Taylor Swift

Letsholonyane... That's a mouthful.

What a great summer this will be.

Match times Bangkok time each day: 6pm, 9pm, 12.30am It's going to be such a great summer.

I'm fucking excited for this.

Anyone signed up to the bracket on soccernet.com?

I've got Argentina, Spain, France and Holland as my semi finalists. I've got Portugal winning their group which means Brazil gets Spain in the second round. I've got England going out at the quarters to the French.

Eh? They were crowned U17 Champions last year so you expect them to start dominating at senior level right away or what? Every good international team right now has a core of players who were very good at U19 and U17. A Championship at that level is a pretty accurate predictor of relative success at senior level. Look at the years Spain won the U17 World Cup - 97, 99, 01. 10 years later, all those 16 and 17 year olds are now players like Xavi, Iniesta, Villa, Silva, Casillas. Cesc also was top scorer in a u17 or u19 competition.

Reina is not better than Valdes, and Valdes has been better than Casillas for the past two years, so it's Valdes who should be No.1.

I agree about the way Dunga has transformed them into a team which is startlingly good at defending. They're very much a hard team to beat now, even though they gave up some flair to achieve that. I think the Germans will be hard to beat as well (as usual), but they've got nothing up front this year. If the Argies defend well, they'll win imo because they're just so superior up front. It's really up to Maradona whether the Argies fulfill their potential.

What's Argentina's normal starting eleven? I think their defence is weak as shite, and they have no one in midfield who can create goals. They should really play with 4 strikers or something, and drop Messi and Tevez back in the the AM role. Or something like 4 defenders, Mascherano, Jonas, Di Maria, Messi, Higuain and Tevez. Or Milito instead of Tevez. Or Aguero instead of Tevez.

Spain and Brazil are obviously the favourites, imo, but I think Argentina will surprisingly do well. They're my 'sleeper' pick to win it. What say you?

What does the headline say? Something to do with Maicon being Mourinho's first target when he takes over, and wanting to move Ramos to central defence?

I think Toure is infinitely better than Busquets. I don't see what Busquets offers to the team; he's slow, he's not the most accurate of passers, his defensive coverage can't compare to Toure's and his tackling is nothing special, and that's not mentioning that he's some cunt as well. Toure, on the other hand, has pace, strength and is an excellent tackler/defender. And, he rocked out with Xavi and Iniesta last year.

Leo, 3-0.

A Real goal followed by a Valladolid goal would really make things interesting.

Barca score.

Jeeze, even Messi looks nervous.

Barca look nervous as hell. Switching between this and the Fed-Nadal match; can't make up my mind which one to stick with.

Unless we're loaded with cash or the club we're buying the from is struggling with solvency/liquidity problems, paying in cash is stupid. I'm sure Ashley got rich because he bought in cash and got something like 3-5% discount, whereas if he paid in credit he'd have to pay in 3-6 months. In football, the credit is years, not months, which means the % discount that Ashley must be getting has to be around 15% or 20% for it to be worth it.

Are you kidding me? SSR is totally right. Ronaldo, you may think you know a lot about the world, but it's obvious you know f*** all about accounting. No business pays for things up front and sells things in installments. That goes against basic economic logic (inflation, discounting etc.). It's the opposite of what any sane business would do. The only reason any club would do that is to prepare for a decrease in revenue, but why go to this extreme to protect the club's cashflow when other, more reasonable and common measures which leaves the club with more money to invest can be taken? It clear you don't know much yourself if you can't see the logic in buying players in one installment. There's only one advantage to buying in one go, you will in some situations get a lower price. Its like buying a car on finance, it costs more than if you pay cash. Even 0% finance is typically more expensive as the cost of the finace gets built into the 'price' of the car via lower discounts or such like. Thats how he became a millionaire - buying cheap by using cash rather than accepting higher prices for a payment period. If you think how a lot of football clubs are being run at the moment with debt - an immediate cash injection of £5m may well be more appealling than £7m over 4 years (answering both of you here, not just ronaldo) Agreed. Clubs with cashflow problems will want cash because they could repay their debts/overdraft (which probably have an interest charge of around 6%) and hence get the savings that way, however, it makes no sense for us wanting to pay in cash. We should only take advantage of the situation if the club we're buying the player from is willing to give us a significant cash discount. It should not be our modus operandi because it's incredibly stupid. It's moronic, it's inefficient, it's not diversifying risk, it's really just idiotic. I don't know what else to say.

Basic accounting: Spend £1m today = £1m gone. Spend £1m over 10 years, you pay £100k each year, but of course, because there is inflation (let's assume 2%), you actually only pay £98k in the second year, £96k in the third year, £94k in the fourth year etc. etc. Put an extra 0 on that number and the amount of money that you're technically 'saving' is a lot, especially if the discount rate is higher than 2%. That is just basic accounting. The value of money today is greater than the value of money in the future, so naturally people want more money today than they want it in the future, so it's basic economic logic that you should want to spend money in the future rather than today because that money will be worth less in the future. Of course, clubs usually adjust for this when they negotiate transfer fees, which is why you'd pay more for a player if you're paying in installments, but imo not enough. Or, if they're run by idiots like we are, they don't adjust at all and will realise that the money they eventually pocket 2-5 years from now is actually worth shit all because the inflation rate in football is a lot higher than 2%. I'll give you an example: We spent £15m on Shearer in 1996. If we had bought him, paid his wages but agreed to pay Blackburn £20m in 2006, that deal would have been an amazing deal because transfers had become so inflated by that time that £20m in 2006 terms for the return that Shearer delivered made the transfer an extremely valuable one. There is also the fact that you can spread out your investment. Say we have £10m to spend this summer. If we bought an amazing CM for £10m, we wouldn't be able to buy anyone else. However, if we decide to spread out the investment over 5 years, we'd only be paying £2m now, which leaves £8m in the transfer kitty. Say we did the same thing with 4 other players, we'd be getting £50m worth of players but only actually paid out £10m. If things turn to shit and these players don't deliver value for money, we're hamstrung in the transfer market until we pay the deals off, but it doesn't fuck us up because we could choose not to spend any money in the future windows. If we decided to buy these 5 players but pay it all in one go (i.e. one player each year), the potential negatives are still the same. If these players don't live up to the hype, we've wasted 5 years. If we had spread out our investment, we would only be hamstrung for 5 years as well. However, the positives are obviously different. If we buy these 5 players in one season, our team would obviously be much improved, generating immediate and future revenues which would not be possible unless we spent money in installments. If we had bought one player each year, the improvement would not be as dramatic, hence lower immediate and future revenues, which would hamstring our ability to spend in the future.

Are you kidding me? SSR is totally right. Ronaldo, you may think you know a lot about the world, but it's obvious you know fuck all about accounting. No business pays for things up front and sells things in installments. That goes against basic economic logic (inflation, discounting etc.). It's the opposite of what any sane business would do. The only reason any club would do that is to prepare for a decrease in revenue, but why go to this extreme to protect the club's cashflow when other, more reasonable and common measures which leaves the club with more money to invest can be taken?

Ashley Cole, 8-0.

Drogba hattrick.