Yorkie

Yes.

Dunno wtf I'm reading these days tbh. He's not a can of beans on a shelf with a price stuck on him. If the only club at the table is fucking Como then of course the price is 20-odd mill. If a bigger, more prestigious, significantly more wealthy PL club is asking, the price obviously goes up. Or are we saying inflation isn't a thing now?

Think so mate yeah. Worse actually. (And I mean worse than Bramble today).

He wouldn't have been available to us at the price he was available to Como for.

Trying to make us redundant are we?

@54 I again tender my resignation from thread title duties.

The fuck do I do with the title now? Sake man Herpy.

They're always gonna try and fetch more from a PL side than a mid-table Serie A one.

I don't think it's complicated or mysterious. We have a resource issue at the corporate level and the impact of that has been compounded by an unforgiving market structured to benefit the cartel. If we had a slick operation we'd have probably been able to secure Longstaff's replacement and future-proof CB by now. However, I imagine we're probably still hitting brick walls in terms of the striker search. We need quality but we're not allowed to buy it, so the talk of us being a disgrace that we've not done so continues to be grossly unfair imo.

So basically the only difference is we'd have skipped one or two of those options and been working on deals for worse players sooner than we are now. I'll say again, everyone else is still available. If we should be after, say, Kalimuendo - he's still at Rennes now.

We were linked with Moise Kean at one point; might see that one bumped again. There's a few other names from Europe who did well last season; Guirassy, Kalimuendo, Ayoze. Amine Gouiri has been linked before; got 13 last season.

We've already demonstrated twice that we can. Reminder again also that Elanga is still comfortably the most expensive and highest profile signing made by anyone outside the cartel.

Man Utd only actually came to the table this afternoon. Apparently they couldn't afford him.

She is definitely missed because it felt very much like her house during the brief time she was here. However, it's nice and rare that a person in such a role can come and go with a reputation that is so brilliant. She saved the day and then did a great job after the credits had rolled. Would love to have her back in the fold but would assume that's not happening in a million years, though maybe with Eales gone, who knows. That said, it'll all feel a lot better once those two major appointments are made, almost regardless of who they are. The void is Eales and Mitchell-shaped, rather than Staveley-shaped.

I would ask if this young player who impressed early in his career falls into the bracket of raw diamonds that we should've been mining for instead of chasing certified ballers, but the reviews on here suggest he's just rubbish. Shame. I'm sure they'll get something right eventually!

That's what Douglas is suggesting. Ah, class. I guess this time we should've lowballed.

So we had to up our offer to a certain point for it to be acceptable, but they've accepted something less from Man Utd? Am I reading that right?

You fucking what

I think it's that we shouldn't have gone after him at all.

I'm talking about the summer as a whole as the post which I first quoted said our policy was embarrassing.

So we're back to just assuming our decision-makers are idiots who are clueless in terms of identifying attainable targets. Of course in reality, they're not idiots. They know what they're doing but are fighting an uphill battle in the context of PSR and its varied impact depending on which club you are. Chasing extremely talented players whose true, un-inflated, values we can match delivered us the likes of Isak and Tonali. It's not like those players won't have been coveted.

Disregarding targets whose valuations we can actually meet - because a cartel club might gazump us - would be lunacy imo, and incredibly wet behaviour. If there was only five minutes left of the window it would be an extremely dicey approach, because the risk of losing out is abundantly clear, but with weeks left to do business I don't see the problem in taking a shot at the best targets. That's what we need to guarantee we stay where we are/progress.

Yorkie man, trying to sigh then and coming up handy isn't a good outcome just so your aware Well there's policy and then there's delivery. Our policy isn't embarrassing. I don't think the lack of delivery is particularly embarrassing either; I'm not sure how it really can be when the rules aren't fair. That's assuming this goes the way we anticipate it going. Then it's onto the next target. Another 24 hours has passed since I last said all the worse players we should've gone for in the first place are still available. Still the case.

take me back to the days where we didn't try to sign the best players around, save me from the humiliation of being ambitious!

If only it had played out like this: Sesko's agent: "Hi, my player wants to sign for you." NUFC [in tears] "Wah, no thanks, you might be lying!" [Runs away]