The College Dropout

Way too much money on the bench. Money is spread too thin. No Haaland or Salah is fine but then not TAA/Robertson - or Arsenal anywhere? You have 3 players from the best 3 teams in the league last season. And none of them are the best asset from that club.

I do wonder if we can commit to £18-£20m cost this year (60m fee, 5 year contract over 100k) as it stands without a sale.

Aye fair. I would want closer to £10m. Something that would save us 12m overall including wages and the rest of his unamortised fee.

Wood profile was a bad fit. Always been a decent player.

Makes sense. Agreed. I believe him when he said he didn’t want to lose ASM. He likes having talented players. The lack of Targett rumours lends me to believe he’s on gooooood money. For me Trippier is an easy sale at the right price point. We have the replacement. His value is only diminishing. His position requires athleticism that is surely in decline. He’s not that useful off the bench either. If we sold him - I don’t think he NEEDS replacing in the squad. Certainly not with an expensive signing on big wages. id take £18m in a heartbeat. We should’ve sold him in January imo. We knew we needed at least £40m right?

The fee we received is only useful because of PSR. The amount isn’t impressive because smart money would say he has the very real potential to double that value in 24-36 months. It has no sell-on or buyback to capitalise from that future potential either. The sale isn’t impressive. Selling £100m for Kane is impressive because Kane will never be worth more than £100m again. If he was doing this for us in pre season, there would be talk that we didn’t need a top quality RW. That would be a discussion rn. At the least we would be excited that we have something in our hands. It was necessary business. Some are acting like the fee made it shrewd business and that’s not the case.

Chelsea fans are used to it (KDB, Salah) but they have 2 CLs and a gang of PLs to help.

I don’t love their business. But I like how they are publicly pushing back at the core of FFP and why it’s here. And they seemed way better prepared in dealing with their shortfall than we did. And they’ve added a lot of players they can FFP flip in the process. Still like Brightons moves. I’m super interested to see how they deal with their RW. Brought in Minteh and that Duberry kid. Both young and raw. I assume they’ve been promised good minutes.

I wonder what impact the last couple of months have had on PIFs stance. Unfortunately Eales is still peddling the lines of FFP having ‘unintended consequences’ or words to the effect. While Villa tell it how it is.

This is a way better argument than acting like he’s worth the money. Hes worth the money to us because it allows Forest to buy Anderson, thus making us PSR compliant and literally saving us 1-10 points. Buying him at £20m directly indirectly got us 1-10 points that’s fair market value. This is defo more a problem for Forest than us though. I maintain that anchoring is the best idea for the PL. You don’t want us and City building Galactico teams that nobody can compete with. But you can’t FMV transfers man.

£15m no? I personally think that’s close to Anderson’s true value.

Hope so.

Without outgoings - what level of signing would you think we'll get? We will have until next June to deal with outgoings too tbf.

I don't think we have enough wiggle room to go on the type of shopping spree we've grown accustomed to. Enough to get Thiaw for like £30-35m and like £4m wages sure. But enough to get a £60m winger on a £5.5m wage? I don't think we do. We need to generate further headroom for that IMO. I think we needed 90% of those sales to be compliant - I don't think it's given us significant headroom.

Aye but that was the best the club could negotiate at the time. We were well under-prepared, so we have a useless player on the books for £20m.

These are the types of signings we should make to try and close the gap. I think we are in an awkward position. With what we have we are top 4 challengers. ATm cos of PSR we don't have the money and maybe the network to go out and get us the next Tonali, Isak, Bruno, Botman that we think can immediately get us to the next level. But we don't want to go too risky either on unproven/young talent. So we are looking at high-floor, lower-ceiling players like Thiaw. Players that we think can come in immediately and contribute but not a star signing or a young prospect.

Same with Gini.

My hunch is that PSR is really clipping our wings. And we don’t have the budget to get a lot of players we really like. Unless we move some players on. I think we’ll get the Thiaw deal done mind.

True - it's the most egregious which is what I was saying in the other thread about us having the dodgiest transfer because we were in such a last-minute panic. BUT - all those transfers between the 6 clubs are cooked-up figures too. It's such a house of cards.

Probably assign their own FMV. Then punish Forest?? Maybe us too? It's stupid as hell though. I think this one is most susceptible to a court challenge. It's not even illegal to buy clubs as a favour to another club to help that club.

If it's £20m its the mutually beneficial number for us and Forest considering the needs of PSR and the fee for Anderson. On paper - this is the dodgiest PSR transfer. Nearly everyone else involved in the fuckery got a young player with room for improvement. I think we tried to do deals for DCL & Elanga but couldn't make it mutually beneficial enough/the clubs wanted to keep those players.

His reported fee keeps changing. £7m, £12m, £20m. If we don't sign anyone else from Forest, I think it makes the larger fees more likely. I'm annoyed we didn't sign anyone useful. To me it screams - we ran out of time and options so we found a lad we were happy to take for his wages/fee to align both our PSR issues. The Anderson fee is inflated too but at least he's useful on the pitch and might be able to hold 50-100% of his new value if things go well. Ditto the likes of Maatsen.

Most people didn’t think Barnes would be the only Winger signed. Including me. Barnes was signed with plenty of time to bring in a RW. Lots of ppl pointed out they would rather a RW.

Aye. Did you think it would make sense for Gordon to play RW and Barnes LW?

Tbh I thought we were gonna sign a RW at some point that summer. It never happened.