OzzieMandias

I'm English enough to care about England winning, but English clubs is something different. There's no sense in which Man U or Chelsea or whoever are representing me. I've worked in a few different countries and I've spent more time in, say, Lisbon than I have in Liverpool -- have more friends there and like the place better. In the time I was there I used to go to Sporting games (sometimes to Benfica, but I liked Sporting better --perhaps because of a natural aversion to teams that play in red and white). And, frankly, if any English team except us was playing Sporting, it's Sporting I'd want to win.

What a load of sh*te man. Where's the reasoning that "but had Owen been fit, we might have scored an extra 15-20 goals this season, been 4 places (or £2m higher), and still in cup competition. aye, without even looking, I KNOW that macbeth will portray the club in the worst light possible, and not consider the playing side of it. So why bother. Just think where we would be if we hadn't bought Woodgate, Dyer, Bellamy, Robert, Parker, Butt, Martins, Owen etc etc over the past years, instead buying players for 500 grand or something to keep the books right. Aye, and just think where we'd be if we hadn't bought Marcelino, Maric, Viana, Cort, Luque, Bassedas and Boumsong. 45m quid the lot. Aye, all the shite boards back their managers with that sort of money, just like their predecessors always bought international footballers instead of selling them all. As a long term - cough cough - fan you know this though don't you. BTW - you forgot your hero Arsprilla, who scored 2 goals in his last season, and played well in about 1 game in 10 before that anyway. Are you still dishing the dirt on the club you say you support to lundun scumbag journos who hate Newcastle ? Are you still confusing me with Freddie Shepherd and Douglas Hall?

We lost £5 million on Cort.

Didn't they pay the same for Woodgate as what we paid plus additional payments which im pretty sure the conditions would not have been met on? We bought him for around £9 million and sold him, I thought, for £13.4. I don't know about part of that being conditional.

We got £1.75 million for him. No profit there.

We sold Gillespie for £2.3 million, so that does represent a profit if you're right that his buying price was one million of the money we'd have got for Cole.

I can think of only three -- Hamann, Jenas and Woodgate -- but I've got a feeling there may be one more...

What a load of sh*te man. Where's the reasoning that "but had Owen been fit, we might have scored an extra 15-20 goals this season, been 4 places (or £2m higher), and still in cup competition. aye, without even looking, I KNOW that macbeth will portray the club in the worst light possible, and not consider the playing side of it. So why bother. Just think where we would be if we hadn't bought Woodgate, Dyer, Bellamy, Robert, Parker, Butt, Martins, Owen etc etc over the past years, instead buying players for 500 grand or something to keep the books right. Aye, and just think where we'd be if we hadn't bought Marcelino, Maric, Viana, Cort, Luque, Bassedas and Boumsong.

Alas, though, here in the real world, Owen WAS injured.

Went for Lazio but given the chance I would have ticked five or six others too.

Well, the explanation of the wage bill figure is that it has had the one-off Owen compensation knocked off it, thus partially disguising an actual rise of around 12 percent.

So say we had won the UEFA cup and received say £10million prize fund 9made up figure - I don't know the prize fund) would it be fair to include this in turnover as its a one off cash injection? Well it certainly couldn't have been counted on as a recurring event.

The point is that a one-off payment doesn't change the underlying picture of a wages/turnover ratio now running at a staggering 67 percent.

How's the information "twisted"? The wage bill would have been even higher without the £3.3 million knocked off. Fact. It's essentially risen by around 12 percent.

Rush... Bowyer... and though I've been trying since this thread was first posted, I simply can't think of a third player I hated as much as those two.

It'll be something like... Harper Duff Martins Butt Milner Gooch Sibierski Bramble Dyer Parker Huntington

Or the Daily Mirror is just making it up.

It usually takes a while for a manager to build a new squad – look at the few seasons it took SBR to remove the shite and reduce the wage bill while slowly adding his own pieces of the puzzle, with a few mistakes along the way – and that's partly because of money but also because you need to see how it all fits together. You can buy six new players who've never met each other and throw them all into the first team and it might well not work however good they are. It's a bit like commercial airliner design. You have to be conservative, because if you get it wrong the thing falls out of the sky. So you don't come up with a radical new airliner that's completely different to anything that's gone before. You build on previous designs.

We're not even in the competition, man.

Bobby Moncur Sir Les Peter Beardsley

I rate Sven but I don't think he's at all suited to us in our current situation, and I can't see him working well with Shepherd (though that's true of just about any successful and sophisticated manager). If, if, if the club ever got bought by some forward-looking individual or institution willing to revamp the club from top to bottom and prepared to put a decent chunk into the playing staff as part of their investment, I think Sven would be the kind of manager to bring in. But that's just daydreaming. Otherwise, yeah, I agree with Grass. I could see him at Chelsea, and that's about it.

I'd definitely take him. If we have to have an English manager, he's the best around. He's proven that he can operate in the transfer market, work with big egos, raise players' games, maximise limited resources and plan for the future. His ability to "think out of the box" would be a refreshing change, as would his hunger to find an edge in any way that he can.

It's a nothing story as yet, released now only to strike a positive note amid all the gloom. No planning permission yet. Well, there won't be any investors on board until there is. And the attractiveness of hotels and conference centres are going to depend a lot on what the football club is actually doing on the pitch. If we were performing like we did a dozen years ago, having a conference behind the Gallowgate might seem kind of sexy. Right now? Well, we'd just be competing with loads of other cities that have conference facilities – and having trouble filling 8,000 more seats.

There's no way "investors" are going to invest significant sums in the playing staff unless they're taking over the club. But you're possibly on to something in your second paragraph.

This.