timeEd32

I thought our Swedish friends taught us it was Ee-zak (or ee-sak) from the beginning and it was just the Bruno song that got it all wrong.

Go watch that, ideally in an altered state, and you won't give a shit about our transfer business for a little while.

Because our wage bill is very high so it would help unlock new spend (or help make us compliant come June without having to panic sell). Fraser, Lewis, Dubs/Vlachodimos a must. Miggy (+ a fee) a big help, and Targett in a dream.

Yes, return to play and return to perform (i.e. back to where they were) are typically two different timelines. Not always the case and greatly depends on the specifics of the injury and the individual, but it's why I'm assuming we won't have a fully ready Botman (or Lascelles) for a huge portion of the season.

This place may be worse than the lowest point from last season if we don't sign a RW (likely) and drop points against Bournemouth/Spurs and/or go out of the cup.

Yeah, I don’t think we can lose so many defenders at once. But I’d be doing it on our terms.

Without looking it up that must be over £25m in wages, not counting Schar who should be extended. It’s an incredible reset opportunity. I’d be in no rush to extend anyone else unless we know we can get a fee for them.

Yup, Joelinton and Pope. A really terrible combo to be missing.

Ha, same. Signing a RCB who could, in an emergency, fill in at RB if needed is probably the easiest path to moving Trippier and not completely regretting it three months from now. Just on wages alone we'd save over £5m this season by not having Trippier, so if he's not going to start every week it's the most sensible thing to do.

I'd be irrationally excited by an outgoing.

So is most of our squad unfortunately.

Ladies and gentlemen, our new right winger.

Check out my podcast dropping tonight where, after having collated all of the day's news, I make up some plausible information and present it in a vague way.

From that list the only ones I'd be racing to do would be Schar and Gordon.

If Chelsea covers part of his wages then he'll be a revelation for someone for about 8 weeks. Then he'll fade away as the reality of having played nearly 40k minutes of football in the last decade becomes obvious.

I'm going to PSR number crunch with information asymmetries until the end of time, thank you very much.

The most annoying thing about this argument is if we were shopping exclusively in this market there'd be a chorus of complaints about how we'll never compete with City / Arsenal / Liverpool by shopping at Aldi, where's our ambition, etc. etc.

I've mentioned this before, but I don't think enough is made about how precarious of a position they are in. As you said they could return to being one of the best in the league / world with the right appointment and a few transfer hits like Palmer. But every year they are not in the Champions League their financial situation sits on a knife edge and they are slowly eroding the pedigree they've built up over the last two decades. Champions of Europe and in the Championship are both in play five years from now.

Tapsoba’s current wages are reportedly quite a bit higher than Guehi too. The full package would probably be roughly the same.

I don’t really have an opinion on Disasi, but we should probably be open to anyone coming from Chelsea not necessarily giving the best account of themselves.

None of that is how I interpreted that scene.

Just opened a 1 hot take about every club from the opening weekend article to see what it said about us and I only got this far:

It's not out of the realm of possibility that even spending what's been reported on Guehi is tied to Miggy / Trippier leaving. There's a lengthy list of theories you could come up with at the moment. We'll know more in a couple weeks, but unfortunately won't really have the full picture for another 10 months.

Until given a reason to think otherwise I'm just assuming recent Gomez links are just a lazy continuation of what may have been discussed in late June when we were in extreme panic mode. He's more like Vlachodimos than a real target (I hope).

Ok, that's what I thought. He could easily be included beyond that I guess. Also thrown off by #UEL - isn't that the Europa League? Such stupid names and acronyms.