UV

Aye, can happen to the best of us.

Bollocks. By that "logic", Marcelino, Luque, Boumsong, Viana, Duff and Smith were all good value. neither was your hero. Are you too thick to realise that you've just shafted your own "argument"? my argument is that you have to judge quality and pay for it if necessary. Shame you still don't understand this Ozzie. The fact that YOU might be unrealistic enough to think that every signing you make ought to be a success, simply isn't worth commenting on. Self explanatory. You also have to back your appointed manager. He may not be who you want, or who I want, but the people who appointed him - he's THEIR choice and so they should back him until such a time they feel he's making a bad job of it. In Ozzie's world you don't pay any transfer fee or wages for 2 years, and then you only pay what you think the player was worth based on his performances for you.

Remind me when this was again. Kluivert being the best example. It was never a rule though, which is where people fall down in their arguments with NE5. only example really. and he was on a free. If he were signed today I'm sure it would be lauded as a great move by the club (and rightly so IMO).

Remind me when this was again.

Saves the big wages for his favourites obviously.

You'll be waiting a long time seeing as how any player can now leave after 3 years regardless. As "Websters" become more commonplace I think we can expect to see most player contracts (who we want to keep) being renegotiated every other year as a minimum.

Average age of player signed Summer 2000 - mid July 2007: 25.3 Average age of player signed since mid July 2007 - : 26.6 Average age of player signed for > £5m Summer 2000 - mid July 2007: 23.9 Average age of player signed for > £5m since mid July 2007 - : 24.2 (The 00-01 season is as far back as I could be arsed to go. Mid July is when Ashely took full control, and even though Ashley was the major shareholder when we signed Viduka (31) I've put him & Barton in the pre-Ashley group) the transfer record in terms of outlay and ambition since the end of last season has been poor to say the least. but i'm not sure this new policy of getting younger players really came into effect until we'd appointed wise and co. before that was more about mort doing his 'strategic review' of the club and looking at ways to run the club in the future. mort has since came out and stated what the policy is about bringing players for the future. it's also worth bearing in mind that we sort of did that under Robson, buying a fair few young players until the end of his reign when we started trying to get in older players. I agree really. The point of the post was not so much to say anything about the policy under Ashley (I just put that in for comparison purposes) but to try and put a stop to the myth that we typically used to spend loads of money on has beens.

Average age of player signed Summer 2000 - mid July 2007: 25.3 Average age of player signed since mid July 2007 - : 26.6 Average age of player signed for > £5m Summer 2000 - mid July 2007: 23.9 Average age of player signed for > £5m since mid July 2007 - : 24.2 (The 00-01 season is as far back as I could be arsed to go. Mid July is when Ashely took full control, and even though Ashley was the major shareholder when we signed Viduka (31) I've put him & Barton in the pre-Ashley group)

Aye, I'm sure a player who bought out his contract for what will probably be a relatively small amount so he can profit from a big signing on bonus rather than his old team receive a transfer fee will be a loyal servant to the club who is happy to accept a minimal wage just to play for the love of it. Edit: I'm not really having a go at Gutierrez here - fair played to him for getting as much financially out of his career as he can - but some of you are just naively delusional about players these days. There are very few around who wont be after every penny they can get out of the game, and the ones who aren't should get a new agent.

No.

CORRECTION....OLD BOARD PRE-SOUNESS v new board NE5 doesn't actually have to post anymore there's always plenty of other posters to helpfully (yet incorrectly) tell us all what "NE5 would say...".

Don't worry, Ashley's sent Wise out to fish for some tadpoles so we can be lucky in 2012 if they turn out to be the right kind of toads.

You know what everyone's been saying about none of our transfers being in the papers...

Aye, Shepherd was good at that stuff. Make a noise about making a bid for Ronaldo or Rooney, sell a few seats, and then get Bowyer in on a free. Aye, Ashley's good at that stuff. Make a noise about making a bid for Modric, sell a few seats, and then get Gutierrez in on a free. Spuds announced they'd signed Modric before renewals even went out man. I guess it would be more relevant to the intimation in the article than making a bid for a player weeks into the season then.

