LCFCJohn

Fair shout. Different circumstances in that we are L1 now though. The fact that only 3 transfers out of L1 have been over £10 million and are us this window says a lot! And I like Souttar, but BEK, Fatawu and Monga are all more appealing players for the big transfer fees, attacking, younger etc. The McAteer deal was incredible for us. Did he has a long contract maybe?

Where’s the evidence of this? The reporting of the case suggests Arsenal interest but not having met Leicester’s valuation, £30 million quoted. Point being, we could have accepted less to get a profit rather than losing for free. There’s no credible evidence anywhere that Tielemans declined an accepted offer from Arsenal. Vardy did in 2016 of course.

That’s beside the point I was making really though. Regardless of whether it was a negotiated fee or release clause, there was an interested party, Man Utd, a huge club, willing to pay that for him. And yet, we are supposed to believe that in 2022, when he was four years younger, nobody was interested? He signed for about £32 million with us on a 4 year contract. 2022, a year left meant we owed £8 million on him (roughly). Yet there was nobody interested in him where we could have got say £15 million up to even nearer £20 mill, covering what we owned on him and some profit on top? Yeah, I’m absolutely buying that……

There’s always going to be specific cases. What is undeniable is the sheer volume of players, and therefore the overall amount we purchased them for that walked for free, that we have seen at this club in the past 5 years. I don’t buy for a second that players like Tielemans, Soyuncu and even Perez for example, wanted to sit around and run their contracts down. Given the volume of them, whilst we cannot know what goes on in each individual players head, it would be an extremely educational assumption to say that the clubs ability to know when to sell, and creating saleable conditions was the problem. By saleable conditions, I mean wages too high, excessive amortisation to clear based on stupid transfer fees we shelled out and even just too high a demands for players in some cases, like Iverson where we basically last £4 million we were offered and let him walk for free the next summer after not even playing for us. We are led to believe by many defenders of the club, who try to gaslight others into believing there was no interest in these players. Let me ask, how have Aston Villa managed to sell Youri Tielemans for £35 million to Man Utd this summer, when he had one year left on his contract there? And you’d expect me to believe that in 2022, when he had a year left with us, at 4 years younger and heading into his prime, that there was nobody who’d have been interested and given us an amount that would have covered the last year of what we owed on him plus a tidy profit?

Got to play the game at the end of the day. Starmer failed at this. There were no doubt plenty of good things that happened under his government but he lacked the ability to essentially, boast about them and make sure the public could see. As such, he has been ousted with an albeit nonsense, label of worst PM. I also notice Burnham’s trip to the pub was in Essex. Not Clacton….but close enough. Same county. Meanwhile, former MP Nigel argues with a bin….

I can’t imagine man of the people Nigel will be too pleased that Burnham has been mingling with folk in the pub, pulling and having a pint! That’s his thing after all

Norway speaking out against FIFA https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c1l1vz4n484o In other World Cup/International football news, Argentina fans approaching 100,000 on a petition to replay the World Cup final due to ‘biased and corrupt refereeing’

If you are looking at purchase price in 2010, plus everything they have spent, and the debts etc, it is unrealistic to think they would get that much now we are in L1. This might be a rather simplistic example, but it’s like if you buy a house, and do loads of work to it that ultimately means what you have spent goes above the ceiling price for that property. It just comes out of your pocket basically. Fine if it’s your forever home but if you want to sell, you might end up with some of that investment as a loss.

Fair enough. Enjoy the 2027/28 Championship campaign

You can level a lot of criticism at him, the fee and wages (not his fault) but more the fact he could be too anonymous and not take a game by the scruff of the neck and lead as a player who should be experienced enough. Maybe that is confidence so again, a criticism. But I’m not sure a ‘really bad attitude’ is something you can really throw at him. Not when the competition is Winks, Faes, Vestergaard, VK etc.

In terms of striker, that Danny Ormerod sounds a great shout. But at 20, and jumping from the National League to L1 if he did, you’d not imagine putting those 15/20 goal expectations on him. So the issue is, who else do you get? The ideal would be a Jack Marriott or Keillor-Dunn type who is late 20’s or even early 30’s as an experienced scorer at this level with our own youngsters and an Ormerod to add competition.

As per Mac above, storage is key. Either way, we are losing a lot of potential energy by the infrastructure not being there. Either way, even if we can cover a large percentage but not all of our needs, it’d be a lot further on than we are now. Look at how we are beholden to unstable countries (Russia) or regions (Gulf) and how our prices are affected. I get that this is what the argument regarding the North Sea addresses. I guess I just think, do what we can with solar/wind and other renewable and top up with the non-sustainable methods not the other way round. 100% on car parks. Think how horrible it is getting into your car during these heatwaves with the steering wheel, gear stick, handbrake etc being scolding. Shade should be something for car parks anyway with the increasing heat, being able to stick solar panels on is double the reason. The energy matter is actually the biggest reason I am so anti Reform. It’s not even about the immigration thing. It’s their insistence on scrapping anything renewable.

I’m no scientist…. I agree it’s difficult to just switch off from fossil fuels. However, we should be trying to be as renewable as we can. In theory, solar and wind should compliment each other. With the longer and hotter summers, comes more scope to gain from solar. Whereas in the winter, more extreme wind to be collected? I hate the idea of covering green belt with solar farms. But houses, shops, warehouses, car parks could all have them. But yes, of course the point you are making, that still may well not fulfil our total requirements for the country, 365 days.

