The College Dropout

His final ball has been poor. But Moussa has been one of their best players imo. Moura has been quiet. First time I’ve seen Mendy have to defend a lot and he’s been pap.

Zaha and Johnson = penalty magnets We have Ayoze and Matt Ritchie.

Pitch is so distracting.. horrendous.

He is a good busine But he’s not running NUFC as a business. It’s a marketing tool for his actual business.

He never planned to seriously invest in the squad or city.

The Championship is getting harder to come straight back. Only us and Burnley have done it in recent seasons. The last promotion we had the best manager in the league by a distance and it wasn’t as nearly as easy as the first time. The majority of our transfers succeeded and we sold £70m odd in transfers. We still had Shelvey, Mitro, Lascelles etc. We sell our 4 most talented/rated players we’ll have nothing beneath it this time. The strategy is high risk and is bound to fail soone or later

What happens when we eventually stay down? That will happen sooner or later. Also, the fans have never caused that much grief throughout the Pardew era or the McClaren era. This is after he hounded out a club legend. I think the penny has dropped with the fans that it's not any 1 managers fault ultimately but Ashley's. SO maybe something has changed there and we might be able to hound him out. But i'm still sceptical. When I regularly see empty stands on MOTD, something might have fundamentally changed. I also think some of the broadcasting media will change perspective when that happens as it's bad for TV. While the stadium is full nobody will bother to do any real research.

Not made him sell up the previous two times and it won’t again. Same thing will happen he will bank on going up again straight away. I personally believe that nobody will be interested in buying into a championship team either especially at the price he will be looking for Don't understand this line of thought. Leicester City Crystal Palace Fulham Wolves Southampton Watford All purchased from the Championship or League 1. Simple rule of business. Buy low. The price will be lowered after a few seasons in the Championship. That's what it will take imo. Maybe 3-5 seasons in the Championship. Maybe ANOTHER relegation. Can't see us being sold while the PL money is coming in. All had the chance to buy us when we were in the championship and didn’t because he is asking far too much and the clubs you mention were able to be bought for a fraction of the cost compared to us. That is the way it is unfortunately and relegation won’t change that. One year in the Championship won't be enough. We will need to stay down. I'm thinking about it this way. We've done the amble around the PL, stinking it up and not coming close to being sold. Let's try 5 years in the Championship. The price must come down. If anything, maybe staying down will ignite the fans to turn vitriolic. A nice midtable Championship position might get the masses to desert the club and/or get angry. He knows he can ride the relegation wave and he's seen a winning championship side stop any shenanigans. This invest minimally and scrape survival is the ultimate win for him regarding the club. A relegation and bounce back straight after is something I reckon he's also happy to do. Both scenarios, the public don't cause that much disturbance.

Not made him sell up the previous two times and it won’t again. Same thing will happen he will bank on going up again straight away. I personally believe that nobody will be interested in buying into a championship team either especially at the price he will be looking for Don't understand this line of thought. Leicester City Crystal Palace Fulham Wolves Southampton Watford All purchased from the Championship or League 1. Simple rule of business. Buy low. The price will be lowered after a few seasons in the Championship. That's what it will take imo. Maybe 3-5 seasons in the Championship. Maybe ANOTHER relegation. Can't see us being sold while the PL money is coming in.

Atmosphere in the OM / PSG game is something.

Conte to Real Madrid? Interesting to see how he attempts to go 3 at the back.

You figure they would rank among the most well-liked, probably loved club owners as well. I'd love any owners that had us winning the PL. Not that it matters much but yeh.

Lad needs to get out of here ASAP.

I think there's a certain pot for 1 country in the CL per tournament phase. So say for English clubs it's £100m for the group stage. 4 teams get 25m each. But for Portuguese it's a £60m pot. But there's only 2 clubs in the CL, that's £30m each. So it gets to a situation where if there's 3 Spanish clubs in the semi-finals with a £80m pot and an English club that has a £80m English pot. The 3 Spanish clubs will need to share their 80 while the single English club gets all 80 of theirs. But...... I think now there's 4 Italian teams in the CL right? And I assume their pot is smaller than the English pot.

