oldtype

The Osula goal is our best goal since Cisse IMO

Regardless of whether he’s staying or not, it’s completely ridiculous to be criticizing the mother of a new child for wanting to be closer to home. And they can probably make that work as a family without him having to move clubs anyway.

I like how we’ve concluded that Howe will never, ever play him as a striker when he was played exclusively as a striker until Wissa came back and Bruno got injured.

I kind of get it for them in the sense that they want to press and already have plenty of attacking creativity in their team. Gordon's not going to be asked to absorb all of the attacking usage, he can lead the press, run hard on counters, and fit in as a cog in the machine. It's a great fit in that sense.

I certainly don't mind players using the club as a stepping stone as long as they give 100% while they're here and go about it respectfully. And I don't mind us telling that to players if it's going to convince them sign in the first place. The reality is that in this moment, we are a stepping stone club. And to some extent, we'll always be one (even the top clubs in the PL are often "stepping stones" to Real/Barca)

If anything Wood and Kelly are manager failures, not scouting failures. Because clearly there were good players in there that we never figured out how to use. (Osula would have fallen into this bucket as well if we moved him on last summer).

I mean we literally made free money off of Kelly, even if you account for his wages. Even if he had never played for a single game for the club how is that a failure.

Wood scored two goals that kept us up and turned out to be a really good player once we sold him on. Targett was signed for peanuts and provided roughly peanuts value as a rotation player. Kelly was sold for a profit and again, turned out to be a really good player. Don't think you can classify any of these as scouting failures.

We didn't really miss on any of our domestic signings either other than last transfer window.

All of these people might as well be FM regens to me, but I just want us to sign a first team player so I can start getting unreasonably excited.

It’s 2026 man there is literally a button on your browser that will translate it for you instantly. Or if you’re feeling really adventurous, just ask an LLM to crawl the forum and summarize the reactions for you.

I think he’ll be very good at Barcelona but he wasn’t going to perform at that level here so it doesn’t really matter. I’ll take the cash thank you.

Transfers move faster when you have actual transfer staff instead of the manager doing it in his spare time shocker.

Not a clue who this guy is but sure.

Good to know that the new team believes in getting business done quickly. Fee seems more than fair as well.

I think the difficulty here is that folks think that in saying we were unlucky, I'm arguing we weren't actually bad. That's not the case. You can be both at the same time.

I do think he's a very good player, I just think he's no longer sufficiently motivated to be very good for us, which is a shame.

The thing is that "20-30 million pound" players stop being 20-30 million pound players when you don't have a professional recruitment staff with extensive personal networks, leveraging their relationships with peers and agents to get a better deal. I suspect the likes of Woltemade and Wissa would have come a lot cheaper if we had a real recruitment team who could manage the situation better. The unforgivable sin was going into a 200m summer with no recruitment team, and once that decision was made the damage was already done.

It's both. It's always both. This season was always going to be disappointing, but if you re-run it a 100 times I suspect a significant portion of those would be closer to "mildly to moderately disappointing" as opposed to the "what the fuck" that we got.

I think it's fair to say that this season we were both: (1) shit; and (2) unlucky, which is typically what is necessary for a club that made the champions league last year to hit relegation form.

If you're a player, the reason things may be a lot better next year is that they've been a lot better every other year under Howe other than this one. We lost 27 points from winning positions this season. If you make us just a tiny bit luckier, have a couple of opposing goals hit the post, and drop that to 22 points (which is what 2nd place has), we are 7th and in the Europe Leauge. If you drop it to 16 points (league average), we are fifth and in the Champions League That's not to say we were not shit this season, but to illustrate that all of this operates on extremely fine margins. To draw the conclusion that we are not just fucked for this season (which we are), but fucked forever is simply absurd. Absolutely nothing could change about the quality of the team or the manager. We could just be slightly luckier and have a season that basically everyone will deem successful.

If you think he should be fired for misspending money, he's no longer running transfers so he's technically been "fired" from that already. And if you think the bad, horrible, not good summer spending caused our struggles this year, well, Howe will now get a season to prove what he can do after a window where actual competent professionals are in charge of transfers. He's done pretty well in that situation so far.

Chelsea had a better and deeper squad to begin with, outspent us last summer including beating us to one of our top targets, enjoy innumerable structural advantages over us, yet still landed about the same place we are this season. Let’s not even get started about Spurs. The reality is that performing consistently in the premier league is harder than it’s ever been and nobody is more than a handful of bad decisions away from a shit season. We sucked ass this year, but let’s maybe take a beat before concluding that the manager has hit his ceiling or that the club is doomed forever. Look at all the “top six” clubs who have chopped and changed managers after a swoon recently and see how well it worked out for them.

Read the title and thought he was signing for Fulham very puzzled for a moment there.

There are people on this board who I've never met who have my face from 15 years ago as their avatar.