Colos Short and Curlies

Reckon it’s pretty safe to whack Isak 14 and Barnes 11 on the kids shirts?

Hold fire for a few days and one will appear unexpectedly

Im guessing we didn’t use goal posts so there is a lot of ambiguity over whether a shot was over or under the crossbar or how much of a jumper the ball can cross before not being a goal. so depending on your viewpoint it may well have been 2-0 to is, 9-1 to Burnley or anything else in between. I did hear it went to last goal the winner and we had a no blasties rule in place

We probably thought that Targett would be the one pushing/starting at LB tbf

Wrong, if you have 11 then you're playing one as a number 9 which we all know is plain dumb

Probably going to sell the report to themselves for £50m

And you just know that the premier league would not accept any FA compensation in the PSR calculations

Rob Beckett?

I said Southgate should have gone after the last Euros. We’ve gone backwards since then and it’s definitely time to step aside now. 2 years to the WC and we need a fresh approach so that we don’t waste the younger talent in the squad. Kane, Walker, Trips, Stones and Shaw (maybe) have run their races or will block a progression for the next 2 tournaments. We need a manager who will drop the front 3 behind Kane and operate with a pool of 4 or 5 players who rotate in based on freshness and opposition. We also need to avoid a repeat of a Kane where we have a number 9 who plays every minute of every game apart from meaningless friendlies. We need variety in the attack.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we are top at Christmas but then fall away to 3rd/4th at the end.

I had an arm wrestle with ol Nigel before he did a gig in Falaraki in 99. asked him what he was playing, the poor sod (lisp and all) replied US House Music. just in case there is any doubt, he won. Easily

And despite all the speculation here this is the single most likely reason

Probably sick of Dominos and nipping over for a Pizza.

Could Deschamps be any more French?

An away kit based on the 89/91 yellow and green number is pretty high on my wish list.

Modern penalties, much better when it was blast it as hard as you can

It doesn’t make much difference for this year, we had to make a net loss of £35m (ish) over 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 with the only provision being that a gain of at least £35m had to be in 2023/2024. so if we made an opportunistic sale In 2023/2024 of say £30m on top of achieving the £35m profit the. We’ve simply got a position where we can make a bigger loss this year. Its only year 3 where you have difference as the profit in year 0 drops out where you could have delayed this by a year by selling 01.07

It's not just the clubs that we would want to control the narrative with though, anything they can do to muddy the waters with the general press and football environment the better for them. We're still the 'richest club in the world' to many and we don't want our pants pulled down on fees so create a narrative that there is no cash to spend

I see a plot twist where we are hiring out our private jets (donated foc by PIF to us of course) to other clubs as a PSR fudge

Technically it’s not the transfer window that is wiped out but rather the loss we made in the year. same end result

Based on his first 6 months I think the club would have been pretty confident on turning a profit on Minteh, maybe not £30m but probably £20m would have been considered as reasonable. Anderson or Longstaff for £20m+ was also reasonable based on other young English players or English players with Longstaffs stats. i still can’t get to a position where I can see how the club could physically be that far out this season unless there is a massive one off cost we don’t know about or there is something in the background with the Sela income. That’s why I’m of the mind that we’ve brought in more than we needed this weekend as we saw an opportunity where both players had a buyer willing to pay slightly more than we originally thought we’d get.

You’ve got it, we can afford 2 years of £70 million losses before needing another profit of £35m - well that would be the case if the rules weren’t changing.

Yeah it’s based on all things being equal - so adidas = champions league. however it’s £35m however you get there - I’ll take a look at that tweet when not on my phone later - so if we have additional deals coming in then we can either reduce our player sales or increase incomings accordingly

There can only be one way of catching them and that's through really smart recruitment. We aint going to be signing many 'tier 1' superstars but if we box clever with the likes of Isak and Bruno then we'll grow success on the pitch which then snowballs into financial growth from all sorts of areas. A sale of Bruno or Isak could accelerate this by allowing a bumper transfer window or 2, but I'd look more to Arsenal's model where they have a pretty consistent level of player trading at a given level, and this then steps up as league position/champions league qualification comes in. it's not a complicated financial model, but its damn hard to get right operationally

You're right on the 21/22 and 22/23 losses, the 3 year cycle up to the end of June 2024 needed a profit of £35m for the 23/24 season/year to balance out. The first £70m drops out now so we have a total of £105m allowable to June 2025 and are starting with a £70m loss and £35m gain (in simple terms this could be more) = £35m loss. Hence we can drive a loss of £70m this year to be compliant. If the rules weren't changing then we'd have a further £70m loss to play with in 2025/2026 and need to balance this with a £35m profit in 2026/2027. I don't know our CFO personally of course but he does have a pretty decent rep and I don't see where figures of needing £60m+ last week could have come from unless the premier league are threatening something and we've created headroom for that. Having said that, I don't think it would be unacceptable to have a sale of someone like Minteh or Anderson built into the plan from Jan, we are trying to be aggressive in our development, but again it wouldn't surprise me if the thought was we'd sell for £20m and have just taken a windfall when we got the likes of Lyon, Dortmund and Everton biting