I think we will need to start over at CB (senior CBs). I could see all 3 of Faes, Nelson and Okoli going. I really hope we aren’t looking at right full back as Aluko and even Joseph are ready. Left full back, with VK out, I’d be more inclined to bring a younger option in to challenge and replace Thomas. We’ve ended up quite short on the wings as you say with Monga and Fatawu going. Still a lot to be done….

Not sure it’s based on much more than size of club at the minute. We have so much to do still. The signs have been positive but we are still a mess, which just highlights how bad things/the squad was going into the summer. We definitely need a few more out and some big gaps to fill to be able to win the league. Not to say it can’t be done.

£12 mill would be deal of the century for us! Never going to happen!

I’m South Yorkshire based and there are a couple of prominent SY based MPs in the cabinet, Louise Haigh (Sheffield Heeley) as what I think is basically the deputy role, John Healey (Rawmarch and Conisboriugh in Rotherham) and Milliband (Doncaster) although he’s not local to the area like the others. I’d say our region will be pretty well covered with the cabinet make up but appreciate that won’t be the case for all area. It’s still an improvement on London centric though.

Hey look, I’m normally pretty negative with my outlook on stuff like this. And obviously I don’t have a load of knowledge beyond what is really on this forum so I may well be absolutely wrong on this. It just seems that there are no grounds to make a solid case that we ‘stopped’ them going up. Again, no more so than we could say Forest and Everton’s breaches that they were punished for the season after we went down were the reason we went down in the first place. I guess the difference is we had our own issues that season whereas Leeds can argue they kept their own finances in line. The authorities should be very concerned here. As others have said, the precedent this could cause.

I like him and wish him well, but am also happy to see him move on. He was fantastic in the Maresca season and obviously we didn’t see him barely in the PL season. I think he was sucked down by the rest of them last season. We saw how James held it together for a while but looked nowhere near on it when he came back. For me, Fatawu has so much technical ability but not so much strength of mind/strong mentality. We saw this with some of his posts relating to moaning about the fans etc. As I say, I don’t hold it against him, but if he also couldn’t see what the problems were, I don’t think he has the mentality we need for what comes next for the club and for our hopeful recovery. Maresca was given so much credit for his signings but I have said before, even the positive signings such as Fatawu and Hermansen, were very much good technical players but lacking in other areas. We have also seen it with Hermansen’s struggles. Neither are players to dig in when the going gets tough. So yeah, of course we won’t replace Fatawu with someone as good ability wise. But we can probably bring some in that are better suited to where we are now.

I’d say the post you quoted evidences well what a load of hypothetical nonsense it all is and what a frivolous claim it is by Leeds. As in no, our results against Southampton won’t be considered because it won’t get that far.

Yeah….but there’s not really a solid argument to say anything we have done has remotely given us a sporting advantage is there?

I personally try and look at the performance of the younger players in the context of the club decline and as such, give them more leeway. I have done the same with Stolarcryk for example. There will be times where the player doesn’t amount to much and that faith will be misplaced and there will be times where the player goes on to much bigger things than us and the critics look silly, such as with KDH. With Nelson, I just think back to the Huddersfield cup match where he came into so much criticism. This showed there was, albeit a vocal minority, who will just not have him and probably want to be proven right in their criticism. I worry that the same will happen to the likes of Braybrooke, Alves, Page and Aluko the minute they have a bad game. Then you probably have a much larger proportion of people who genuinely just expect the same from a 21 year old academy player with limited experience that they would from a seasoned international that’s been signed for say £15 mill. This is why there is so much underrating I think. We will have to see how he goes on at his next club but I certainly think he’ll do well once he leaves us. Unfortunately the decline of the club, the toxic culture from the owner downwards has created an environment that is not suitable for good young players. It’ll be interesting to see how many who have left us go on. We’ve already seen the likes of Barnes, Tielemans and even Perez back in Spain doing a great job. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to see Daka even, return to goal scoring form wherever he ends up.

Ok fair, apologies and why I wanted to caveat I could be wrong. We just need some stability and to put faith in the youth as they have been brought through playing together how the club clearly wants. It’s the signings that come in aimed at all these different managers that end up cluttering the squad and finances. The plus about RM (can’t believe I’ve said that haha) is that he has massive self confident in himself, which whilst it is probably not warranted based on his record, probably means he is less likely to be scared like the others and will do what he wants to to regarding team selection. I just hope he has learned from his previous roles…..

Seems like it and good news. For his faults and the reasons his appointment wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm let’s say, it does seem RM is good with giving younger guys a chance. To be fair, after my initial negativity at his appointment, I’ve just come round to giving him a chance. If Alves, Braybrooke, Page and Aluko are central to the starting 11, that will be a massive plus. Right back has to be Aluko’s, Braybrooke in centre midfield, the main thing is where Page fits in I think but he seems too talented not to!

What you do get, is managers who are more likely to give experience the nod as we saw with Cooper particularly, and even Cifuentes didn’t follow up his talk about youth getting changes. It also seems that experienced players get given more time where they can under perform and be given a free pass whereas youth seem to have to prove themselves more. That’s not a comment on our own club record in recent years. And it’s not saying that youth will not be given a chance if they are good enough. But I think it’d be a stretch to say the opportunities are evenly given. After all, to show if you are good enough or not, that chance has to be given in the first place. I know you are a critic of Nelson (unless I am mixing you up with someone else) but look at how he was written off and stuck on the bench for 3 months after one bad half against Huddersfield in the cup (after coming back from injury). Alves was also quite anonymous in that game. Yet Faes and Vestergaard were messing up game after game in that Autumn period and there was seemingly very little call for them to be dropped.