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Yeah it really doesn't work this way anymore. Most folks in Korea have already chosen their teams and did so ages ago. We had Ki on the team when he was captaining the KNT, but that didn't result in any meaningful increase in support. He would need to be on par with Son (i.e. the best Korean player ever) to meaningfully move the needle with casuals fans.

Yes, so happy to see him get long overdue recognition.

If he can somehow go from a rotation player in the Korean second division to a Premier League player in the space of a few months, maybe he really is Messi.

Market won't always be this inflated. Even the big clubs can't spend this much money every single window, and we'll have had a year to develop a robust target list with a new executive team in place. If we just don't want to sell him because we think we'll never be able to sign good players again then what's even the point, might as well give up. Have to trust that the club will have the ability to react better with more time and less competition.

That and a hundred million pounds into the club's coffers at the end of it seems like a pretty good outcome to me.

I'm as disappointed about this as anyone, but I think folks are being a bit thin-skinned about it. So far all he's done is put Romano on retainer to keep tweeting out the same vague statements every day and handed in a sick note to avoid a pre-season trip to halfway across the world that doesn't really matter and nobody wants to go to in the first place. There are myriad ways he could be more disruptive than this if he chose to. So far we (1) haven't seen any statement that he wants to leave attributed directly to him, his agent, or even "sources close to him"; (2) no declaration that he will refuse to train or refuse to play games that actually matter; (3) no attempt to attack the club's reputation through his proxies in the press (he was lied to about a new contract, we're a shambles without an executive director and PIF doesn't care about us anymore etc.) For what it's worth, Wissa has already done #2 and #3 with Brentford. There's no doubt he wants to go to Liverpool, but frankly it seems to me that he's hedging his bets so he can be quietly re-integrated into the squad with plausible deniability if it doesn't work out this summer. I understand that this is something new to all of us because we're not used to having players who the biggest clubs in the world are willing to pay over a hundred million pounds for. But if we're going to keep growing as a club, we should get used to the fact that players of this ilk have more leverage than even your garden-variety really good player and like to flaunt it from time to time. We're all going to be miserable as a fanbase going forward if we lose our minds every time this happens. Even the likes of Liverpool or Man United can have their best players tapped up by Real Madrid/Barcelona.

Summer 2022 Isak at the price we paid for him was an extremely risky signing (particularly given that we now know that we overspent and almost jumped ourselves off a PSR cliff). Just because the risk paid off doesn't mean that subsequent, similar risks will have the same result.

How on Earth is he still only twenty-five years old

Yes, there's no daylight between the two. I just think that if we're going to be damaged by a cunty move, we should be able to benefit from one as well.

Cuts both ways. Isak is also a better player with more leverage who's up for a much larger pay hike if he moves.

This is one that will inevitably drag on forever. (1) We can't sign him unless we sell Isak (2) ManU can't sign him unless they offload one of their shit players for a decent fee. Until one of those two preconditions are resolved, there's not going to be a resolution.

The PFA is a labor union for the players it would be a breach of their duties to their members if they took the club's side in something like this, no matter how unreasonable the player is being.

He looks more or less exactly as expected. Rapid, good technique, very young and a bit of a headless chicken. Must have been a really special moment for him. 18 years old, never even played in the first division, making his debut in front of a home crowd against the K-League all stars before he heads off to Europe.

Same price we would have gotten if he had a normal year and just happened to have one less year on his contract. Maybe more, because clubs other than Liverpool will jump in for him. Teams will always overpay for this type of player.

Once we fully move on to lower class players that the bigger clubs aren't interested in, I'm pretty confident that we'll get deals done quickly. We are by far the biggest fish in that market. We will have bodies in by the close of the transfer window, they just won't necessarily be the bodies we wanted.

Meteors will never come to us. They only want Liverpool.

Look, it's perfectly natural for the manager to be demanding more say in transfers. And it's the fault of the owners/executive team if they can't talk him out of it and save him from himself.

I've got no basis whatsoever to determine whether 150m is an adequate fee or whether 135m is not. It will generally suck that he's leaving, but I probably won't be more or less angry based on what the fee actually ends up being, so long as we're not selling him for 50m or something.

Seems relatively straightforward to me. Player wants to play out his last season at Palace and go to LIverpool on a free. Palace would prefer to get money for him, but even if they accept bids from other clubs, they can't force him to go.

Yes, this was the fundamental failure of the window. Then again, we still have a month to fix it and we should have far more freedom of maneuver with lower-tier targets now that the top six appear to have blown through most of their spending.

I hate preseason tours too, but then again, in a world where our ability to spend is directly tied to our ability to generate commercial revenue, we can't not do them either.

Worth noting that it's also not typical for every top six club to be spending over a hundred million in a single window. It just so happens that the moment we were finally able to get back onto the market with CL qualification and PSR headroom happened to coincide with a historic spending cycle for the cartel clubs, many of which had urgent need for upgrades due to underachieving/transitional squads, as well as the ability to spend due to being relatively frugal last year. You could call that bad luck, you could also call it a failure to anticipate market conditions when choosing our targets.

I go to sleep every night thinking the banter on the forum cannot possibly get any gloomier. I’m proven wrong every morning.

I think we’re all reasonably expecting some level of improvement from the tail end of his Arsenal days. And if Eddie Howe thinks he can fix him, who am I to say that’s wrong.

I’ve now convinced myself that given our spending limitations, this was always a better allocation of our resources than plunking 30m or whatever on Trafford.