oldtype

I understand the unrest, frustration and/or apathy from missing out on players & tonights results going against us - but we're not nigh-on-certainly relegated like. Unless people are strategically lowering expectations/hope to avoid disappointment. Teams around us haven't strengthened THAT much, and we were competing fine before and haven't often slipped into the bottom 3 this season if at all. We had a good chance of staying up before this month began - most would have agreed with that statement - and we still do now. Nothing is decided yet and fans throwing in the towel will affect players on the pitch in home games, as much as they won't like to hear it. Back the team whilst Rafa is here, would be the least I ask of fans losing interest. Issue isn't that we're guaranteed relegation (honestly, I wouldn't know, I haven't been watching the games.) Issue is that staying up is pointless. Under Ashley, yes. The hope is that we're sold after staying up. We go down and that definitely doesn't happen. I don't think which league we're in materially affects our attractiveness to a potential buyer. Just the asking price.

I understand the unrest, frustration and/or apathy from missing out on players & tonights results going against us - but we're not nigh-on-certainly relegated like. Unless people are strategically lowering expectations/hope to avoid disappointment. Teams around us haven't strengthened THAT much, and we were competing fine before and haven't often slipped into the bottom 3 this season if at all. We had a good chance of staying up before this month began - most would have agreed with that statement - and we still do now. Nothing is decided yet and fans throwing in the towel will affect players on the pitch in home games, as much as they won't like to hear it. Back the team whilst Rafa is here, would be the least I ask of fans losing interest. Issue isn't that we're guaranteed relegation (honestly, I wouldn't know, I haven't been watching the games.) Issue is that staying up is pointless.

I don't watch football anymore. He's just sucked all the joy out of it. I guess this makes me a bad fan or whatever, but... nah, just not worth it.

"Legality and complexity" (i.e. bickering over specific contract terms) is the majority of the work in any M&A project. The actual valuation/bickering over price stuff doesn't take as long as you'd think.

Pulis record at WBA was shocking yes and he rightly deserved the sack, anyone no matter who you are if you have that kind of record you deserve the sack...Mourinho,Van Gaal,Ancelotti have all been sacked too for s*** records Rafa takes 1 point from f***ing 27 though and hes absolved of all blame on all counts Yes we are a championship team and f***ed up majorly in the summer because of such tight restraints but the players we did buy are absolute garbage and a complete waste of 30m quid and this lad Kenedy will be no different. Tart it up all you like but 1 point from 27 is a sackable offence imo You’ve just said yourself that we’re a Championship team and yet you expect Rafa to be winning games in the PL with it. You’ve just contradicted yourself enormously! We are a championship team simply because we failed in the summer to move on from a championship team to a lower half premier league team. We bought players who have failed at premier league clubs and championship players. We failed to get rid of the s**** that contributed to us getting relegated in the first instance and yet these players still get gametime for us 2 years after that relegation. Im not contradicting myself at all. You mean to tell me that Benitez plays absolutely no part in us failing to get better players than what we bought and its all the fault of the team behind him. I really don't buy that at all after all this is the same Benitez that went to war with Gillet & Hicks over them not letting him sign Gareth Barry to replace Xabi Alonso He has signed these players or do people on here think he was just given them on a plate. Surely to god there were better options out there for the money we spent Murphy 12m.....Lejeune 8m......Joselu. 5m.....Atsu 6m....Manquillo 5m....All f***ing rubbish Money wasted on s**** Were they his first choice players, the players he had lined up for months? It doesn't matter, if you wanted a Maserati but couldn't afford it would you just settle for a clapped out Nova that couldn't move just for the sake of having a car...no The players he bought are no better than the shite that was already here,,,is Joselu any better than Darryl Murphy..no, It is ok to criticise Benitez you know you aren't going to hell for blasphemy for it Choice between walking/getting the bus or having a car of your own to get from a to b any fool would take the clapped out nova. We needed to add both numbers and quality in the summer. Due to a lack of resources, we managed to add numbers but not the quality. Seems perfectly natural to me.

HTT has a better conception of how a business acquisition works than most people in this thread. Obviously no guarantee it goes through since deals can die for any reason at any time, but no reason to be all doom and gloom about it either. The lack of news doesn't mean anything, our results on the pitch don't mean anything. People should stop reading tea leaves. You're not even reading the right ones.

Large investment advisory firms that only deal with institutional clients don't need to run publicity stunts to get their name out to people who will never be their customers.

Why have lawyers and financiers negotiate stuff at all? Everyone should just "meet in the middle"

At the end of the day, the system works and is printing money. Why risk the whole thing for the small chance that you might be able to print a little bit more money? Superleague talk is an empty threat. They can go fuck themselves.

We've been worried about a Superleague for over a decade now. I suspect the economics proposition isn't quite as good as you'd think, or it would have happened already. (1) You're essentially collapsing your domestic and CL revenue into one, so the TV money has to be better than the combination of the PL and CL money right now. Are we confident anyone will pay that much money for one rights package? (2) Some clubs will have to face the possibility of going from top of their league every year to perennial bottom feeders. Does it actually benefit, say, Tottenham to move into a Superleague where it loses its competitive advantage in attracting players and probably gets the shit beaten out of it every year? (3) People underestimate the role tradition and regional rivalries play in the attraction towards European football, even among internationals. It's going to matter to some people that there will no longer be any Merseyside derbies, and that will act to the detriment of the product as a whole.

Good. The rest of us can enjoy a league with actual parity then.

I read through this thread specifically to see if anyone was going to say "must win"

I was 23 when this guy came to the club. Amazing.

At this right Qatar may not exist by 2022, never mind host a World Cup.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/long-qt-syndrome/Pages/Introduction.aspx https://www.bhf.org.uk/heart-health/conditions/cardiomyopathy/hypertrophic-cardiomyopathy Not saying it is these but here are 2 examples that are very much possible. Sudden heart failure among athletes is not entirely uncommon

Wow. Don't know what to say.

what This post has got to have some sort of forum award locked up

Money is good. That said, man those uniforms are ugly.

Club will tour Asia in the summer. Local press has confirmed stop in Korea, trying to arrange friendly with local team.

Amazing isn't it. Managing Director of a top flight Football Club at that age, is pretty darn impressive to be honest. Obviously he was in the right place at the right time and kissed the right backsides, but he's been a hell of a lot more successful in his career than most of us and I'm sure most of us would like to be a penny behind him in the bank. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/04/26/lee-charnley-newcastle-managing-director-arrested-part-hrmcs/ - He's allegedly 39 - He's been at the club eighteen years, which means he was here since he was 21. - Started out at Russell Cushing's assistant. - He was made a director in 2008, when he was 30. Managing director in 2014, at 36. - He only makes 150k a year(!) Less than some entry-level jobs in Wall Street. - He's been a director of 30+ companies (!?), although I'm assuming most of them are just club-related or Mike Ashley shell companies. None of this makes sense. Who the fuck is this person?

"Secret Payments" Okay that doesn't sound good.

My job relates to this sort of thing, but hard to tell anything at this stage really. Could be any number of things. Having the first publicly-released information about the investigation be the arrest of your executive is not a great sign, mind.

Hooray. Getting to watch games again next year.

Should hire Pardew imo. It's what they deserve.

Seems to me that Rafa and Ashley are in general agreement that the squad is strong enough to go up and there's no point in overpaying for players who won't be useful in the Premier League next year.