oldtype

You don't score more goals solely by buying a striker, you score more goals by buying midfielders and wide players that improve your possession and your build up play. I feel that we've done that. It just wasn't realistic to expect the club to go get a world class striker somehwere in January when nobody wants to sell, especially not to us.

Honestly if you're feeling down about our window just go to Sky Sports and look at the in/outs for our relegation rivals and see if you'd rather have any of theirs. January is a tough time to remake your squad and we've done just about the most we possibly could have.

8-ish? Trippier and Bruno are A+++++ signings that could conceivably be with the club for a long time as it grows and would have been completely beyond our reach under the previous regime. The rest are fine, okay deals. That would be a decent set of incomings for an entire summer under normal circumstanes, never mind a January transfer window where we are fighting relegation, don't have a director of football, and every other club is adding another 10m onto their prices just for us.

We are acquiring multiple first-choice (or recently first-choice) players from teams that are better than us (i.e. any other team in the Premier League). I realize that they're not exciting foreign names, but it's hard not to be better when you're doing that.

That looks like us done for the window. It’s not a disaster. Should always expect less than you hope for on deadline day.

Well, I’ve just realized that when you’re 8 hours behind UK time deadline day morning starts right around when you’re usually trying to go to sleep. That sucks.

I’m surprised the athletic doesn’t have a deadline day stream like they do for basketball. Or do they?

There’s some irony in Newcastle fans of all people not understanding the psychology of abusive relationships.

So I guess he’s local and he’s very tall. I like him.

Never heard of him but he looks like a good player and has pretty heat maps. Welcome.

I like how it's a new era but we're all maintaining the exact same level of pessimism as a self-defense mechanism.

Looking forward to us signing Mbappe but getting the transfer cancelled because we didn't fax the paperwork to the league office until 12:01am.

IMO it's not surprising at all that they're struggling to reposition once their initial targets slipped away, given that we don't even have a permanent director of football in place and are probably relying entirely on scouting data from the old regime.

We supposedly have infinite money so really, what do you care what his transfer fee was. He could have cost 2.5 mil and it would be of no difference to us. Just a few more quid going out of a bottomless bank account in the Cayman Islands somewhere.

I don’t think a club that’s 3-5 years away from contending for anything (and possibly even facing a year in the championship) should be appointing a manger in his sixties.

Hopefully pans out better than the last Haidara we signed.

I've been reduced to googling "football release clause" and seeing what the options are. Really doesn't look like release clauses in the 20-30m range, which seems like what we're going for, are all that commoin.

Was in a similar boat with Chris_R in my old military job and can confirm. It's nothing at all like being in Abu Dhabi. More or less the only exception is embassies where they can get stuff in through diplomatic pouches which aren't subject to customs.

Exactly. The best leverage we have is that we have a half dozen bids in at various places and someone may blink and take the money before you do.

If they try to sign a replacement let's just go and hijack that player too just to be safe

Trippier cost half as much as this guy Whatever, whatever. It's not my money. He'll do.

Also, I love how obviously this signing is a product of Trippier's agent leaking the clause to us, us saying "no thanks", then realizing that we won't have another striker for Saturday and going back to him with "so, about that release clause..."

Honestly we should just be trying to identify every release clause in Europe and going after those players given how clubs are trying to take us to the laundry in negotiations.

He's a striker, is breathing, and doesn't have a broken leg. I'll take it.

Had completely lost track of all the terrible excuses for a striker who have played for us. How does he only have one Premier League goal