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Without been to pessimistic is the Europa league the worst thing that can happen to us ?

No one told me being good would be this stressful

Casemiro has £18 million to pick up over the next year, Mount has £39 million over the next 3, how can they possibly get rid of these type of players

A £29 Million villa must be some gaff

You know you've had it incredibly well when your lowest point supporting your team is losing a European cup final.

The Man Utd Internet meltdown has been glorious. I like how the most painful thing about it appears to be losing to Spurs. Neither Liverpool or Man City seemed especially bothered about the fact that they'd lost to teams that had gone longer without a trophy than Tottenham.

The Story of Mike Ashley. The first comment on that video:

You absewlewtly know they’re having the driest roast dinners known man.

It’s your Athletic podcast. As Checko has said as we’ve been absolutely shite for ages and when your own club brings you no joy it’s imperative you learn the art of the hate watch and associated schadenfreude from a young age. All these lads having an awful time and paying through the nose for it is chefs kiss stuff. As a wider point seeing proper Man U fans turn more and more against us and other formerly inconsequential teams as we’ve got better and as your boys flounder has been great stuff. That it is in part due to the toxicity of the fan base has been an added delight. I was in the minority that wanted you to prevail last night but either way I couldn’t lose. Laaaavely as Glenn Hoddle would say.

Gameweek 38 Bournemouth 2-1 Leicester Fulham 2-1 Man City Ipswich 2-1 West Ham Liverpool 3-1 Palace Man United 2-2 Villa Newcastle 3-1 Everton Forest 2-1 Chelsea Southampton 0-4 Arsenal Spurs 2-1 Brighton Wolves 2-2 Brentford Echo @Disco's words, thanks so much again @Magpie

Everything about the shake-up boils down to appeasing the ESL clubs, particularly the six PL ones. UEFA has engineered ways to maintain 'elite' club participation in the Champions League. Their first proposals in 2021 literally suggested two high-revenue-generating teams could qualify for the CL even if they underperformed domestically (i.e. that coefficient horseshit). I don't think it's far-fetched to say making the EL easier to win is just that, dressed up as meritocracy. Surprise surprise that two of the three ESL clubs who didn't feature in the CL this season ended up in the EL final. The other absentee is in the Conference League final. As for revenue; all of the clubs who compete in the Champions League get more revenue than the previous format, because there's more games. That probably covers the shortfall they might otherwise have achieved via finishing 3rd and having an EL run.

His first touch looks absolutely terrible, Delap looks a better player technically, and Delap doesn't look like ever being world class. With good coaching could be a very useful striker...either way, considering we need a right winger, an incisive attacking midfielder, at least 1 center back, I'd hope we sign either a RW or attacking mid who can play striker, like Mbuemo. Ideally we'd want a couple youngsters good enough to improve the bench in midfield and either forward or defence. We need a lot to maintain top 4/5 while also playing in Europe. Wonder if we could get away with a 150mil net spend...or if Mitchell can pick up a couple of positions for 30-40 instead of 50-60. Always wondered why we havent heard much of hiring new scouts to have a constant presence all over Europe and occasionally in South America

Bruno F would be a near-perfect KDB replacement for Man City. Him on 300 grand a week would be lower wages! They could roll out another "Welcome to Manchester" poster like they did with Tevez. Rodri back, Bruno F creating, and maybe a defender or two with better fitness than Stones and they'd be back to 85+ points. That Bruno will be way out of our wages-for-age-profile league, but presumably Isak will end the summer as our new top earner. What we willing to pay will have to ratchet up too.

If Sheffield win this is their end for a good while...even Southampton are far better than that shower of shit...League 1 again ?

Yeah, like I say, I was working backwards, I didn’t see the specifics of the contemplation Just to clarify the nuances about not caring about the league, I only got to that point when the players were dropping like flies, the ones left were out on their feet and we clearly didn’t have enough of a squad left to compete on all fronts. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Ange could have done a better job managing the squad up to that point, but it wasn’t happening. Can’t remember if I’d ditched the league before or after we went out of the domestic cups tbh. I’d love us to have made a fist of the league and the cups, but we just didn’t seem capable of doing so. As far as the dropout changes I didn’t realize that they had come from the ESL guys. What was their reasoning? I would have thought they’d have been to their benefit in giving them extra revenue, as they would be most likely to be the ones in the CL in the first place?

