Memphis

My Greek source Harry Paratestes says it's all but done

Fuck me I check this thread and people are talking about us signing Arda Guler?? I'll bare my cheeks in every shop window if we sign Arda Guler.

It'll be Drool Runnings when he gets a whiff of that jerk chicken

I watched it expecting to see something bad. Instead, I see a player for a team down 4-1, probably could have gotten a bit tighter, made more of a challenge, but the clip itself shows absolutely nothing of value in "scouting" the player. You can make almost any player look good or bad based on a selective edit of their performances. It's hard to YouTube scout without watching full games, especially for defenders, when so much of their activity goes unseen or undiscussed on the TV broadcast.

It's going to happen like a bolt out of the blue. Some player we haven't really considered will have agreed a deal. The downside of us doing our business so quietly is the lack of rumours...

That's reassuring. It was very clear from Howe's comments that something wasn't quite right and needed to be sorted out. And on the back of that, they have all met and seem to have figured it all out. That's good communication, even if perhaps it took a little more time than it should have to get everything settled. Particularly notable to me was the comment about being happy to sign foreign players, that reads as Howe responding directly to a big criticism of him by some. Hopefully this draws a line under the whole thing and we start making the signings we desperately need.

But not quite, though. The devil's in the details here. Howe's a very shrewd guy. He has chosen to do this. He chose to leave open the possibility he wouldn't be managing the first game. That was by design. He's sending a message to Eales and trying to make sure what he feels is his territory is honored. I certainly underestimated how the amount of turnover and the PSR stuff must have unsettled Howe. Ultimately I think he remains but with Eales saying Eddie is "at his best on the grass" and Eddie then responding like this, clearly they need to work on their communication, and fast.

I will say the Athletic piece here has made me a bit more concerned about the situation. In it, Waugh includes the full transcript of several questions and answers I haven't seen elsewhere. That's rather more alarming than I initially thought. Didn't rule out being gone before the start of the season. Again, he's couching it as "having to work for Newcastle" but it certainly sounds more like it has to work for him. And again he points out that being allowed to have a huge amount of control is the way he wants to work, and he's just not sure that's going to be allowed to continue. I do think after reading the quotes there is a bit more to the story than I thought at first.

From Howe's perspective, he's got an entirely new management structure in place than when he started - and virtually all new just in the last few weeks. Amanda and Mehrdad are out, and while he's probably got a good relationship with Eales, he hasn't been reporting to him until very recently. And then add the new Sporting Director into the mix and you can see why he's a little bit unsettled at the moment. But let's remember that Howe is typically very thoughtful with his words. I don't think he was threatening anything or expressing any actual anger or disappointment; rather, I think he was making the important point that, while he's very happy now, were things to change in regards to what he is allowed to do, that could change. And since he doesn't quite know how the new structure will shake out, he's just going to wait and see. Makes perfect sense to me. Nothing more in it than that. If there was, the club website wouldn't run the interview where he said all of those things. We're all accustomed to worst case scenarios, but I just don't see much in this to fret over.

I'm fucking pumped up after watching that. Passionate, ambitious, driven, absolutely fantastic. I love him setting such a high bar. No settling for second best.

The ITK stuff is pitiful attention-seeking nonsense. Why would NUFCWill1892 or MagpieMediaX or DipshitMag69 have any access to anything? Why would someone who valued their livelihood at the club pass along potentially revealing information to some weirdo that could jeopardize a deal or their job? Truly bizarre.

I do think it's as simple as getting the new Sporting Director up and running, and establishing the communications process for getting all this sorted. We will have been negotiating or speaking with various agents/clubs, now we have a new transfer leader, got to get him in that mix. I think once that's finished, probably this week given the meetings and schedule, then we'll seemingly be much more active. I'm sure Paul Mitchell will have had his own list of targets he's familiar with, we'll have our own list, those two will have to be combined and sorted - which is why I think almost every rumour out there right now is purely speculative or based on outdated info. And we as a club have a habit of trying to keep the bigger deals under wraps until they're all but done.

You just know a rumour is legit when the post doesn't even have the name spelled correctly.

You never know but I can't see a guy with his drive, determination, and workaholic nature wanting to take a job that would have him merely watching 20-30 weeks out of the year. He seems to thrive on the day to day training, camaraderie, and general activity of a club. I could see him as he gets older wanting to slow down, but I think we're still a long way from that.

We are a bird about ready to fly away from the nest, and to do that, we have to leave the mother bird behind. But we'll never forget what she did for us.

That was a WWE match. Vegas Street Fight. Nasty stuff. Horrible ref. Glad Bruno didn't get hurt. No quality to speak of from either team. Some dogshit penalties from Brazil. Come home, Bruno, we love you no matter what.

This has really helped to calm my nerves after that seemingly chaotic final week of June. I have no idea how much of that was legitimate and how much was just press freak-outs. Doesn't really matter to me at this stage. Signing Paul Mitchell is a real statement of intent, to me on par with signing Kieran Trippier in that first January window when we were still very much in danger. It showed the power of our project and the attractiveness of the club and gave us a level of seriousness that was essential. This is the same thing. We're coming off a disappointing season, no Europe, PSR issues, etc etc and yet we've managed to attract one of the biggest names in football recruitment circles. It gives us an enormous boost and shows potential players how serious we still are about all of this.

Time to run a (Neil) Bath

Well we just about managed to get the credit card paid off...time to max out a different one

Wish him all the best in the world. Hope he kicks on and gets even better. Never quite did it for us at the level we'd hoped but always gave a good showing. There's a good player in there.

Blink twice if you're OK, Odysseas

Cannot wait for the documentary on PSR in a year or two. This is some mind-boggling stuff. If Anderson is worth 35m, Isak is worth 500m easy.

Ah. That makes (slightly more) sense. If we're paying north of 5 million for him, the PSR police will be on the case...