Les-TA-Jon

If we were a mid-table PL team like we 'should' be?

We absolutely should be complaining. The club shouldn't be in the position to have to sell their best up and coming youth products just to keep the lights on. It's a disgrace that we've managed ourselves into this position. The entire point of spending £100m+ on Seagrave and it's high annual running costs was to create, develop and use players like Monga, not sell them early in their careers just to maintain cashflow and enable the signings of players with worse prospects.

Currently got a book value of approx £5.5m - so a nice £2.5m loss for Topkin...

And I don't even think it's a 'choice' by the club either - it's simply that there's little to no football based talent and strategy in the structure, above the manager...

The 6 point deduction applied to the period ending 2024 (Promotion season under Enzo) so RVN sacking was irrelevant

Think it's more to do with them not having / not finalising a plan - whilst that's the case, they 'have' to keep Rowett as an option. RVN delayed sacking was different because it was around figuring which accounting year could stomach the cost of doing so.

We're in League One mate

Sure - But I guess I'm saying if it is him signing off on 'bad stuff' then he's the target for blame. But if he gets overruled by Top all the time, and forced to do 'bad stuff' then Top's to blame. Either way we're splitting hairs - the club is a shambles and seems to be continuing in that vein.

Did Jan Kerfuffle get any recognition at the game?

New points deduction incoming for this illegal use of subs

Who’s to say the CEO can make that call? How do we know? Maybe he’s been suggesting that and is overruled by Top?

Us winning and waiting for the final whistle “Ref, you said 10 seconds, 40 ****ing seconds ago”

Think it's just a classic multiple things can be true at once situation: We were massively punching above our weight in 2019 and 2020 - at that time, non-big 6 club finishing in the top 6 in the PL era was exceedingly rare. In one of those attempts at the top 4, Man Utd spent £65m on Bruno Fernandes in Jan to get them over the line and pip us. How can we compete with that? Finishing 5th both times after being in the top 4 for so long was a crumble/bottle situation, perhaps indicative of the soft mentality/underbelly that developed in the latter half of Rodger's tenure But finishing 5th twice was a huge achievement for the club based on an historical perspective for the club and for a non-big 6 club Performance in subsequent 2nd/3rd tier European competitions was poor (even if we did eventually get knocked out by Mourinho's Roma) 'medium' sized clubs that have done well since is largely due to 1) the PL getting more competitive; 2) those kinds of teams have upskilled; 3) 2nd/3rd tier European competitions have gotten 'easier' due to format changes

Also just totally scattergun 'strategy' too. We ripped up our model to try to get into the top 4, yet both times we were close we refused to spend in the Jan windows and/or brought in crap players that made no difference.

Yeah but look at the careers of all those players since...oh wait...