Unbelievable

Reversely, he could stay in football by not selling... I’d be more confident if he said he had enough of football and will use the money to make another SD acquisition of some chain of stores.

Returns might not be about cold hard annual revenue profits though, as they can be capital. Buying a football club for £300m when it makes a £30m loss every year and investing £200m isn't a bad idea if in 5 years time due to the next inflated TV deal, better commercial deals, regular European football, greater brand values, etc etc, the club is now worth £800m and has a playing squad worth double what it was when taking over. There's also "synergies" to consider, with NUFC these past 10 years being a Sports Direct advert one prime example of how there is money to be made indirectly through owning a football club and utilizing it to favor your other interests. The other possibility with many of these Arab, Russian and Chinese investors/oligarchs is that they just just want to move some of the vast sums of money they have out of their respective high risk/volatile countries (over the long term) and invest in "reliable" assets in stable developed economies that aren't going to depreciate anytime soon. Business, buildings and land are the obvious options, but they're saturated markets at the moment and I'd imagine these investors already have large investments in mansions and skyscrapers in major cities around the globe. Football and sports are a different option, yet if you were to look at valuations of football clubs over time it's going to be a consistent upwards trend, and that would appeal to these types of investors looking to stash their cash somewhere safer. That's before considering the degree of prestige and exclusivity that owning a PL football club brings, whether they're football fans, etc etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case that they have nefarious intentions or want to milk NUFC immediately. Although that's obviously always going to be a risk. To be quite honest, I genuinely don't care what their intentions would be providing they put competent and skilled people in charge of running the football club, which is Ashey's biggest failure imo. I'm sure many on here wouldn't care one bit about Ashley running NUFC to the benefit of Sports Direct if he had put in place both a David Dein or Daniel Levy type in the boardroom and a Rafa equivalent (or the next best we can attract) in the managers dugout from day one and supported them (as opposed to backing buffoons like Llambias, Kinnear, Jiminez, Wise, Pardew, Penfold, etc). Of course the issue is that someone like Ashley who intends to run NUFC like a circus act isn't generally going to be able to persuade a Dein/Levy to work for him, he'll inherently want/attract yes men desperate for a job, but then Ashley isn't a good standard to measure against. The point is that I'm sure it's possible to want to make a profit from a club like NUFC and still run it competently through employing the right people. You have to be a special kind of tool to want to make money from NUFC by running it in the worst possible way. Excellent post

Bit lucky

Undeserved, but I’ll take it

Oh yes!!

Short corner ffs

Oh man

Pffff

Howay you dopey cunt

Ffs ref

Get Joselu off now

Oh man, we’re shite

Joselu ffs

Phew

Deserve it tbh

Seriously, what have we been doing on the training pitch all week?

THAT was our best move?

I envy you

Oh my fucking God

Another lucky escape

Holy mack, this is unwatchable

What’s Rafa waiting for? We need changes before we concede