timeEd32

I get your point, but there's a big difference between riding some good fortune in a single game (away to a good team no less) and over-performing all of the underlying stats for two years running.

Really need Arsenal to win. I don’t have much faith in West Ham.

Literally can't be worse than having a keeper who is seemingly stuck in knee deep mud at all times.

I've wondered before if I'll still be a lunatic watching NUFC when I'm older. This gives me hope.

Very roughly speaking I think a Europa League R16 appearance would be approximately equal to winning the Conference League. One other pretty sizable difference is in coefficient points. Both give 2 points for a win and 1 for a draw from the group stage onwards (same as CL). But the Europa League bonuses are double the points -- 4 for group winners (vs. 2), 2 for group runners-up (vs. 1), and 1 for every knockout round (vs. only 1 point bonuses for SF/Final).

This is just prize money. All three competitions have the same revenue components: participation, coefficient, TV pool, and performance prize. Then there's the additional matchday income as you said.

This seems quite perfect if we think a loan is the right move.

That £12.5m is just the prize money portion. It's an estimate but West Ham got approx £19-20m in total for the Conference League. The year before they got about £27m from reaching the Europa League semifinal. Arsenal got about £21m from last season's Europa League Round of 16.

I thought the pressure of not being able to have a single slip up would get to Arsenal and potentially Liverpool. Certainly didn’t think it would happen to both today.

That doesn’t help the drunken spending, but it’s not the core reason for the never ending arm’s race.

The way football is structured and the amount of money in the game now has created a fundamental flaw on the financial side that I’m not sure has any solution. Clubs at the top of the pyramid like Man City and Real Madrid have revenues approaching a billion £ annually, but they have to spend most of it to maintain their position. The clubs behind them need to spend everything to stay in the Champions League / try to win a title. The ones behind them spend it all to try to get there, the ones in the middle spend it all to stay there, and the ones at the bottom spend it all to try to survive. There is no such thing as treading water in football; you can’t take a year to reset without great risk. And if you’re a Champions League club or bottom half club then every season you are at risk of £70-£100m+ in revenue vanishing the next season. This makes it incredibly difficult to be consistently profitable. Now you can argue that football clubs shouldn’t be corporate entities generating huge profits, which is fair if not a bit fantastical in the 21st century. But the problem is if you aren’t profitable in the best of times then a downturn can quickly put a club in a tenuous position.

What’s wrong with helping people grow weed?

Selling a hotel to yourself is a whole other level of accounting shenanigans.

From midtable, manager out depression to planning on making up a 10 point gap with six games to play.

Can we play Spurs at home every April please?

I made this mistake during the Everton game.

I need a picture of Isak with Van De Ven on the floor upside down.

The emotional seesawing in this thread as information / speculation is leaked in dribs and drabs is painful viewing. I strongly encourage everyone to wait for the details. That said, it almost doesn't matter what the details are. We know there will be financial regulation of some kind and we know what UEFA's rules are, which we may have to follow next season and would certainly plan on having to follow in 2025/26. That means the ultimate aim off the pitch will not be changing -- we have to increase revenue. The tweets from Kieran Maguire are obviously sobering, but it's also important to remember that they are a year behind and it's been a big year for us. It's hard to pinpoint what the exact number will be but our revenue for 2023/24 is going to grow from £250m all the way to somewhere in the ballpark of £335m, plus whatever we do before June 30. Roughly £28m of that is from player sales (and there may be more coming), but that number is relevant for the next three years if it's done like UEFA and that's important given the pathetic sales before (thanks Mike). In total that's a massive increase that will at least start to put some separation between us and those behind us. It also goes a long way to turning that -£27m into a positive number, though the cost side does not include Tonali, Barnes, Tino or Hall. But not so fast. Some of that revenue will disappear in 2024/25 so we have a lot of work to do just to get back to something approaching £350m. Roughly £70m in the form of Champions League, player sales, and the Amazon doc go away (I'm going to assume our SJP events business stays roughly flat for now). Let's says Adidas is £40m, so now we need £30m more before we're growing again. That feels doable between sales and some new deals I'm expecting to see this summer, but how far can we go beyond that? The growth beyond ~£340m feels like the critical factor to me.

I hate that the current setup made me feel anything but joy at Liverpool losing 3-0 at Anfield on a famous European night.

That's just wages. Need to add amortisation costs also.

As always it's hard to judge without the details. For example, is being at 86% a points deduction or is it fines until you're a repeat / gross offender? But something following the track of the UEFA rules is at least sensible. I did some very rough math a couple months ago where I guessed we were at 88-89% this season (we had to be under 90% for UEFA, though that was for 2023 calendar year).

Sheffield United docked two points next time they are in the Championship aka next season.

I'm struggling with the blame on the US tour. I imagine it was a hectic week+, but we basically approached it like this: Villa - A team first half / B team second half Chelsea - A team Brighton - B team There were some outliers, like Trippier played almost two full 90s in a span of three days. Probably not ideal when ramping up and I can also accept that the PL opposition may have upped the intensity a bit. But we stayed in a single time zone, though we could have helped ourselves by being based between NYC/Philly and not Atlanta (logistics and PL decisions from the PL may have forced our hand ... or Eales), and it was a couple weeks before the season started. A week on the east coast with first class/charter travel shouldn't be too much of a burden. One mistake was probably playing four other preseason games on top of those three. 7 games seems like a lot.

This is good news. The manual drawing of the lines is ridiculous.

“For our biggest game of the season we’re going to dress like we’re in Varsity Blues…”