Parky

He had shown some ability previously though, in winning the SPL and Uefa Cup Winners Cup with Aberdeen. Koven, I swear your working in some capacity for the club .....Why not tell people why ManU persevered with Fergy: 1980:First managerial honour when Aberdeen win Scottish championship. 1982:Aberdeen win the Scottish Cup beating Rangers 4-1. 1983:Aberdeen retain Scottish Cup this time beating Rangers 1-0 and defeating Real Madrid 2-1 in Gothenburg to lift European Cup Winners'Cup. 1984:Aberdeen win League and Cup double beating Celtic 2-1 in theCup final. Ferguson awarded OBE. With Aberdeen ffs!! Now compare that to GR's record will you? Will you!!??

Suzao?

You believed him too, didn't you? He said all that about last summer, but he also wasted 80% of the transfer window by saying we wouldn't be looking until after the World Cup (bearing in mind the season started not too long after it finished), then traipsing around Europe watching Kuyt play. Remember "pole position"? Remember "4 or 5 players through the door" in January? Then all of a sudden the squad is good enough to get us through to the summer. He's clueless. He'll do the same again this summer because he doesn't know what he's doing. What's the point in giving him a load of cash to spend this summer if he's only seeing his contract out for one season? Get shot. This.

You fancy a bit of Crouchie Halex or what? Dunno really. I think he's a canny player. Not great but canny. He's not particularly athletic though, in terms of his aerial ability or his movement and he has no pace either. Not sure we would play to his strengths either - humping the ball up to him most likely. He'd cost a lot too. I think he has a better attitude than the likes of Viduka and Anelka (who would be better bets in other respects for me). Going on from your thoughts...His lack of pace and movement are the key minuses.

You fancy a bit of Crouchie Halex or what?

And speaking of the devil... http://football.guardian.co.uk/rumourmill/ "Roeder won't stop there either: he's wheeling Bramble, Celestine Babayaro and recently confirmed not-racist Emre out on to his front lawn and dumped them in a heap next to a sign reading 'will accept any offers'. He might get a bit for Emre too, since Hertha Berlin and Bayern Munich are both interested. Whatever coppers Roeder does scrape together from those sales, he will take straight to Rafa Benítez to see if they add up to Peter Crouch's asking price."

Whichever way you look at it Owen has kept up the gold standard of 1 in 2 for most of his career if not all. That is the only real referance for a tier one striker. I do also think he could play with Crouch, but that will also lose us movement and guile upfront, qualities Crouch doesn't have and someone like Anelka or Villa does have.

Fairly useless post, Vic, all things considered. Not just concerning Crouch, either. what fucking things? goals per game when comparing strikers? aye fucking useless... It's such a flawed method of argument, man. I thought you were more sensible than that. "I don't want Crouch here, so I'll post the goal ratios of him, Martins and Owen" - never mind how many times they were substitute, or how many games they've actually played, or for what team in what competition, or how many goals they've created, or how well they've played aside from scoring... it's such a superficial way of judging a player it's unreal. Exactly the type of thing you chastise the majority of other posters on here for. Crouch has played for some bloody shite teams and in lower divisions, while Martins/Owen have been at the top of the footballing world from almost the word go in their professional careers, it's a dud comparison and it always has been. It's the sort of mediocre post on here that you're usually very much against. I could post goal records of a dozen strikers like that and use it as a claim that we should sign them, with nothing else along with it and if I did that, or someone else did that, you'd be the first one to call it "shite" if it didn't go along with your personal viewpoint. There was no comment on it, nothing, it was just utter garbage man. Shall I just go and get their total appearances from somewhere and use that to say whether they are injury prone or not and then just stick it up here without any backstory or any comment? ....according to 'my' stats Luque is the 99th most dangerous striker/forward in Europe.

Wouldn't it have been better to go back in for Babel as the third forward/winger who can basically play anywhere along the attacking line and is a very good age and size for PL stardom?

....and what's worse is that Raffa fancies...............Owen.

.....I just took that out of me post as well Gemm....Felt a bit cruel.

..rumours continue to persist that we're getting ready to bid for Crouch in the summer and he is our No.1 target. This raises the obvious concern that Roeder will continue to play the ingenious 'hoof' up the middle and knockdown stylee. Then there is the issue of Owen/Martins and Crouch...How will they all play together? We need a big man upfront but I'd rather we had one with pace and power and good ball skills ala Anelka than the one dimensional Crouch.

