ikri

On paper there's nothing wrong with the Arsenal stadium redevelopment or Chelsea selling a hotel. It just looks all a bit dodgy when you start to consider the potential ramifications. If PIF want to redevelop our training facilities, or move to a new site, what's to stop them from fronting the money for the club to then buy a bunch of potential sites in the area then allowing the club to sell off any of the sites that don't get the right permissions and banking the profit on paper for FFP purposes? It would be both a completely legitimate, football related activity and at the same time an obvious trick to increase our revenue. How do you account for an asset when it isn't counted when bought but is when it's sold?

The big loophole here is that infrastructure costs aren't included in FFP analysis but income from selling that infrastructure is included. In theory, our owners could give the club the money to buy Newcastle Race Course, which wouldn't impact our FFP figures, and then a month later the club could realise that they had no reason to own a race course and sell it to PIF for £500m and solve our FFP issues for a decade. No one really noticed the blatant flaw in the rules until Chelsea tried this with the hotel.

The ownership of Everton should have been properly scrutinized a long time ago. Farhad Moshiri owns the club but it was mostly funded by Alisher Usmanov - a man who was barred from entry to the UK even before Russia invaded Ukraine. It should have all sparked an investigation into every club throughout the country to check for any more owners-on-paper-only. I always thought it was a shame that there wasn't a more in depth analysis of dodgy ownership back when Portsmouth were shuffling between different owners, including at least one occasion where they were seemingly sold to holding company owned by the club's owner.

Even just changing the rules on sponsorship from related companies would be huge for us. No need to go around trying to find businesses willing to sponsor the club, just suddenly get sponsorship deals from PIF Golf, Saudi Airlines, Saudi Arabia 2034 World Cup, random taxi companies from Riyadh etc. It would mean an immediate boost to the club's turnover and allow the club to spend as much as they want to all within the PSR rules.

Thanks Dummett, you fucking halfwit.

Absolutely brilliant comeback.

What are the odds that we don't manage to finish with 11 players on the pitch without anyone getting carded?

Anderson is a left sided player. Longstaff plays on the right side of midfield. They are not like for like players. Playing Anderson would mean pushing Willock to the right of midfield where he's not a natural player either. Longstaff is playing because there is no one else available who is comfortable in the position he plays.

We'll certainly be doing that too but it won't necessarily be the obvious players. Despite a lot of people looking at Minteh and wondering if he could do a job for us next season, I fully expect that he'll go out on loan again next season and then he'll be sold for 20-30m to a newly promoted team. The same goes for Kuol. We'll create FFP space by buying promising youth players, loaning them out to develop them before selling them for decent fees.

He loves managing teams. At one point he was coaching an under 11s team because he enjoys it so much.

Slack defending costing us again. And fucking Longstaff. Stay on your fucking feet and stop begging the ref for free kicks when you lose the ball in fair tackles.

The guy is the double of Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.

Commentators are really bad at recognising Newcastle players. First mixing up Miggy & Tino and again mixing up Isak & Willock.

Beautiful goal

The fuck was that?

I don't think it'll be the top teams that will challenge FFP in the courts. It'll be Everton or Forest. If either team is on the verge of relegation because they've received a points deduction for breaching FFP rules, the best option they will have will be to challenge the very idea of FFP. No FFP, no FFP breach. No FFP breach, no points deduction. No points deduction, no relegation. It'll be that simple.

I think Isak has struggled with fitness because we keep needing to rush him back from injury because Wilson is out as well.

Considering the number of head injuries that Schar has received in the last two seasons it's a bit of a miracle that he even remembers that he plays for us. We do need some extra pace at the back, I expect that Lacelles will be the one to move on in the summer with a replacement, either long term or short term, for Schar.

A little lax in the 2nd half, a lot of the poor passing might have been down to a saturated pitch from the 1st half downpour but whatever it was Wolves passed the ball around a hell of a lot better than us in the 2nd half. They still had to get through us though and we held out well and Tino's first goal sealed everything off quite nicely.

What a difference Willock makes.

We fundamentally changed the way we play this season too in order to accommodate Gordon and Barnes as wide forwards. Last season, most of the time we had Joelinton and Willock either on the left of the midfield three or in the wide left forward position. They would swap around during the game as well which made it a nightmare to defend against them and the wide forward was able to drop back into the midfield easily giving us more bodies when required. With Miggy's constant running we were able to switch between a 4-3-3 and a 4-5-1 with ease and then as soon as we were in the position to go on the attack, those wide midfield players were suddenly forwards again. It was all very dynamic and very successful. This season, with Gordon playing up there instead, he hasn't been able to fill the same role as an ad-hoc midfielder, instead he's been an ad-hoc centre forward. Barnes is the same, he's a forward rather than a midfielder. If we'd had Bruno, Tonali, Willock and Joelinton all available this season we might have found some sort of balance but with the injuries on top of the change in style everything has gone a bit tits up.

Brilliant saves by Dubs in the shootout but it should never have gotten that far. Blackburn looked the better team throughout whereas we looked lethargic.

Presumably. West Ham agreed to pay Sheffield United £15m back in 2009 when they went to court over their relegation. 15 years later I would expect that figure to double, maybe more. With 4 or 5 clubs involved as well they could be looking at having to pay out hundreds of millions. For Everton, that wouldn't just be them screwed under FFP for a few years, it would be administration and the complete collapse of the club.

Everton are still likely fucked. Even if they stay up this season they're being sued by the clubs that were relegated in the last couple of seasons whilst they were overspending. They may survive in the league only to owe tens of millions to rival clubs.