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They built this summer in a lab to break our spirits The ManU offer is 5m lower specifically to let us know that it’s not just the money, it’s us.

My God can he not just sit down in one place while he records this stuff? Straight to prison.

The way this has played out, it really does feel like the club deciding "fuck everything, we are fed up and we're signing a player no matter how much it costs." Which feels like a humongous red flag but I'm as desperate as everyone else to see some fireworks so I choose to ignore it.

What I've gleaned from some YouTube scouting is that he's a player with amazing god-given athleticism (height, speed, strength, stamina) who so far hasn't necessarily wanted to use those attributes to really get physical with opposing defenders. He prefers to drop deep and move into spaces that others have made for him, rather than leading the line and creating space for others. If Howe can spark a change of mindset in him, I do think he could be a really good fit. But that's not always easy or possible.

IMO it's a fair assessment to say that Isak is an amazing world class striker who's not necessarily conducive to the overall style of football we try to play. (He's good enough that he doesn't need to be) I'm not confident that Sesko is that player, but we could conceivably find someone who makes us just as good (or better) without scoring as many goals.

Even a poor start to the season fades from memory pretty quickly. I'm sitting here twenty years later and I still remember David Edgar scoring at Old Trafford, or Sibierski looking like a world beater, or Martins "sending Teemu Tainio to fucking Alaska." I don't remember much of the shit parts.

We're not even going to remember what happened this off-season in a few years. We'll remember the cup.

If he leaves now, at the end of the day, dude will have given the club 2.5 amazing seasons, a major trophy, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 150m in cash. The ending will have been a little messy but for me at least, he can go with my blessing.

I just don't understand how people can be this miserable in general given that we just broke the trophy drought a few months ago. I used to think back in the Ashley days that I'd take the club going into administration and being relegated down to League 2 if it meant I could see us win a major trophy before I die.

In modern football, I think it just makes sense to not to get too emotionally tied up with players. Try not to fall in love with them too quickly, and try not to hate them too much when they inevitably make decisions to improve their income/career. Support the shirt, not the player.

Come on Romano, give us that "HE ONLY WANTS NEWCASTLE." I need to inject that into my veins

I understand this is just what promising young players go for these days, but man, that is a whole lot of money for a striker who's never scored a goal every two games in a serious league.

Folks have been completely gaslit by Romano and the other favor-trading journalists that they profess to hate so much. Just taking it as fait accompli that we're going to bend over and let them have him.

Personally I'm of the belief that if you can sell any player that's not prime Messi or Ronaldo for 150 million pounds, it probably makes sense to do it. There's typically significant diminishing returns between player value and fee (i.e. a 150 million pound player does not contribute three times as much value on the pitch as a 50 million pound player). So unless the squad is so deep that you're running out of space to put good players in your XI, you will usually get more value replacing one player with several in the open market. Also, at some point it's just so much money that it doesn't make sense to have that much value tied up in a single player, due to injury risk alone if nothing else. All this is contingent on our asking price actually being met, of course.

That would be an awfully strange way of trying to convince big clubs to shell out a hundred million pounds for you next summer.

Everything around this seems like guessing, without anything being directly leaked by the player or either club. All the vague "leaning towards Man United" stuff smells like third-party hearsay (sports journalists will often do this thing where they quote a "source" from another club on a transfer that club has nothing to do with to add a veneer of legitimacy. That source will provide an educated guess about what's going on, which they can run with it as insider information). If either the selling club or the player were primarily trying to stall so Man United could come in, there's absolutely no reason for them to keep that secret. At a minimum, there would nothing to stop Man United themselves from leaking it to the press. We'd be seeing tweets from Romano or whoever that looks like the ones that Isak's representation were ghost-writing. Instead, none of the reporting is even consistent about whether it's the selling club, the player, or us holding up the deal (i.e. we may not be wiling to go through with this unless we have more clarity with Isak). The point being, nobody knows what's going on. Let's just set to the side for now and see what happens this week.

I have no idea who this person is but I'm bored, let's sign him.

I think we'll get bodies in by the end of the window. If we materially lower our standards it's not hard to go out and sign squad players. The mistake we're more likely to make IMO is making desperation signings and saddling ourselves with players that we'll struggle to offload when we no longer need them.

This is going to be the case for most players going forward. 1) the gap in quality between the haves and the have-nots grows larger, so even big club failures are still useful to somebody in the PL. 2) the existence of the Saudi League inflates outgoing fees across the board. As long as a player has been good at some point and isn't on crazy wages, it's easier to make your money back even if he's had one or two bad seasons with you.

He's twenty-five years old with his whole career ahead of him. From his perspective, it 100% makes sense to honor his contract, leave on good terms with the supporters and varnish his reputation, and have his choice of clubs to sign with on a free. It's not like he gets a cut of the transfer fee if he's sold for fifty million pounds or whatever. Even if Crystal Palace wanted to sell, why would he want to move now when he could go anywhere he wants on whatever terms he wants next year. The only reason he would agree to come here now if we were his first choice for next summer anyway, which I assume isn't the case.

Nolan was essentially holding the entire squad together that one season on and off the pitch. He was a great servant to the club for the short time he was here.

This is the correct answer. A month is a lot of time and we probably still salvage this by getting some bodies in, but we already know the process was bad. If we panic-spend in August to save face and rid ourselves of the PSR headroom burning a hole in our pocket, that could cause its own problems down the road.

I fly to Korea about four times a year and am almost always working the day after I land. It’s not that bad if you’re used to traveling, as professional footballers are. I imagine having a chartered flight makes in significantly better as well.

The fact that Isak’s agent has cut off the automatic payments to Romano might be our best indication that he intends to stay fwiw

Other than everyone panicking in this thread