oldtype

It feels almost meaningless to say that he was by far our best No. 9 since Shearer given how depressingly low that bar is. But he is, of course.

If he ONLY WANTED MANU his agent would have leaked that to the press ages ago imo. That’s how you put pressure on your club to reject any Newcastle bid.

Personally I’d prefer they just deal with it quietly instead of creating more drama, but who am I to second guess Eddie Howe’s personnel management.

I think it's worth considering, that even if the deal is actually close the incentive for journalists is to make it seem as uncertain is possible. The moment somebody posts "deal almost done, player wants Newcastle," all those sweet, sweet ManU fan clicks you're getting evaporate and the story dies out. You want to keep speculating as if ManU can jump in at any moment until you are forced to reckon with indisputable facts. (i.e. bid formally accepted, personal terms agreed). At that point, your incentives shift as you want to be the one who gets credit for reporting that first. All of this is to say, can we get off fucking panic stations please.

If we spend 70 million pounds on a player and he's genuinely "shit" we're probably fucked forever PSR wise so best to not even think of that scenario.

Makes perfect sense for them to ask us for a sell on in case Šeško takes off here and is in Isak’s position three years down the road. They want their cut if Liverpool/Real Madrid/PSG or whatever come sign him for 150 million.

I'm sure we'll find some way to mess it up regardless, but I have to say, it would be extremely weird for the most widely-circulated daily newspaper in Slovenia (who apparently doesn't even do football rumors) to repeatedly go on a limb like this unless they had pretty good information that the rest of us don't have.

I'm sorry folks, I've spent the past half hour on YouTube convincing myself that actually this guy is class. So he's clearly signing for Liverpool now.

If this does go through, I would assume we would have no more money to spend unless sales are made.

Posted that I didn’t fancy him yesterday. Reverse jinx worked like a charm.

We can't meet the asking price on a player: stupid lowballing club with absentee owners. We're doomed forever. Liverpool can't meet the asking price on a player: MASTER PLAN. We're doomed forever.

Ability to access news 24/7 with 90% of it being completely worthless white noise has objectively made life worse. You're not even getting that much more information than you did in the newspaper days, you just have to invest extra effort into sorting out the actual news from the nonsense.

Brentford on the phone with Liverpool, trying to find out what our "emphatic rejection" email looked like so they can copy/paste it back at us.

Famous last words, but I think he'll quietly rejoin the team next week and everyone will pretend this never happened.

Or they could have just... not signed Ekitike.

This is just the same with all news. There's too much of it now. Following it is exhausting.

"so quick and strong." Did we respond to their email with or something?

Seems like they're putting pressure on Isak to ratchet up the disruption by "pulling out." They want him to refuse to report or to throw an open tantrum in the press.

Happiest explanation for all of this would be that Isak just really hates Korea and was looking for any excuse to drop out of the tour. I am 100% willing to take one for the team.

Seeing Cisse's goal from the away end was fucking nuts. Shola got the ball near the corner, which is just about the least exciting thing that NUFC could possibly do on the pitch at the time, so nobody was really paying attention. Then he passes it to Cisse, and everyone's just thinking "wtf is this guy doing fannying about outside the box." The viewing angles at Stamford Bridge are terrible so my part of the away end didn't really have a line of sight to the back of the net. Didn't realize what had happened until we hear this gigantic collective gasp from the home fans, we all strain our necks and realize that Cech is on the ground and the ball is in the back of the net. Absolute pandemonium follows, of course.

I think the more accurate description is that we can only "close" one major deal at a time, which I imagine is true for most major clubs. More preliminary transfer talks will always be percolating in the background.

Yeah I'm not super thrilled if this guy is the best replacement we could reasonably get for Isak. His record doesn't seem to suggest that he's some kind of superstar to begin with, the agent antics are annoying and suggestive of poor character, and it says volumes that Arsenal had a clear path to signing him and decided to pass. Also spooks me a bit that it's only us and Manchester United who want him. They're desperate, and their recruitment is always a shambles. How's the last young European striker they spent sixty million pounds on doing? Right course of action here is to get one last year out of Isak and shop for a replacement next year, when the market will presumably be slightly less inflated and there will be better options out there, even if our Isak fee ends up being a bit less.

Ah, that also sounds similar to the Isak situation.

I can tell you on behalf of the 1500 sickos that we will be watching his development with great interest but most Korean football fans don't even know who this guy is at this point. He's only played in the second division and only started making the news when he signed for us.

I assume we are not being more aggressive with this for the same reason Liverpool are not being more aggressive with Isak. We know the player has his heart set on us and that we don't have any competing suitors, so the assumption is that we'll get Brentford to come down on price eventually. If we get closer to the deadline or a competing suitor emerges, we may raise our bid at that point.