oldtype

Isak’s going to score a trillion goals this season. Look out Haaland.

Would like to see Almiron and Tonalli replaced relatively early in the second for Barnes and Anderson.

Players like Gordon never draw as many fouls as they deserve because refs just don’t understand how it’s humanly possible to get the shit kicked out of you that many times within a ninety minute span.

Not quite SJP but decent viewing location

Central midfield as a whole has been pretty quiet today (except for Tonalli popping up for that goal). Villa doing a good job in that part of the pitch.

Gordon reminding me of peak Jonas Gutierrez today. Couple more games of this and I’ll start calling him Jisung Park with more end product.

Gordon closing down has been an absolute killing machine today.

Trillion years off side if not for that dude unnecessarily sticking his leg out

Gordon seemingly controlling the entire left side of pitch has been the highlight of the team so far.

Two very "first ten minutes of the season" goals there.

Within the space of what feels like a couple of years, we’ve gone from debating the relative merits of Scott Parker, Lee Bowyer, and Nicky Butt; to fretting over which of our too many good players will be filling the three central midfield spots.

Fans of every other club would probably say the same of us, mind.

Kind of crazy that he's been with the club for almost a decade. I still remember the thread on here when we got him and Lascelles together from Notts Forest. Same summer we signed Perez, Colback , Cabella, Rivere , Debuchy, and Janmaat.

They would very much care if they were being directed by PIF to do so.

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.