TRon

Puts everything into perspective anyway. Wish him all the best.

I'm surprised at that tbh, John Hall always made plenty of noise about ambition, maybe he just got cold feet at the cost of it all in the end.

Not like Eddie to call out players, even if he's not naming them. But I like it, good to see this side of him once in a while.

Didn't even know that a new stadium was possible at Castle Leazes with all the planning permission palaver from the last time, but that would be the ideal outcome for me.

After a season where we suffered the same issues last time....and it cost us Europe. Would help if we had signed a back up striker who is actually fit for purpose.

In that case, we need these legal costs to keep spiralling. The PL were leaking stories that the costs were £45m and rising as of yesterday, from a predicted cost of only £8m. That will have to be stumped up for by the rest of the clubs who are subsidising the rule of the cartel. Maybe once it starts hitting them in their bank balances, they might reassess whether their subservience is paying off.

Wait until it heals you would have thought. Can't imagine if there's any sort of pain that you could play effectively with one.

Exactly. This is just nit-picking, obviously our aims are general, if we miss Europe by a technicality then it's not going to be judgement day.

I don't think anyone is happy to finish 8th but until PSR restrictions can be sidestepped there's not much we can do about it.

Fighting a losing fight which isn't even yours in the first place. They are being dragged into legal wrangles on behalf of the cartel clubs and chucking good money after bad and making absolute fools of themselves in the process.

Frankly, it's a disgrace that the PL authorities have put themselves in this position on behalf of the cartel clubs. They have ended up blowing milions upon millions which belonged to all the other clubs in trying to protect the Liverpools and Arsenals when there was no good reason for them to get involved.

He needs to earn the new contract assuming it's big money. You're only as good as your last game, and there's only a handful of clubs who will offer him better deals than us, and they will only pay top dollar for top players.

It will also encourage them to spend big everywhere else as they know that that they can't be restricted by PSR in future windows.

This is probably why the story about the £45m the PL have blown on legal costs was leaked this morning.

I'd rather have played a shit team personally. I'm not confident of winning it either, they are one of the cartel clubs who could put out two teams worth more than ours.

I think he is talking about being #1 as our ultimate goal. For this season I think Eales has already said European qualification is the marker.

I'm not defending the lack of action. Why wouldn't I want a bigger stadium which is best in class for our club? I'm putting forward reasons as to why it might not have happened (yet). You could address those and maybe I'll agree with you.

I think that goes in tandem with being able to put out a trophy winning side on the pitch though. If you can do that, then you know that you can fill the new stadium - which would have to match the cartel clubs for income potential wrt corporate boxes, seat capacity, and other revenue streams which a potentially larger stadium would bring. I'm assuming that's why there has not been faster progress on that front - not to mention there will be resistance to moving the stadium out of the city if there is nowhere available within the city perimiter.

Not if the investment will cost an astronomical amount that would take decades to get a return on the capital invested. If it's purely an investment, then why wouldn't you put that money elsewhere which would see a far quicker ROIC?

It depends on what you mean by investing in the stadium. The cost of building new stadiums has gone up exponentially since Spurs did it, I would imagine it would be billions now with the cost of raw materials and labour sky rocketing since then. Extending the stadium has been notoriously problematic even before Ashley's time. Do you have any figures worked out on how it would be good from an investors's perspective?

Did you notice that bit where they specifically spelled out that buying the club was a serious investment and not a vanity project? The exact words which I used yesterday? That's not particularly reassuring IMO. Ithink we were better off when it was a perceived vanity project, because I am of the opinion the Saudis would have spent shedloads to make us no 1. If they think the path to no 1 is barred by legislation, then it's perfectly understandable for them to revert to seeing it as an investment.

When we bought him I assumed we were buying Kelly as a CB and was quite excited at the time, but he's only played LB so far. Which is about as exciting as Burn playing LB.

Yep. IIRC the injuries weren't even used as a reason we couldn't sell him, it was decided he was too important in our push for Europe. Which is fair enough, we thought it was worth gambling the £13m loss of income, but ultimately it backfired. He's still looking to leave and now we won't get anywhere near that.

Depends what metric is being used to measure elite passing. From what I've seen he doesn't make long defence splitting passes, but he is very effective at quick one touch passes into space which releases team mates into dangerous areas.

Made this same point in different forms and on different threads. The irony is that we have probably one of the few ownerships capable of delivering a brand new stadium costing billions of pounds, but IMO the reason they would do that is if they thought they could make NUFC among the top teams in the world. We can't do that under the present restrictions, and why would they want to build a world class stadium for a second rate team? If PIF feel that the game is rigged to stop us becoming "Number 1" then they might decide let's just treat it as it is - purely an investment.