Aye, Shepherd was good at that stuff. Make a noise about making a bid for Ronaldo or Rooney, sell a few seats, and then get Bowyer in on a free. Aye, Ashley's good at that stuff. Make a noise about making a bid for Modric, sell a few seats, and then get Gutierrez in on a free.

I wont lose any sleep if he leaves, and I'm sure McKay will be trying to engineer a move, but I think people are getting worked up over nothing really. He was probably asked direct questions like "You were not chosen for the team towards the end of last season, are you happy with your current situation at Newcastle?" and "What do you think of the teams you have been linked with in the English press such as Arsenal and Spurs?", then they edit it so it looks like he came out with the quotes spontaneously.

Does noone else find it ironic that he's now talking about having a scenario exactly like the position we were in last year before he forced Shepherd and every independent investor (thousands of supporters) to sell up to him? Set adrift in a lifeboat, waiting helplessly for someone to pick us up?

He's definitely got people reading the forums.

Sense at last!!! You won't last long here my friend It's bollocks actually. Firstly, the debt was around £70m. Secondly, if it was more than he expected then we're talking around £10m or so more at most. Thirdly, if he couldn't afford to cover the debt himself, http://www.oceanfinance.co.uk

Would have thought that, like Primark, Sport Direct's business would have been booming because of the credit crunch. As said above, the downturn is probably due to Steve McClaren and the idiots who wanted rid of the previous bloke in charge who actually had a pretty good record even if, in hindsight, he didn't always pick the right team.

Yup, the Rooney bid was as fake as the moon landings.

So was there anything to stop him from, you know, taking out another loan with someone else if paying it off himself was going to scupper his plans? He had plenty of legitimate excuses last Summer - new to the business, Alardyce not his man, etc without having to invent new ones for him. If I remember correctly, the most popular one was that the "strategic review" must be completed before any signings can be made.

Well done, Ashley will be so proud. Keep the faith. What is the Executive Director (Football) getting paid rather handsomely to do then?

There are basically just a bunch of Arsenal groupies on here who think they support Newcastle. They think Dennis Wise is the new Arsene Wenger who will come in and start signing loads of teenagers who will all become world superstars. They go on about cutting the wage bill while conveniently ignoring the fact that the club they love which is run on a shoestring has almost double the average premiership wage bill. They go on about how having a debt means you're destined for administration while conveniently ignoring the fact that the majority of teams in the premiership have the same or greater non-stadium related debts than we did. They go on about patience and short termism when the same people were demanding a change in ownership while we were still regularly getting into Europe. They offer up as examples of models to follow either teams who have only recently started to act as ambitiously as we used to, or teams who are notoriously yo-yo teams (Everton: 15,7,17,4,11,6,5 under the same board and manager. This is the consistency we should be aiming for apparently). They talk about massive changes behind the scenes as if we never had an academy or scouting network before, conveniently ignoring the fact that Taylor and N'Zogbia have been regular first teamers for years, and there was a time not so long ago when we signed the European young player of the year. No-one even really knows what is going on behind the scenes, who is in charge of what, what the transfer policy is, or what the ambitions of the club actually are, but they simply base their unquestioning knowledge on their own hopes and on the scraps of PR occasionally thrown out to the eagerly waiting acolytes. They go on about a brave new world where we no longer sign mercenaries, yet the first transfer this Summer is a bloke who has reneged on his 5 year contract with his previous club doing them out of a transfer fee; no more last minute panic buys, yet 2 of the best of last years signings were signed on the last day of the window; no more overpaid average players yet the owner sports a shirt with Smith on the back; no more interference with transfer policy, yet the manager now has to go through someone else to get the player he wants even onto the list of transfer possibilities. Anyone who doesn't sign up unreservedly to the new blind faith agenda will be labelled stupid, impatient, or even a non-supporter by the radical Ashleyites. Praise be to Our Saviour! Burn the unbelievers!

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/transfers/whats-in-the-kitty-how-the-premier-league-clubs-shape-up-financially-834762.html Apart from Spurs, Man U & Arsenal, everyone has an operating loss. Although it says N/A for us, I believe we made a profit in 06-07?