Yorkie

@Froggy I've made the point over and over again that PSR allows the likes of you to make mistake after mistake and also stockpile the most coveted players. You'd already signed Mbeumo and Cunha by the time you were in for Sesko because the financial regulations are incredibly accommodating for you. The absolute disasters of the Antony, Hojlund, Sancho (to name a few) have had absolutely zero ramifications in enabling you to rebuild this summer. The central point is that you're not even at the table for Sesko if the financial regs are more evenly applied. You what 🙃 It's exactly the same scenario here. Liverpool had already signed Wirtz and Ekitike and yet still had the capacity to go even bigger on Isak. If they're not at the table, he's still here - or they get him but Ekitike is still on the market. I can't do another day of banging my head against this wall. If people want to criticise the choices we made with the resources we had, I can accept that: Woltemade was clearly a bit of a dicey move at that price and Elanga looks like a poor choice; personally I think Wissa was a sensible transfer and no one could reasonably expect the nightmare he's had. But to deny the influence of PSR is cloud cuckoo land stuff; it is the most dictating factor in the entire market. I can take it from you, TBF, because obviously you will go into bat for your team and deny that the rules are extremely helpful to you. But it's having the argument with our own fans - who'd sooner curse us to the hills than deny the inherent unfairness which has left us scrambling for solutions - that drives me bonkers.

Yeah, agree very much with this. It's definitely extremely important that we recruit well in the summer but I don't agree with the building consensus that we need a thousand new players to replace a thousand outgoing players. Like you say, literally just give him a (much) better keeper and we'll already be getting somewhere.

Probably just semantics but I think we were looking for someone to compete with and push Isak, rather than just come and be backup. Either way, aye, we had him on our list weeks in advance of us actually signing him. He was obviously far from first choice but I don't think anyone could reasonably predict it turning out the way it has. It seemed like a pretty safe investment and we'd just take the hit on the fee.

He wasn't a contingency mind, he was always in the plan as Wilson's replacement What's that based on?

That fact we overpaid at the 11th hour is that not by definition a 'panic buy'? Not imo. He was the contingency plan all summer and we signed him the moment we could.

We were first linked with Wissa on 8 July because Hope peddled his name alongside Watkins and I can remember it being discussed on here. That's 11 days before the Celtic friendly when the Isak stuff first emerged. He wasn't a panic signing in any way, shape or form, though we did overpay thanks to the fact it happened so late in the window.

I just don't agree at all and never will. My take is that we were between a rock and a hard place and yet miraculously got £130million out of Liverpool despite the player pulling every trick he could to drive his value down to £0. The disaster is Wissa's output. If he enters the fold and provides half of what he did for Brentford last season, the season looks completely different.

I think it's as unlikely a hypothetical as saying Lamine Yamal rocks up at Benton demanding to play for free. It was just never going to happen. But to play the game I'd picture us signing no strikers, with him either continuing not to play, or being brought back into the fold - demonstrating something close to or worse than the form he showed for Liverpool. Either way it's worse for us than the reality. Woltemade and Wissa don't look like successful signings so far but there's still time, and we'll use the money to invest again in that position imo.

I think we did exactly that, at the cost of it coming extremely late in the window. If we'd accepted Liverpool's first offer in a July - which was way below his market value - we might have been better positioned to sign replacements and plan for the season ahead, but there would have been absolute uproar. Plus it would've signalled to everyone else that we're easy sellers, weakening our hand in future windows and essentially inviting Tonali et al to manufacture moves as soon as they fancy it.

so stupid Someone better get on the blower to Arsenal, Man City etc - they're doing it wrong.

Clearly we'll agree to disagree on this. I think the position I'm defending more than anything is that no one at the club is negligent or incompetent. That was what was getting thrown around all summer; I argued against it then and always will for as long as I believe it to be true. We saw true negligence for years and years under Ashley and I don't see that today. I'm not saying they always make the right call, incidentally.

@TheBrownBottle I feel like you keep missing the point that PSR invited these clubs to get all rather than some. If the regs don't facilitate that stock-piling of triple-A players, then suddenly, some of those players become available to the likes of us. That's why I threw Trafford into the mix. If City don't have the flexibility to sign two elite goalkeepers - both of whom would walk into the vast majority of PL sides - then I don't think they go for Trafford. They were hardly lovestruck; they got him knowing they'd still be able to get a Donnarumma if they became available. We're light-years from being able to operate like that. I don't want to go tinhat but they probably signed him as much just to stop us than anything else.

So you believe we actively decided not to sign anybody on loan, thereby acting with either gross negligence or downright incompetence. Bearing in mind this is Eddie Howe we're talking about here, and Ross Wilson, who successfully concluded about 400 transfers at Nottingham Forest; my view is that we probably did explore our options in that market, but decided there was no one available who would have been worth the effort and outlay.

Right so our season is falling to bits because we didn't loan an understudy to Hall?

We've already discussed this. By all accounts Pedro was all set to come here, Trafford too. The flexibility PSR affords to the clubs they eventually signed for is the only reason why they didn't come here.

I don't know why we didn't spend a fortune in January if the financial regulations aren't holding us back then. As for loans, Howe fielded that question multiple times prior to and during January and his answer was that nobody wants to help us. I.e. there were no players of the requisite quality available to us to loan. I'll just never buy that it's negligence. It doesn't stack up with any aspect of our approach since the takeover.

Well if that's true then they've lied to us and we're back in the Ashley era of bare-faced negligence.

Because it would have reduced our financial capacity in the summer.

We paid that price because PSR funneled all of our top targets to the cartel clubs, meanwhile our existing striker and Liverpool FC contrived to ensure we had zero leverage in any negotiation. To call it gross mishandling on our part is really unfair imo

This is all we have though. The three concessions we could make were Osula, Ramsdale and Alex Murphy, and they all started.

It is the majority view.

Well we signed six players in the summer, leaving us with two goalkeepers, four full-backs, four centre-backs (five before Lascelles went), six centre-mids, four wingers and three centre-forwards. Where's the gap there, numbers-wise? Not even sure how much it is his job to build the squad anyway. It was just something he was thrown into at the start of last summer.

Yeah. Literally played more games than any other team on the entire continent this season but mental and physical fatigue ain't got nothing to do with it. They're just shite.

Horrified to hear he was booed by our own fans. Absolutely stinking way to carry on and he doesn't deserve it at all, nor the majority of flack he gets. He and Barnes have shared 'stepping up' duties in broadly equal parts this season as all others have flailed.

He spelled it out in his post-match interview on Prime: he thought it was crucial to win the game in order to reignite the home form. It might have worked out had his goalie not provided an assist to Everton's CF from four yards out today.