jeffschlupp

If the club expect him to remain professional they don't have to drop their demands at all. It's a business, not a pre-school.

Percy's article yesterday says United value the player at £50-60m. I expect him to go, but if the two clubs really are as much as £30m apart in terms of valuations, is a deal really that likely?

I believe it works over a set three-year period, one of which has just ended (2016-19) and a new three-year FFP period begins as of 1 July this year (2019-22). That's different to what you're suggesting which is 'every 3 years' or 'the last 3 years' we must comply. While yes, we could make a loss of £105m, any loss over £15m has to be guaranteed by the club's owners. But as Dahnsouff's article above says, the change for this period of FFP monitoring is the abolition of STCC, so the wage budget limit of £7m extra per season is no more.

I'd keep him. You can't go a whole season with five players for three positions. He was our best player in the first half of last season.

If we were to let Gray go and bring in two wingers then sure, but that's pretty unlikely. But to sign a 19 year old as the marquee wide signing would be seriously underwhelming.

Everyone keeps talking about getting into the top 6, but then are prepared to rely on either an injury prone CB who has only played in Croatia and Scotland, or a mistake-prone player who had one good season in the Bundesliga for Freiburg. For me, we partner Evans with a quality first choice, keep one of Benkovic or Soyuncu as first cover (loan out the other), and have Morgan as 4th choice. Whichever one goes out on loan hopefully has a good year, and then we can look at phasing Evans out of the first team next season. To trust in Benkovic or Soyuncu with Evans would to me say we aren't as ambitious as everyone thinks we are.

"Now the Foxes are sweating on whether Maguire is prepared to play in their pre-season fixture away at Scunthorpe on Tuesday." If it's anything like the Mahrez saga, it would make it even harder for him to leave if he were to go on strike!

I've not been comfortable with a diamond ever since that utterly disastrous one Ranieri tried away at Southampton and we lost 3-0. The one thing you need is speed in the 'wide' midfielders and that is exactly what arguably our best player in Tielemans lacks. As others have said, 4-3-3/4-1-4-1 will get the best out of this group, particularly as you get two players close to Vardy, and another two players who control the play from the centre and therefore take the pressure for creativity away from Ndidi.

I'm no lyrical genius but surely the most suitable tune for Tielemans is Karma Chameleon?

I think his future is as a left winger, assuming we stick with the 4-3-3 we ended the season with. His pace is too big of an asset to be wasted in the middle, IMO. Rodgers clearly rates him - he started all of his first 6 in charge, was took out of the firing line after Newcastle but came on to score at West Ham, and was used as a sub again for the last 3 while he trialled Maddison wide and Choudhury in the middle. He is our best winger, I think. Albrighton isn't mobile enough to play regularly in this team; Gray is yet to find the attacking returns, and Ghezzal has been forced out seemingly by our fans' bizarre hatred of him. Ayoze will come in to play across the front line, but i don't see him starting ahead of Barnes to start with. Barnes on the left, a left footed Mahrez-type on the right would be great.

A lot of the deadwood will be shifted later on the window for sure. Those leagues from which we're likely to get interest for Silva, Slimani, Ghezzal etc. have the whole of August to do business. At the start of last August, we'd only managed to sell Mahrez and loan out Barnes, Moore and Iversen. By the end of the window, Musa, Gordon and Ulloa had left permanently, and we secured loans for Slimani, Thomas, Benkovic and Kapustka. Only King, Benalouane and Elder weren't named in the 25 man squad at the start of September, and all of those went on to get moves sorted in January.

I wonder if Suso from Milan could be an option. Left footed, right sided so fits the bill, and obviously worked under Rodgers at Liverpool. Any deal would depend on how their relationship ended I guess. Giampaolo isn't one to play wingers so he is probably surplus to requirements there, and I think he has a €40m release clause. Impressive numbers last season - and I know we scouted at Milan late last season so who knows.

But it's that attitude of 'we can make do' by changing formations or shoehorning players out of position that will be the difference between top 6 and another average season. Having 6 midfielders (Ndidi, Mendy, Choudhury, Tielemans, Maddison, Praet) for 3 positions doesn't require a squad of 58. A squad of 25, with two players per position plus a third keeper and a couple of utility players like Amartey and Perez is perfectly reasonable. Otherwise, we're going to be left searching for answers when one of our two star midfield creators pulls up injured halfway through September.

So if Youri is suddenly out for 3 months, you're going to put our current best wide player in central midfield, a position much deeper than the role he played at WBA with significantly more defensive responsibility? I've got no problem with Hamza but every team wanting to fight on 3 fronts needs two players per position, and he isn't a viable alternative to James Maddison in terms of creativity. To only have 5 proper midfielders for 3 positions will cause us problems later in the season.

Barnes and Gray are wingers. Perez is surely a utility forward. We have to remember we switched from a 4-2-3-1 with a proper number 10 to what was a pretty standard 4-3-3 with one holding player (like you say, Ndidi or Mendy) and two creative no.8s. Maddison and Tielemans just about have the defensive application to make it work between them, but I'm not sure Perez does. Percy reckons Silva has been told he's not wanted, and Kingy is surely not good enough these days. I just think we are a bit light on depth if we want to give the cups a proper go this time.

Everyone is forgetting we have absolutely no cover for Tielemans and Maddison. One creative and attacking no.8 is a must.