macphisto

Good shout about Savage. Might be mixing it up by a few years as he was slightly later but I didn't think too much of Wes Brown.

I was thinking of him but you could argue he had a decent early career but maybe that's because the others pulled him along.

Livramento is a good player in comparison to others. Apart from a very select group of players, all players have limitations. Worldwide, at this moment in time, there really is lack of quality across the board.

100% agree, indeed would I be right in thinking he was the worst of the Class of 92? Would have been interesting if Keegan had tried for one of the others.

Agents are out for themselves and have to protect their whole roster of players. Mess a club around and you could be harming future players. This is all before even mentioning that agents often act on behalf of clubs in a deal and you also have very murky relationships where certain agents work very closely with particular clubs; just look at Newcastle under Shepherd and our relationship with Paul Stretford.

Biggest challenge for Wilson is to improve our relationship with agents. If we had good relationships then we wouldn't have even got to the stage of considering some of our targets nevermind bidding for them. Can happen to one or two players but it was a systematic failure last summer.

Are they that great anyway? Bournemouth have never had Europe before qualifying this season and Brighton qualified for the second time after this season. Good for them both, they're well run clubs but once you're established in the Premier League then it's not too difficult to stay mid-table like they have for the vast majority of their time. They're not that much different to Palace, Brentford and Fulham too in that regards. Yes they've done well in the market but people also forget their failures.

I'm quite positive as we've done well in the transfer market since Howe has been here and I would take one bad window every few years (never going to get it right every time). My main reason for being confident is that I don't think the league is that great and it won't take much to get back up there. Yes, we'll have holes in the squad, but then so does everyone else. All this talk of £20-£30 million pound players, you can get one or two of those players but to base your recruitment around that price range is not going to get you Champions League football.

Can't see us having a bad run if we don't have Europe and we do OK business over the summer. The worst case scenario would be inconsistency.

I don't think the issue is paying over the odds for the players, more that they're not deemed good enough to play for the team.

Mixed with players from overseas.

What shows that this is a ridiculous conversation, from either perspective, is that he's only had two active transfer windows where we've had a DoF. January signing of Gordon and the following summer where we signed Tonali, etc. From a recruitment perspective we can only say he worked well with Ashworth due to the successes of those windows and I don't remember any stories of discontent coming out of the club. We have nothing else to go on either way. Whether he's wanted full control or not, outside the two above windows, he's been given it due to mismanagement by PIF where we didn't have people in place.

No, I don't think he has. He wants input like any other manager.

He's only had friction with Mitchell, let's not rewrite history.

I meant investing money in terms of exploiting loopholes in PSR which plenty of other clubs have done. I didn't mean investing capital. Howe worked well with Staveley, Ashworth and now Wilson which indicates he's happy to share control with others. I'd also throw in Bunce too.

PIF investing would have made a massive difference as it would have reduced our losses over any given 3 year period. We can only assume that they planned to get around the PSR rules, otherwise they are completely incompetent for leaving us in a position where we couldn't buy any one for a good few windows. Howe has never wanted control, he only got it as PIF allowed a vacuum to emerge at the top of the club. Having a say in what players are sold to full control are completely different things.

Selling players isn't down to Howe. We also have no idea if PIF ever rowed back on how much they intended to put into the club which led to our PSR problems and not buying any players for a few windows. We can criticise Howe for what happens on the pitch but on the subject of trading players that's more on PIF due to poor senior managerial appointments or lack of.

Good point, not sure about that. I would think you're right about it being just PIF Clubs.

Seriously, I would not be surprised if he won the golden boot.

In the news that was announced today, I found it bizarre that, under UEFA rules, selling players to Saudi Arabia are not included in our balance sheet as it's a related party transfer. Q: Do UEFA rules on associated-party player sales stop you doing business with Saudi clubs? CAPPER: It doesn't stop us doing business. What it means is if we make a profit, it doesn't count. We sell a player that's worth a pound for £10million and make a profit of £9.999million in the Premier League but make a profit of zero in UEFA. We just don't get a profit.

A great snippet from Richard Keys interview in the Telegraph, a perfect Christmas Day 😂

How have we been short term thinking when we've bought Isak, Woltemade, Hall, Livramento, Gordon, plus a few others?

An interesting thought experiment when it comes to PIF is how they would have acted if Howe had only done an OK job? Imagine if we had not got Champions League at this point or won a trophy. Say one or two seasons in the Europa League. I wonder if they would have found ways to get money into the club? If not then we would be a very average team. By Howe doing such an incredible job, it's kind of masked PIF's true ambitions to a certain extent.

Well what have they done? We got the guy from Manchester airport for infrastructure. Not much happening there. Hopefully will change soon with the training ground. We've had a few commerical hires, and yet our closet commercial partners are directly related to PIF. Hopefully, again, things improve soon on that point. When regards to Commercial Income, as I say you can't truly judge it, under Ashley and under PIF, as our main commercial partners are and were directly related to the owners. Completely different, for example, to John Hall.

Our commerical side is so murky that it's difficult to say what our true commercial revenues are after Ashley and PIF. We look at Ashley and all the free advertising which not only deprived us of direct income but also would have put off other commerical partners. That's one example without even going into the partnership with Sports Direct and, latterly Castore. So our commerical income was £140 million but our commerical activity was much greater, it just didn't show on our books. In many ways it's the reverse with PIF, as they are using their related companies, Sela for example, to help put money into the club. That was my original point; it hardly takes much for a PIF company to get sponsored by Sela and Noon if PIF want it to happen. We did well with the Adidas deal but that's all.