Just what Barca needed imo, he's closer to a Xavi/Iniesta style player than the likes of Gomes, Turan, Rakitic, Paulinho ect. Rakitic is amazing - I would never put him in the same category as Gomes, Turan and Paulinho Even Paulinho did a good job. The other two were failures imo.

Classy on the ball aye. But this is it. Great on the ball ability in terms of short passing and carrying the ball. Good 1v1 but any other type of defending... woeful.

Nah. The lad couldn't defend at all.

He's not a DM though. He's a good passer of the ball it seems. Off the ball i'm not sure what he offers. he's playing at DM for Arsenal He's playing a deep midfielder role, that doesn't make him a defensive midfielder (I assume this is what you meant). Going on whoscored his only "very good" strength is passing. With long-shots and set-pieces his other strengths. So he can pass and strike / deliver a ball well. You would like to think a DM would be good at interceptions, tackling and concentration. Going on Torreira's page his strengths are what i've listed. Tackling, concentration, interceptions, blocking the ball among others. For me Xhaka is a very good passer at times but not much else. His role is a deep lying playmaker almost. I'm not sure that's enough. He's no Pirlo, he won't control the game from there.

He's not a DM though. He's a good passer of the ball it seems. Off the ball i'm not sure what he offers.

Rodgers will have better ran clubs after him, he's also very unhappy with Celtic's board and their lack of ambition currently. Rodgers would be mad to come here. Only desperate managers need apply. Aye, I feel those that think we'll be after Rodgers don't understand how bad things really are. We would be lucky to get Bruce. It's 100% going to be someone totally out of their prime. Big Sam, Bruce and co. are probably as good as Ashley could do.

He's in a weird position and I wonder what it's like for him. His own self-esteem. He's not a properly proven PL player but he's had some success. He's in a bad run of form and he gets selected every week. I wonder what his confidence is like right now. Does he know he's going to play crap again next weekend? Never been a huge fan but I feel a bit sorry for him. When he first came we had De Jong that could replace him but now he's a guaranteed starter and he's just fucking awful. Needs a break.

Should have done it season before with us. No excuses with the squad they had when you see it was Huddersfield who were one of the teams up. Di Matteo was their manager until October like. They didn't even make it to the play offs to be able to go up instead of Huddersfield. IIRC Huddersfield were the most deserving of going up in the play offs as well. Either them or Fulham. Bruce has been at Villa long enough now to have made more progress than he has. Even looking in as an outsider I wasn't convinced he was getting them anywhere, they always seem to be struggling to get near the automatic promotion spots. He got them to the play off final and they lost to a better team. A team that we’re also better than them the previous year. Bruce is a decent Champo Manager. 4 promotions is it?

Yep. Also the side from the first half of 13/14 when we were pushing the top 6, then Cabaye went and it fell to bits as well as Pardew being a twat. Just think, hypothetically, we stay up after getting taken over, who'd you keep? For first team it's only Dubravka, Lascelles, probably Lejeune. If Kenedy was on form I'd say him too but he's been poor since Spurs. So that's 3 players who are relatively consistent at this level. I'd probably keep Yedlin, Shelvey, Ritchie and Fernandez as squad players (no idea about the other new signings because we've barely seen them), so when you think about the amount of crap in the rest of the squad, that's shocking. Cheers Mike. Hate to be so negative but this feels like cuckoo land. We won't be sold. And Rafa will leave at the end of the season. It's just a case of which division we'll be in and I honestly don't care.

That is how I see it in a nutshell. Even if we go down, he'll stay because he'll fancy we can come back up with a better squad than the rest down there. It would take a really shit managerial appointment to keep us down. Not true. While I agree we've had superior squads in our Championship seasons. We've also had superior coaches. Hughton would be one of the best managers in the Championship today still. Obviously, same applies to Rafa. I think Bruce is a good Championship manager and I reckon we'll struggle with him at the helm. Next time we go down, i'm certain we stay down.

We would have 15/20 years ago. Our fan base has changed so much. Staggering how he can sit there unchallenged after all he's done. Staggering until you remember the type of fan who goes nowadays I'm not so sure and this is why i'm so apathetic. I'm sorry, a serious club of our size gets him out by now.