timeEd32

There's a fair amount of guesswork and fuzzy math, but overall a good video minus all the images of Newcastle fans in Saudi garb.

Yup, barely registers for FFP too (£2m). There’s a bit of an Italian-leaving-hometown premium here but also every player with a pulse under 26 seems to start at £30m. It’s a lot of money but also seems pretty reasonable in today’s market.

Outrageous

I generally like Neville too. I guess it's fine to be suspicious, but as is often the case the simplest and most obvious answer is almost certainly the right one -- no team in the world had a larger surplus of attractive players than Chelsea. Case closed. In an ideal world clubs would be owned by supporters or something, but that ship sailed long ago. As these clubs become more valuable they are owned by a shrinking group of the richest people and investment firms in the world, all of whom have overlapping interests and relationships. AC Milan is owned by RedBird Capital with investment from the New York Yankees (baseball). RedBird is also one of the largest shareholders in Fenway Sports Group, owners of Liverpool as well as the Boston Red Sox (the Yankees main rival). RedBird, who also owns Toulouse in Ligue 1, has received significant funding from Man City's Sheikh Mansour, whose City Football Group co-owns MLS' NYC FC with the New York Yankees. The second largest investor in City Football Group is Silver Lake, who has received private equity funding from Sanabil which is owned by ... PIF.

Somehow I doubt he’d be saying that if they had given Man United £50m for McTominay and £40m for Martial.

Are taxes so simple in the UK / Europe that that's easy to figure? Or is that just some crude math on the top tax rate? If so, isn't that 45% in the UK? There's no way we are paying him over £250k/wk. Refuse to believe it.

Fab's numbers match my napkin math. That £120-160k/wk is where we're playing these days. Bruno will presumably go above that and be our highest earner.

Al-Rumayyen has been called to testify at a US congressional hearing about the PGA-LIV merger. He does not need to attend, but it would be interesting if he did just to hear more from him.

I was prepared for that to be @TheBrownBottle's reply.

How so?

As each window goes on I struggle more and more to understand how we got Bruno for that price. Staggering business that accelerated our rise more than anything else.

Reactions to this are all over the place, ranging from "how did Newcastle pull this off" to this being an incredible waste of money for an average player. This may just be where I'm looking but Man United and Arsenal fans seem impressed, while Chelsea and Spurs supporters couldn't be more bitter.

Adding to this -- there are some sources that put his salary quite a bit lower than this to the point that £150k / week would be closer to tripling his wages.

According to multiple places his current salary is £4m/year (gross, btw) or £77k/wk. Putting him on something like £150k/week with some bonuses seems about right. Reports that are significantly higher than that are almost certainly wrong.

I thought double pivot was a pretty common term at this point?

There's no way we're offering him more than what's being discussed for Bruno's new deal. It would also be weird to blow away whatever Isak is on. Italian sources have every reason to spin this as a "he's moving for the money" type deal. I'm confident we're significantly increasing his pay but we're not going north of £200k IMO.

Budget Bellingham

Not a chance we are offering him over £200k/week. Something is being lost in translation there.

Tonali and Szobs, here we go

There's clearly something in this but even if we get an update that it's close I will be bracing myself for a last minute u-turn. Has very strong "player changed his mind / can't leave Milan" potential.

We probably thought he would be a reasonably inexpensive addition and then couldn't believe the prices being quoted by Man United. I can understand our interest at a certain price point.

I still feel like there's a reasonably high probability of this being how ownership gets the fans back onside after sacking Maldini. "Despite the efforts of Saudi-backed Newcastle United, Milan have rejected the English club and given Sandro Tonali a new contract to keep him at his boyhood club."

Forget the Italian food in Newcastle. Our Brighton preseason game is 10 minutes from this gem.