oldtype

Botman looked so graceful turning his ass around to block that

Every time the ball goes near Isak I get this visceral "oh fuck he's going to score" feeling I used to get whenever someone like Henry, Drogba, or Ronaldo was bearing down on our goal. It's simultaneously amazing and disorienting that he plays in our shirt.

Every possession ends in "free kick to arsenal"

Went against us so I hate it forever now.

My Lord this Isak fella is good

Of course it’s fair market value. PSR is a reality of the market now, and it should surprise nobody that player prices are shifting to adjust to demand that is arising under the new rules.

I'm sure there's some kind of weirdo PSR reason why it makes sense to take on a third-choice goalkeeper who is probably on his way out of the league as part of the deal, but I don't know what those reasons are and I don't really care to learn.

I watch mostly US pro sports now, where "salary cap management" is considered normal and part and parcel of being a good organization. So I have no inherent dislike of complex financial accounting rules and clubs having to make creative but facially absurd deals to circumvent them. The issue is that there, the salary cap rules exist to promote parity, and are generally successful. PSR exists for precisely the opposite purpose. If the rules are going to be this draconian, where up-and-coming clubs that are spending far below what they are capable of sustainably spending are repeatedly punished for the fact that they happened to be outside the big-money cartel when the rules were made, then you need a second set of rules to ensure that the revenue gap between clubs is being gradually equalized as well. For example, a luxury tax imposed on the highest-spending clubs that is then re-distributed as solidarity payments to the rest of the league.

35m clearly something shady going on here.

How good do you want our fifth choice CM to be? Particularly given that PSR apparently has a permanent chokehold on our spending.

I just think it’s dumb to sell a cheap, local, homegrown player who would probably been happy to stay here for at least a few years even if he isn’t starting many games, when we’ll inevitably have to spend more than 10m to replace his squad spot at some point. It’s probably the least bad option we had, but horrible planning to be in this position in the first place.

If these were the prices we got when we were staring down the barrel of a points deduction in 48 hours, I think it’s fair to assume that we would have gotten more in an open market with some leverage. It’s not necessarily a problem that we had to sell these players. The problem is that we put ourselves in a negotiating position where we absolutely had to.

Hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody had a serious fuck-up with the calculations last season and deserves to be sacked. If this is how much this PSR thing is going to impact the club, then we really need an entire team of accountants running the numbers full time to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Guaranteed to become Messi now but oh well, if we had to sell somebody this is probably the least bad result.

Last bit of hope for the season well and truly disposed of

Just to keep everyone's expectations reasonable, we are 100% going to agree on a number for him at some point, and it will be undisclosed so both sides can save face. We may be contractually entitled to let him rot, but sophisticated parties will typically work something out in these situations, no matter how acrimonious.

To be fair, Howe is a little self-interested here. By necessity, this will result in him having more influence on transfer dealings.

https://x.com/korfootballnews/status/1759634691257475514?s=46&t=aPX7HF03TLnujCUroFqbcQ This is a viral joke specifically created to drive me insane. It has to be

I imagine we would have put some extremely onerous terms for release in his contract given that we got him essentially the same way so we know he’s the type that’s always looking for the next step up.

Ashworth: “hear me out boss, I’ve got a genius plan that will fix our FFP problem, but you’re not going to like it…”

Objectively, can’t really fault someone for taking a step up in their career when offered the opportunity. Subjectively, I hope he develops chronic, explosive, and unfixable diarrhea.

I distinctly remember posting at the beginning of the season that we had such luxury of depth that Gordon could afford to run his bollocks off for 70 minutes knowing that good players would be there to replace him if he got tired. What an idiot I was

I wonder if we'll ever get to the level of absurdity of American sports where it's considered "unsportsmanlike" to celebrate a goal too hard.

What is he even angry about? that we're happy that we won a football game?

To be fair, commentators often just want the game to be competitive.