Chris_R

Chelsea finished above us last season. I get that they're just hoying money around in a ridiculous way, but it's not like they're Man U.

We should all just link that to every time they mention him not liking football before the takeover. No words, just the link to that. Again and again, every time they say it.

Weird that they'd rather pay to watch themselves get trashed every week in the Prem than pick up free tickets to see themselves win in the championship. Suppose being a mackem was always an act of masochism.

Would love to see a map of the postcodes of those 28,000 signatories. We all know what it would look like.

What about people who put an apostrophe in 000s?

This will lead to the suggestion that since promotion / relegation is pointless, it should be abolished, and we'll get a closed shop. Some might say "well it basically is now anyway" but that's a world away from it actually being a closed shop.

Get them to both sign new long-term contracts a day before the transfer goes through, then bill each other £30m for the fee.

When we get linked to some players, it's clear as day we'd never be interested and it's just agents / selling club trying to drive up wage and transfer fees for the actual buyer by scaring them into shelling out more money faster. No reason to think the same isn't happening here.

Don't blame Sunderland for trying to play hardball, exactly what they should be doing. But 40m is an outrageous sum for a player who has never kicked a ball in the top flight and hasn't exactly been tearing it up every week in the Championship either. Can't help but think that "Decent young player in a 6th(?) placed Championship team" is about £10-15m? £40m feels like a proven, well-performing PL player.

Yeah the "it frees up a fair bit of cash for PSR" line made me laugh in an otherwise illuminating post. PSR concerns are for clubs that intend to spend way beyond their means for whatever reason, I'm not sure Sunderland have shown any intent of doing that under their current ownership? Quite the reverse really. I'd expect you to just be there to make up the numbers, hope you can scrape a result in the only 2 important games of the season and disappear back off with a pocket full of cash. And that probably reads quite spiky, it's not meant to be, it's a genuine observation of what I think you'll do. No different to Burnley. In fact probably more so as you finished a long way behind them and Leeds in the league so you'd have to go some just to be better than those 2, and the last few seasons in the PL have shown us that the clubs that go up have to really go something to stay up. If you're 90+% likely to be relegated no matter what, it probably makes sense for most clubs to just let that slide closer to 99% and not roll the dice on financially imperiling yourselves.

No Sunderland player will be having a half-decent PL season next year like.

We won't have someone on the bench though, we'll have an empty seat. Literally. Sorry, I didn't realise we could only post our opinions once and then had to shut up. Maybe he'll stay, maybe he'll go. My opinion, based on what selling him would mean, is that we'll keep him but that's obviously only an opinion. Of course I could be wrong. I think we'd be silly to sell him though unless there's something really important we need to do with that money. Otherwise we're an injury or 2 away from having to actually play Schar in midfield against Juventus or someone and hope Botman's knee doesn't explode again or we're then out of central defenders too.

He may have asked to go, that's the only reason he'll leave, but he'll be let go reluctantly in that case. I can't see a situation where we decide to sell him to "raise funds" or whatever because he's literally irreplaceable in CL squads. Maybe once we've got 4 other over-21 academy graduates to keep him out the CL squad we can revisit this conversation but until then he's needed and we cannot buy a replacement.

Our 25-man squad for the CL needs to have 8 UK-trained players, and 4 of them need to be academy trained players. U21s don't count. If we sell Longstaff, we won't be able to register a full squad for the CL. We probably won't be able to register a full squad anyway, but we'll have one fewer player. Genuinely crazy to think we will sell him. We won't. We're probably more likely to sell Bruno, because he can actually be replaced. Longstaff, whatever you think of his abilities relative to other squad members, is literally irreplaceable. Or are the people suggesting he's sold really thinking we should go into the CL matches with an unnecessarily-depleted squad?

It's pretty shocking how Pacqueta seems to have played about 2 years with this hanging over him. Really shouldn't be allowed, either if he's guilty or innocent. In both cases it's disgusting, should've been resolved ages ago.

£41,999,999.31 too much

That's not the issue, the issue is his 6 inch arms.

He's actually holding a full-sized Great Dane.

I mean yes but that then fucked us over for the next 3 windows, leading to us being forced to sell Anderson and Minteh. Maybe £75m would've been the right number?

I don't want us to help Villa out of their PSR hole unless we can basically rob them price-wise. Which I doubt they'll allow, out of spite. Which in turn is probably fair.

But gone down because he's got 12 months less on his contract.

Historically I've generally quite liked Villa, seen them as a similar "sleeping giant" to us who've underachieved compared to their fanbase size. However they seem to have some kind of furious hatred for us, so fuck them. I can't bring myself to care enough to actually hate them, but I'll certainly laugh at any failure they have and wish them badly in general even if just out of reciprocity.

"Pay as you play" *sounds* harmless, but if its minutes instead of Osula then it's not harmless at all.

Hope they get horribly low-balled by everyone and have to flog their prime assets for a pittance. Don't they'd sell to us out of spite unless we bid way more than others, so hopefully we just look elsewhere. I've little interest in bailing them out.

Man U to volley a stoppage-time equaliser into their own net to spitefuck us out of 5th.