oldtype

Let’s not be willfully blind to what this really is. “Fair market value” or not I don’t think you can complain about raised eyebrows when it’s effectively our owners negotiating with themselves. The conversation will have been “how high can we make the transfer fee while still retaining plausible deniability.” Not any kind of real transfer negotiation. It’s the same problem as the Sela shirt sponsorship. I’m not saying the sky is falling, but every time I see something like this my “this isn’t going to end well, is it?” dial for Saudi ownership clicks one notch forward. And the more successful the club is, and the higher the stakes become, the less careful they’re going to be about stuff like this.

I vaguely recall writing some kind of teary-eyed post on here when Cabaye left about how we'd never employ a CM of that quality again.

We're going to have this guy and Bruno in midfield together? Seriously? Criminal amounts of class.

The dude is 21 and a lot of people believe in stupid stuff at that age. It's up to him whether he eventually matures to the point that he doesn't. In the interim, I could perhaps hold my nose and support him as a player if he is willing to keep the more batshit side of his beliefs quiet. If he ends up here, we can only hope the club will put good people around him to advise him as such. Ultimately I think for a younger player you treat persistent idiocy like this as if it were a long-term injury problem. Maybe it's never going to be an issue while he plays for you. Or maybe it will aggravate to the point where he's no longer useful as a player. The discount for that risk is probably reflected in his sale price, and the fact that we can beat out the competition to sign him.

If anything this would be another reason why we shouldn't aggravate the controversy around the club by signing someone like this.

As a fanbase, we should probably look to them as an example of what not to become as the club grows: entitled children who throw a fit every time they miss the CL. There are a lot of good teams with tons of resources now. With the possible exception of City, nobody is going to make it 100% of the time.

Why do some people still have my 2011/2012 Chelsea away face as their forum profile pic. It's literally been a decade.

I'm not "outraged" about this any more than I'm "outraged" about the club being owned by the Saudis in the first place, but we can all agree that this is incredibly transparent FFP circumvention, right? Even the 25m annual amount feels like it was deliberately set at the highest possible figure where we could plausibly argue it was "market value."

Madrid and 100m are just random examples, could replace them with City/PSG/Bayern and whatever number. Point I was trying to make is that we probably aren't completely immune to what Napoli is likely to go through this summer. There are going to be clubs that are dream clubs for our players and numbers at which we have to consider selling due to FFP considerations if nothing else. It's a challenge any up-and-coming club is bound to face at some point. I trust the people in charge to handle it though.

Just a random hypothetical, but I wonder what we'd do if say, Real Madrid came in and offered 100m for Bruno this summer. Obviously we have more financial freedom than a place like Napoli so I imagine we'd resist initially, but ultimately hard to say no if the price is high and the player wants to go. That's part of the risk of being an up-and-coming team right? Established teams coming in over the top and breaking up your core.

And I've mentioned this previously, but I think we're well past the time where signing one Korean will allow you to print money with shirt sales in Korea. The PL fandom is smaller and very entrenched now. Everyone picked up Man United (or to a lesser extent, Spurs or Liverpool) back in the heyday of the league's popularity and if they've stuck around this long, they aren't going to move off those teams just because Newcastle signed a Korean player. I mean, we've signed a Korean before. And a fairly high-profile one too. We'd get some increased exposure and that's not nothing, but certainly no longer big enough to be worth factoring into transfer decisions.

I am unsurprisingly in favor of buying all the Koreans, but given the prestige Man United still enjoy in Korea (support is still on a different level to any other PL club) I'd be surprised if he went anywhere else.

I think what he's achieved so far is sufficient to entitle him to benefit of the doubt forever, no matter how badly things go going forward. Certainly wouldn't even consider turning on him even if we had a European hangover next season and landed somewhere mid-table.

Definitely want Paris. Might even be able to convince the wife to go.

I log on here today after the match specifically so I can not think about basketball and Mike hits me with the driveby shooting.

Also, mods please make the forum autoplay the Champions League theme at extremely loud rick-roll level volumes when you load up the page. Just for one day. People won't mind.

This is extremely cringy and I'm almost too embarrassed to talk about it, but in the late 00s-early 10s when I was still playing a lot of FM, I remember whenever I got Newcastle in the Champions League I would fantasize about newspaper headlines, what people would say on podcasts, and even how various posters on here would react. I've gone through that exercise so many times in my head, I genuinely don't know how to react now that all of it is real.

Players are people too and just like any other people, many of them have difficulty adjusting to a new job foreign country where they don’t speak the language. For many years it was painfully clear that we put zero effort into helping our foreign signings adjust, which is certifiably insane when you consider that each represents a multi million pound investment.

Literally the sort of thing I had to play about 700 hours of football manager from 2006 to 2016 to fantasize about. It all feels fake. Surely someone has hooked us up to the matrix.

Newcastle in the Champions League. This Football Manager shit is actually going to happen.

There is no ground or arena in any country in the world in any sport where the fans will be in full voice at 5-0 up (or the equivalent) man that’s just a completely unreasonable expectation unless you’re going to downsize every stadium to 5,000, sell tickets only to Ultras, and kick out all the normies.

Anything short of 25-0 will be a disappointment I say.

Combine Almiron’s first half of the season and Murphy’s second half and you’ve got one world class player. This is why having a squad is good!

Whole point of being in Europe is to see us playing against the best sides, travel to historic grounds etc. It’s not like we’re realistically aiming to win the CL next year so bring them all on I say.

Given the likely implications for CL qualification, probably a top 4 result since I’ve started following the club, alongside 4-4 at home against Arsenal (RIP Cheick), 2-0 away at Stamford Bridge, and 2-0 at home against Liverpool with Jose Enrique playing goalkeeper? Maybe I’ve missed a couple from the years I was away, but I suspect not many good things happened in that time period.