when they published their accunts for the first 6 months of the 2005-2006 season the loss was £6m. When they published them for the full year to last June (only 11 months as they chanegd accoutnign dates), the loss for the whole period was over £12m. but as you well know that is different to losing £1mill per month.(ie,they could make a profit of £1mill per month for 11months then buy torres(knowing us fred torres from stevenage borough) for £23 mill which would show a loss of £12mill but isn't a loss of £1mill per month. it may seem pedantic but the way you make it sound and it may be that way,that we are losing £1mill per month on the day-to-day running of the club not the one off hits for transfers. if we didn't buy anyone for a year would we still be "losing" £1mill per month ? The first half of the seaosn included all the summer signings, so Luque, Owen and Solano. The second half os last season had no transfer activity in it. The club do their accounts by dividing the cost of the transfer fee by the length of the contract and saying that's the monthly cost to the businhess.o So Luque for £10m, on a 5 year contract means the club accounts shows a cost of £2m per year, or £160k per month. Obviously things like wages and ground maintenance costs are the same every month. The income and expenditure for games happens as the games happen. So there is neither game-related income nor expenditure in June as there are no games. The club spread the season ticket money they receive in the summer across the football season. So say they get £25m in season ticket sales, then at half way through the season the accounts would say they had used up £12.5m of it, but it would also say that they knew they were going to have to use the other half in the second half of the season. The other steady outgoing is the interest payments on the ground redevelopment, and on the loans they have taken out. The steady incomes are from things like sponsorship, and from catering and merchandising. The sponsorship one is a slight concern. The club were given £8m of future year's sponsorship money (I guess from Nortern Rock) early, to allow them to buy Luque, Owen and Solano. This means that over the next few seasons there will be a drop of that amount from what woudl have been expected. This probably won't matter inthelong run as the extra Sky will swamp the drop. So, basically, "yes" we'd still be losing £1m per month even if we didn't sign anyone. The number will reduce but it will be hard work to get it back to the level where we at least break even. Don't forget we've been borrowing against future season ticket sales.

The Northern Rock deal was for £4m a year for 5 years iirc. They have let us have 3 years worth in one go or so I heard.

I wouldn't give any of those three a new contract.

Blatantly been reading my wages crisis thread.

They are in panic mode tbf. Interesting about Davenport any ideas on Hudd? How much he's on? Someone did say £9k, I don't know how accurate that is but I would guess that is fairly close. Hudd's problem is that we haven't got the perfect midfielder for him to play alongside so for the forseeable future I see him as Zokora's backup. See that's sensible money. What is he 19 - 20? I rate him quite highly, seems to have concentration problems and loves playing to the crowd, but he'll grow out of that. Btw Imo Eboue is the big Wenger find as people will discover.

Nobody gets it right all the time and I never suggested for a minute that they had. Their success, however, in those days could easily be compared with Wenger, who is as successful as anyone, and even he spunked £10m on Jeffers. Wenger's a legendary manager, but nobody will ever come close to matching what Brian Clough achieved with Forest. Mainly because these days taking an absolute nothing of a club like Forest and winning championships and european cups is actually impossible. Another sad fact that we might reflect on whilst we're all sat in our armchairs watching Richard Keys salivate over some Chelsea - Man United wankfest. Cloughie was special. Top psychologist in the Wenger/Mourinho mould. Would have been interesting to see him up agains the current crop.

Almost as cheap, relatively speaking, as Walcott for £12m!! But when comparing him to Henry for £10m............... it's not so much what they cost as what you get for your money. They say normally 1 in 10 of these finds break into the first team. At Arsenal is more like 1 in 5. That is the differance.

John Robertson did a fair bit of the scouting as well as some coaching. Yes the player Cloughie used to always moan at but secretly knew was great little (slightly tubby) winger. The player he hated was Martin O'Neill.

Aye because NUFC are the ONLY club to have used that money in future accounts get over yourself FFS It's like the comment that if £30m hadn't gone in dividends over a decade (or whatever it was) that this exact £30m would have been available to Roeder last summer to buy players. I'm understand why you say this, but where would it have gone? In the summer 2003 £8.5m was given away at the same time as no money was given to the team manager to strengthen his squad. For me that was a key turning point. It is far better to invest while things are going well, then to try and spend your way out of a mess. The moment has gone though. Agreed we didn't build and this was the key moment.

They are in panic mode tbf. Interesting about Davenport any ideas on Hudd?

But not so good with words? From the 2005 accounts - The club have roughly 300 full time employees, and roughly 1000 part-time staff. The wages and salaries for all of those comes to £44.5m. On top of that the club paid £5.2m in Social security costs, and then a further £0.4k in other pension costs. This came to the total for that year of £50.2m. The total for 2006 was £56.6m but I don't have the breakdown at hand. (Anyone any idea wher I've put it :-[ ) Lets play numbers ... The 1000 part-time wiill be match-day people. So for 25 home games, at £50 (?) a game woudl be £1.2m. If we say that the footbalnlers and the management total 35 bodies, then that leaves about 270 other full-time staff to run the business. Lets say they have the average UK wage of £20k per year. That would cost ~ £5.4m to finance. This leaves the 35 "football" employees to share the rest. This means 44.5 - 1.2 - 5.4 = £37.8m Looks like just over £1m per year for each of them. Of course there will be extremes, at both ends, but on average the figure looks like £1m to me. ++++++++++ So about £20k per week? About what I said then. Plus like it or not Owen and Dyer do skew the figures for the average player at the club. So almost every club doesn't meet the criteria? I haven't seen any premiership clubs go bust recently either? I understand what your saying but in football especially it's harder to stick to the ideal model. When you consider the cost of players, etc. Wages for all clubs rose in those 4 years I would guess. Nevertheless those wage costs were meant to create success for the club, which unfortunately hasn't happened. I trust the board of NUFC to keep the club in good financial help whilst providing as much resources as they can to the team. Seriously Koven are you working for FS? Parky, Seriously, do you think everyone who doesn't slag them and realises that it's not all bad is working for the club? No. But I've got my eye on Koven. blueyes.gif