PRL

We wouldn’t be leaving mush room to get it done

Fair, just seems to be every day a new player linked away. Still potentially losing Guehi, Johnstone, Eze, rumours around Matete posted earlier too. Anderson and Olise gone already. That’s a big old chunk in and around the starting 11.

Palace just selling their whole squad? Like the opposite of Chelsea

Yup, box has been repurposed to just ‘NUFC’ on the door. Although I think it was his family using it a lot previously, and guessing they’re not attending so much.

The timeline for Freedman decision and now this makes the conspiracy theorist in me think that Palace are happy to disrupt us for as long as possible.

By that logic if it was the first / only time the club has put a foot correctly, we would be languishing in Championship or League 1 after being relegated the season the new owners arrived.

I think Brummie mentioned before that Sheffield United paid half the £18m up front, and if they were relegated had to return him for free rather than pay the remainder, so a loan fee and obligation on those terms I’m guessing. They got relegated, returned him and now Villa sold him for £15m. So got £24m in total for him, which is nuts.

His release clause was under £45m… edit: as per above, I see that was only for non-PL teams. Surely Palace would have accepted £50m from us rather than £40+5m from Bayern in the circumstances. Would seem crazy to go all the way to £60m

to be fair, even Downie on SSN said this was just officially confirming what Parish said a couple of days ago. Sky just desperately trying to eke out the story. Downie said it’s a delicate time in the deal and we are actively looking at alternatives.

It's often said that we focus too much on PL experience, but almost £200m spent with only a single PL season (and not the best one) amongst that (I think?), that's a huge gamble. I know Brighton have done this well in the past, but if Chelsea aren't spunking inordinate cash on their players in future windows, they may struggle to replicate. In the course of last season Mitoma and Ferguson's value will have dropped, PSR has become more prevalent and there's a fair amount of belt tightening happening. It may go great, but I think it could just as easily blow up and a team featuring a bunch of young PL newbies gets bullied.

They’ve been talking to Jobi McAnuff about the championship for the last 15 mins edit: just rewound it, definitely a mis-speak as they go on to talk about it as if it’s likely. She paused as she said third bid and then said ‘turned down’ but nowt on yellow bar

They’ll probably say they were allowed previously but they’re being blocked off now.

Hayden turned his nose up at plenty of L1 loan offers, while considering an offer from Reading, of League 1. Seems legit

Obviously none of us know, but the idea Gordon could have dictated signing a 3.5 year contract when he was desperate to get away from Everton and Chelsea’s interest appeared to have cooled, seems unlikely. For what it’s worth, I’m sure at the very worst there’s a year option our side. It all feels like one source being quoted, which coincidentally helps to stir the pot.

I would assume the majority of our purples have agreed to stay for another season and see where we are, so the club view may be to sign 1-2 made for first 11 players to get us to best position possible in the hope of keeping at least all bar one, rather than having to be fending off interest in all of them if we finish outside Euro places again.

Msg from a Palace season ticket holder friend of mine, for what it’s worth: “Gutted you are getting Guehi. He is quality.” They’re more upset with this than Olise going it seems

Which one of you is Simon Bird?

As much as I hate the Mancs and think that Ratcliffe will fall on his face when he keeps making obnoxious public statements and begins to alienate internally as well as externally once the 'not the Glazers' schtick wears off, I would hazard a guess that their entire staff has been run in a similar manner to the squad, with slap dash recruitment, not shifting legacy workers when new hires are brought in and plenty of dead wood. It's not great being made redundant in the current marketplace, but from a business and club management perspective this probably isn't the most stupid thing to do, and it's not like Ashley who cut us back to the barest of bones, this is getting rid of excess fat.

Hasn’t he just ripped off exactly what Shadow Puppets said a few pages back? Same as he did earlier in this thread or a different one earlier today?

Got the ‘here we go’ from Romano

Their striker last season was Chelsea youth. Didn’t go so well.

Removal of relegation by stealth. Get what they wanted by gaming the system

Or as they’d say in the West Country, it’s Gert Lush

Normally don’t mind the random pics and posts, but would be lovely not to have them unless relevant just during June. No fun seeing this thread at the top of page.

Not really. It’s like any business investment - if you can loan at a reasonable rate against a solid asset and invest in something you think will garner larger returns then you’ll do it. His view could well be that the injection of cash will give rise to more rapid returns at a higher yield rather than a passive investment. Just large scale private equity investment. NB - not saying this is what he’s doing, but it wouldn’t be particularly strange if he was. edit - what stifler said quicker than me