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Didn't see that Did it sound like a bad one?

Good question. My best guess is it's not quite working out, seeing as he seems to have dropped off the radar. Maybe a loan this season to prove himself?

"You're asking the wrong person"

Best mates with Guehi, according to Steve Parish. I fully support our transformation into the super happy friends club.

Yep, exactly. People should be directing all the pain and frustration caused by this stuff at the rules and the custodians of the game who set those rules. It's now set up in an opaque way which deprives a lot of people the joy of following a relatively simple game. I think it's unintended, but they're really asking people to just switch off from the game and stop caring. It'll be only for the most hardcore, eventually.

To be honest, it was simpler than all that - I was just trying to give easy to understand figures to illustrate a less explored impact of PSR! I realise there are a lot of complexities in any specific examples e.g. with Almiron, he also has the Atlanta sell on fee, which applies either to any profit or the gross sale price - no one outside the club appears to know. Re: your Madueke figures, as an alternative you can also look at the choices of the club e.g. could that Almiron deal fund 4 or 5 Minteh-sized deals, with lower overall wages than one Madueke? Yes. Good idea? Obviously a pretty controversial one. My example would have been better if I'd used Miley, and a lot worse if I'd mooted flipping Hall for £30m. That's why I indicated that what I was saying wasn't a watertight case for selling Almiron. But the broader thrust was about the different perspectives driving different valuations of the same player. How an extra £2m on a sale - which was barely anything even a decade ago in football - can today have an outsized impact on your future options. As I said the other day, we have an extra, parallel economy in football now - a bit like the idea of carbon credits. I understand people getting pissed off with PSR conversations, I am too, but if you don't understand it you're basically cut off from understanding what's going on in football nowadays.

Without getting too PSR-y, basically the value of a pound coin is meaning different things to different clubs more than ever before. Which is making player pricing much more erratic e.g. Gordon was worth eight figures less on June 30th than he was on July 1st. We knew that and Liverpool knew that. It's not just that one quality of player is worth 30% less than another quality of player, it's that individual players are going up and down, occasionally even day to day. Meanwhile there's now more sense in us selling Almiron for £10m (I'm not saying it's a slam dunk case) even if that's seen as cheap, because we're a cash rich, PSR poor club and that sale immediately unlocks a £35m transfer kitty for a deal we may have lined up. But that would be less true for a cash poor club, who would need to value him more highly because they need to fund other signings somehow. PSR, combined with transfer windows, is incentivising many clubs into periodically behaving like Leeds United in crisis mode, before the reset button gets hit and normality resumes. The only real alternative is to have a ridiculously higher income than your peers, or not get as close to maxing out your PSR budget as possible because you don't mind giving your competitors who do an advantage. So it's near enough impossible to talk in traditional ways about how much a player is worth in a steady sense, because one month their club might be in liquidation mode, and the next they might be rich. It's more like buying fresh fish from the docks - lots of moving parts, and what's a good deal now can be a very bad deal a few hours later... Oh look at that, I became too PSR-y.

If you mean the big project, that's unnecessarily despondent. We'd bank £200m-300m and go again. We'd be in a much stronger position than we were a couple of years ago. We could have a gigantic fresh push with that. Upsetting, yes, the end, no.

No, I wasn't confident either - assuming no Saudi assistance etc. But there certainly was a lot of talk about wide ranging squad rebuilds, when what we've got is pretty much stasis. I don't think we wanted Bruno gone in the sense of getting rid of him, but I think it was our main expectation that he left. With that helping to fund the rebuild that the others' fees probably wouldn't have covered on their own.

Going by the talk in the first 6 months of the year, I think we were imagining shipping out a host of players that in the end we've still got e.g. Almiron, Wilson, Lascelles, Trippier, Bruno.

Club that tries, not team. We want a club that tries to build a winning team. Otherwise we'd still want Ritchie here.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but I think there's plenty of other factors that have messed it up ahead of that if it's messed up. I pretty much refuse to judge it until the window's closed, personally.

Let's brainstorm new usernames for that wanker Will.

Ashley is the best answer yet. Quality video. Wonder how Anderson was involved (assuming that rumour was true).

Plausible. Things like how we do and, individually, how Barnes does will help determine it.

Supposedly* he didn't know anything about an investigation until the rest of the world did (Oct 12th, iirc). *Realise there might be a gap between the official story and reality.

Definitely trying not to get my hopes too high. But him coming on and clattering in the winner against Tottenham does feel like it's written in the stars.

Yeah, assumed they were going to carry on ruling out the likes of them before going back to Everton as an easy hit.

Did look a bit that way with the cup lift

Good to hear. The metatarsal is starting to ring bells for me now - was a bit worried at the idea his back issue was dragging on so long

Really? Thought it was a back problem (not confusing it with Anderson's hopefully...).

Any more detail on the nature of the problem? How he's been getting on with it?

We don't know - one of those super reliable websites says £40k but I'd expect it's a good chunk more than that. Probably not £100k though, I'd guess. Split the difference, basically.

Certainly. The only thing is, with his injury history he might want to make sure he gets a job rather than having a long spell out of a club altogether. But many if not most would take the gamble, for sure.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It'll be dictated by who and how many are interested in him. It's unlikely but not impossible they'd actually get more for him next summer e.g. if us, Liverpool and Arsenal were in for him (for the sake of arguement).