AyeDubbleYoo

£150m should be the minimum. TBH I wouldn’t agree to let him go until we’re ready to finalise Sesko and Wissa. Make the buyer sweat until near the end of the window.

As I thought really. Our hope/belief was that Man City weren’t bothered about taking him back. Still wouldn’t be completely surprised if he never plays for Man City and leaves next summer.

Loans between PL clubs should’ve been banned ages ago.

Yeah I know, but even in that case he would also have been offered to Man City. Maybe they wouldn't have taken up the option, I guess we can't know.

I'm not sure we've done much wrong with Trafford. Even if we'd agreed a deal last year or in January there would've been a call to Man City to see if they wanted to match it. Could argue he was the wrong target because of this clause, but I'm not sure anyone believed Man City would really want to buy him.

I think whenever we agreed a fee for him, Man City would've got a chance to match it.

Presumably that's what their buyback clause is for. I think the only way for us to avoid this failure was not to go for him at all TBH. I assume we thought Man City wouldn't be interested in him. So did he probably.

Ah fair enough, didn't know he had actually already stopped working. I thought it was more that he would need to stop working in the near future.

He's quite obviously leaving

Don't think any of that means much for this transfer specifically. Unless you're arguing we'll never do a transfer again.

Eales told everyone he was leaving 10 months ago, but he could quite easily be doing a long notice period to prepare and choose the next person. The intention was probably never for him to leave as soon as possible.

What evidence?

I think if the takeover had taken another season I wouldn't be a fan now. I had already binned all my shirts etc and started wanting us to lose. That was about the club though, where this situation is just as much about the sport.

Erm, I think 1. 12 hours ago Downie said he wants to come and it's nearly done.

Why do we believe this and not the tweets that say we're almost done with a deal?

I don't know why that distinction is so important, but I don't have any proof. Surely they would at least do something like double our wage bill and double our transfer budget. That would cost them almost nothing relative to the size and wealth of PIF. They could do that just so Yasir could have a couple more days out at cup finals.

Not sure if it's unpopular but it's completely wrong. Why would they deliberately make things hard for us when they could make them easy?

Worse really, they lost anyone that gives them attacking threat.

We kind of have overcome it, we’ve gone from shite relegation fodder to CL qualifiers and dramatically improved the quality of our team in almost every position. Problem is the players to take you from top 4-6 to top 1-3 need to be absolutely brilliant, as well as giving massive pay rises to the players you already made into elite footballers. That just needs loads of available money. We could be pushing the boundaries like Chelsea are I guess, and improving revenue more quickly. But even revenue has shown great improvement in quite a short time. Since Mitchell came in it’s obviously been a mess, but I still expect a competent structure to be put together with his replacement.

Room for improvement you’re saying?

Think if they were determined to keep him it would be off by now.

I mean, I’ll get over Cole eventually I suppose.

So 47 up to 55 for cat 2? Ouch. At least it rules out dabbling with any other categories. I think my usual cheeky Leazes corner might be a bit harder to get into as everyone is priced out of the better areas.

Boldwards.

Was going to say, it sounds great so let's hope it's true If they really had preparatory meetings to plan this scenario then I don't see us rushing to a sale. But obviously who knows.