leffe186

This is the flip side. Just hope we’re there too.

Also it makes it (relatively) interesting to look at the percentage of revenue versus the sum of wages & squad cost to look at sustainability on the football side: Chelsea 491 - 359 - 1510 = -1378 Newcastle 335 - 243 - 581 = -489 Man City 694 (lol) - 408 - 1330 = -1044 Man U 667 - 313 - 1102 = -748 Spurs 565 - 256 - 697 = -388 West Ham 228 - 176 - 481 = -429 Aston Villa 378 - 273 - 540 = -435 Chelsea man. Fucking hell. I really hope Boehly doesn't know what he's doing.

Much appreciated. Yeah that makes it a useful measure - it shows the actual hit to the books. Like, presumably as Bentancur cost £15M or so in Jan 2022 his squad cost is about £4M, whereas Gallagher’s squad cost this year will be the full £35M or whatever we spent on him. Chelsea’s figure for that is completely insane. West Ham’s is dangerously high too.

There was discussion about this on one of the Spurs podcasts. We know that wage spend is a better indicator of success than transfer spend - they pointed out that we’ve been low wage forever but recently started spending more on transfers. They expressed surprise that Man U seem to be heading the same way - reducing wage spend while still spending a lot in transfer fees.

I also wonder about the wages we pay for staff to just run the stadium, which you would imagine is a huge amount. I suspect we don’t have to worry about that highest-paid director any more What’s the significance of the “squad cost” figure? Is that just a sum of transfer fees, or does it factor in wages/amortization?

That’s fascinating and genuinely surprising. Imagine how bad the Premier League would be if they didn’t add so much time on. Wonder if VAR is a factor?

It really highlights how much better the Premier League is with this stuff. If CL matches adopted the same timekeeping games would have 15-20 minutes added on until teams pulled less bullshit.

I’m walking the dogs . Rather pick up their shit with my bare hands than watch this.

Michael, Scotland: ”Even as an Arsenal fan, I've not enjoyed watching Arteta and Simeone tonight. Passion is great, but moving to the touch line when players come close with the ball isn't right” First game, Michael?

THey're really not great. It's just such a pity that PSG and Bayern Munich were on the same side of the draw.

My favourite touchline shenanigans was Jol and Wenger. Jol looking at Wenger like "calm down little man" knowing he could have picked him up and thrown him into the crowd if he felt like it.

The only reason I'm hesitating now is that it seems RDZ does it too . Hopefully it's not cynical like Arteta and just when he gets excited.

I had no idea

I hear the bat signal Bow Bells! Not many Cockneys round Ashburton Grove

It's such an obvious try-hard song given that everyone knows they've not been North London forever.

Done them up like a kipre.

We’re Schrödinger’s Cartel Club. Simultaneously both in it and out of it, until somebody collapses the wavefunction.

Chris Waddle.

Anyone on here old enough to remember Joey Beauchamp?

Plenty of time for Dibling. He’s actually older than Archie Gray and just two weeks younger than Bergvall though, tbf.

Yeah the team we put out against Villa last year was a joke, far worse than Villa’s last night. We were shitting it about people getting injured. Also as one Hammer pointed out on KUMB: “No point whining about the Villa side. We had our gift last week against Palace whose post-European results have been sh*te. With no Nketiah, Wharton and Sarr, Kamada and Mateta rested. We had an unchanged squad from the Wolves match, 10 days to prepare, and an opportunity to put daylight between us and Spurs. We finished with Mohamadou Kante up front.” I’d forgotten that was the game where Palace went on the piss beforehand, and fair enough tbh.

Agreed. Been a long time a team since a team was quite so reliant on one player.

They owe us from last year tbf. It does go to show how difficult it can be for a team to be coherent when you make a few changes. In fact, that Villa team was only four different from the team that beat Sunderland. Konsa, Onana, McGinn and Watkins were the only ones that didn’t start both games. You don’t need me to tell you yet again how different our team is from the full one we’d want to put out. It emphasizes that who is missing matters a lot. Konsa would have helped, Watkins is better than Abraham but Onana and McGinn were obviously the key ones missing. It’s notable that they were the two enforced changes. For our part, there are several players I’d obviously want to have back in the line-up, but the fact that Bentancur and Udogie were back on the pitch was absolutely critical. It very much highlights what an absolute disaster of an appointment Frank was in so many ways. There’s still a long way to go. In this week just gone and the next two West Ham play(ed) before us. The concern was that that would put a lot of pressure on, but the flip side is that we kinda know what we have to do. I just hope and pray that you do the business on the 17th.

How many lives has VVD had now?

Agreed m the latter part, although the fact that keepers and CBs tend to develop a bit later can skew it a bit. Yeah, I looked at Transfermarkt but they were so wildly wrong on our loanees that I ignored it. We’ve got an absolutely bonkers amount of kids out on loan and if the other teams are anything like ours it’s a wonder there are any players on the lower leagues actually owned by their clubs. Christ knows how many players Man City and Chelsea have on loan, although Strasbourg might reduce the numbers. It sounds like all those players you brought in will start to filter out on loan in a couple of years time,