Fukin lovely post hope they crash and burn for decades

Nope, serious. Have a lot of respect for the likes of yourself and Froggy who can seem to rise above the common baiting and goading in foreign territory here. Keep it coming, saves me trawling other fan boards to find other perspectives

I wasn't asking if the trophy win meant something/anything though, of course it does. I was asking for your take on the "would you take 17th and a cup win?" contemplation... ... which you've answered here. From your point of view, the ends justified the means and you could care less about the league. Fair enough. The matter about the prestige of the Europa League is a separate discussion. I won't knock Spurs' achievement from the point of view of Ange et al identifying the EL as their principle objective and succeeding; but I will knock it from the point of view of it being less of an achievement in a European context. To answer your question: when I was talking about the structural changes, I meant the wholesale shake-up of UEFA competitions to appease the ESL clubs (including Spurs), of which no CL dropouts is just one constituent part. Where previously the EL was Champions League B, I'd argue it's now moreso Conference League A.

Alive and well it seems. Shame.

Not sure if serious Been protecting those scars (see above) and not posting too much about football - as a result when I pop the cork you get verbal diarrhoea. Also there is an absolute ton of shit going on in life and this is a welcome safety valve. And other mixed metaphors.

Cheers! Hard to say what the season feels like now tbh. That needs a bit more distance. I feel like this is more of a question about long-term v short term football goals but I’ve got a couple of thoughts so apologies for the dribbling essay about to follow. I feel weird because I’ve been keeping a bit of emotional distance from Spurs despite moving back to North London. Danny Kelly said something in his post-game podcast about the scars you accumulate as a fan and how you protect them. Some of mine are about the game in general, some are about the weird stresses inherent in the way we play, some are about the insidious and traumatic nature about being a dyed-in-the-wool fan (of any team) that is viscerally affected by the game despite recognizing its absurdity . My next-door neighbor is a season-ticket holder. He texted me after work to see if I wanted to go down the pub with him to watch it. My response - verbatim, just checked - was “thank you but I am absolutely terrified”. He said simply “me too”. Of course, I did have other stuff to do (like moving a piano) but I watched the last trophy we won in a pub in Sutton Coldfield and the one before in a pub in Stratford (the East London one). Now I’m old and fragile and tired, and I have to try to seem like a normal person around my kids and my wife. It’s easier to hold things together trying to distract myself from the TV with chores that I’m inventing out of thin air. Is football really trophies over everything? Most local opposition fans - Arsenal, Chelsea, even the odd West Ham fan - have been telling me that for a while. They’ll move those goalposts now - actually some already have done. For me it was always community and family over everything, but really community and family and trophies and good football and progress in a sort of mulch. More satisfying to be good in the league though? - well if you’re old enough, you tell me how satisfied you were with the Keegan years. I’m going to guess broadly incredibly happy and proud but with this weird underlying sense of ultimate unfulfillment. I fucking loved us under Poch for a million reasons, but can‘t deny that the fact he didn’t get to lift a trophy gnaws on me sometimes. I got a call from my eldest today (15F). She was ecstatic because her school day tomorrow is cancelled…because of Spurs’ trophy parade down the High Rd. There you go - community and family and trophies . My Mum’s in North Middlesex Hospital at the moment and she’ll probably be able to hear the parade (she won’t know what the fuck it is, but if she hears Ange’s voice she might think it’s her Dad). That’s part of why it can be more satisfying than an extremely good league campaign. I’ll always want us to get better every year and ultimately win everything all the time and force Arsenal back to South London etc etc. It’s almost self-evident that a good league performance this year would have suggested we were on the right track for progress to world domination, and a Cup win - while promoting self-belief and togetherness - doesn’t necessarily do that at all, certainly not when combined with the shambles in the PL. But I’m happy. There are signs for optimism in the squad, some players have got a long overdue reward, we have got access to the CL gravy train even though we are likely to spill it all down our fronts. And the memes will be fucking glorious for a few months.

Re: cup wins, to be fair I've been pretty consistent on this in the past, in relation to ourselves. It would've been vile if we'd spawned our way to a league cup win under Bruce by having teams of reserves literally roll over for us to reduce their own fixture schedules. I think basically the value that comes in winning a competition comes from the difficulty of the struggle and the desire of fellow competitors. I'm sure the European teams you faced were mostly giving it their best, which is what made it sad. Thinking about it, this music video does a pithier job of summing up my thoughts on the situation: It's not Tottenham's fault (well, actually maybe it is in terms of playing a part in trying to lock up global football's finances within a small clutch of mostly English clubs), but the old Uefa Cup and much of European football has become, in relative terms, a bedraggled thing. I think that's a tragedy, but it was a pretty inevitable consequence of things like moves towards Super Leagues. The Premier League itself has been pretty appalling this season, given the apparent sense that many teams just aren't turning up to try if it's not in their interests, especially in end season matches. It's really poisonous for the competition and, in my eyes, it's prestige.

Was trying to get my head around that, I even went back to check if I clicked the wrong thread. Can we keep this shite to the Man U thread 😉