has done well but I'd play Mads all day long tomorrow as the difference in distribution is massive. I've settled on something like this Hermansen Hamza Nelson Coady Doyle Ndidi Winks KDH/Yunus Fatawu Daka Wanya Marcal

I wonder if Enzo knows who he is yet? 😂

McAteer has now had 4 hamstring injuries this season, possibly not helped him kick on after a really promising start to the season but equally I'm not convinced he's reliable enough. A real shame.

Agreed. We needed a versatile attacking midfielder / winger rather than a 4th striker. I'm still very keen to see what Silko Thomas is like, would have been great for him to get a loan move in January.

I keep reading this but is our perceived strongest team actually our best team right now given we've been struggling when they've played and their record against better sides is suspect. Our fringe team perhaps don't have the same issues with form and mentality but it's probably coincidence. I'd go somewhere between the two, there's definite players who need dropping.

We seem to get them a lot in the 5th round and QF's in my lifetime. I know we won the one that mattered most but I still think we're owed another too. Vardy winner please

Is Keith Vaz on it, I'm yet to spot him.

They seem to be much more dangerous this season by not dictating play, we've seen this before with teams that can't break down teams themselves except those who won't sit back.

Did Everton breach the 3 year rolling period for 3 years running. Obviously we've gone and got ourselves relegated in 2022/23 but part of the 3 year cycle is 2020/21 we finished 5th and won the FA Cup and 2021/22 we finished 8th and got to the semi finals of a European competition. That might middy the waters as we were far more successful in 2 of the 3 years if we have then breached in 2022/23.

Well there is the elephant in the room as well - Seagrave. The sheer number of staff required to not make it look an absolute ghost town is also a factor. However the overwhelming % of wages is on the playing side and manager and coaches. If 400 staff averaged £50k a year its £20m.

Wasn't that a dive by Mane? I seem to recall being livid with the decision.

His Champions League goals and his goal and assist vs Rennes have proven what a big game player as well as a hugely reliable servant he's been to us. Love the bloke, I hope we turn to him down the stretch as he's got one final say on his story at Leicester.

The wage structure was completely unsustainable, it's not even the wages that were paid to our successful players, that to a degree made sense but the wages offered to new signings that were often double or triple what they were on was the mistake. Players you refer to as having European experience were still getting monumental pay rises to come here. I'm sure Kieran Maguire said from the 2021/22 accounts our average wage was £94k a week, astonishing. We needed to be stricter and more dynamic, but truth be told we lost a lot of highly talented analysts and staff and I think we took our eye off the ball and believed we'd cracked it.

Stefan Borson said it wasn't much of a defence though, I'd be surprised if it got us off the hook (if we have breached)

Unless I'm way off I still don't think our transfers in in 2022/23 would have dented much on the P&L as spread over 5 years Faes, Kristiansen, Souttar and Tete's loan fee would have been about £10-11m + signing on fees and wages for half a season so max about £20m ? That's quite possibly why we had to balance the books even further with the June sale of Maddison but we are still being told to get ready for us having breached in 2022/23. If all of what is being reported turns out to be correct, it seems that we were pretty much destined to breach unless for a dramatic change in our income during the season, which although there are variables I don't see how it could have transpired and that's with selling Fofana and clearing £35-40m in the P&L on him (about the equivalent of the drop in revenue from the previous year as the difference of European football and a higher league position).

100% we are the victims of our own success but unfortunately we are also the masters of our own downfall. The irony is we achieved what we achieved by getting it right both financially and largely in recruitment and then we tried to build on that by making decisions that were perhaps a change to what we'd done previously and ultimately we didn't have the flexibility for it to go wrong. I think that's the most frustrating thing. We were so close to CL football twice which may have given us the financial boost that could have kept us on track but we also were becoming blinkered in our grip on our progression. The effectiveness of Rodgers was massively sliding on a squad that were becoming disillusioned and wanted new challenges, whilst their value diminished and we seemingly had no answer to how we could refresh the squad to get them or other fringe players out and new assets in. Also to think the sheer amount of transfer fees we did generate on the likes of Mahrez, Maguire, Chilwell, Fofana etc on top of the European football campaigns and major honours and we still seem to have breached PSR.

There'll be no magic formula, it'll be purely dependent on the starting point of their wages to what it grew to over a few years, the revenue generation and then the differential between booking sales in the year they are sold and the amortisation of incomings over the length of their contract. Villa for example, they spent at least £250m in the first 2 seasons but that would be maximum £50m on the book across two years. In the third years they sold Grealish for £100m which is pure profit and probably bailed them out for perhaps going close to the maximum allowable losses of £105m. It'll have caught up with them now, they need 1 or 2 huge sales and/or CL football.

I'll repeat though, we're being told that we have likely breached 2022/23 and the 3 year period and the only impact from relegation for that period would have been the differential in prize money for finishing 18th as opposed to whatever the club modelled in to their strategy at £2m a place. This despite us selling Fofana and Maddison (he was sold before 30th June) for huge profits. So whilst I agree the business plan for sustained long term growth was dependent on expansion of the ground, commercial revenues and hotels etc it's quite clear that we'd gotten ourselves in to a huge short term financial problem with very little financial flexibility and I'm not convinced that would have been quickly resolved for the long term strategy to take effect.