leffe186

Christ. We're 110th on that list, behind West Ham and Portsmouth and miles behind yourselves and Villa. Villa had a pretty small squad last year too.

Quite a few of the figures are altered by so called one offs. Sweet jesus. The main difference I guess is that you still have that 35M to spend. In Pardew's dreams, anyway.

Fans mock up, surely? Aren't Spurs supposed to be going back to Adidas in anyway? Already signed up for Under Armour year after next. Loads of money. I was really looking forward to it anarl. When I first scrolled down I thought the top bit looked ace (the shoulders), but Jesus, what are they thinking? Something like the Admiral strip from the late 70s would be ideal, and suit Under Armour's aesthetic.

Is there anybody in the world who gives a s***? I don't even know who she is. She is breasts, Dave.

Didn't realise you were that close to Liverpool. That would be mint, ideal scenario.

Apologies if this has already been posted but.... http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/9448435.stm ...are supposedly the rules governing the Europa places this year. If true, then if Stoke lose to Man City in the final, they need Man City to finish fourth. They play each other in the last game, which is now being played after the Cup Final. There's a decent chance that Man City will need at least a point to get fourth, so Stoke would have a sizeable incentive to throw the game.

£38m + Stephen Ireland. Criminal waste of money really. What, them paying it or Villa fighting relegation? Heehee.

Honestly didn't know who to root for today. Even without the league implications I hate them both. Before the Stoke match I had written off fourth and was worried about fifth. We still have to play both of these fuckers at theirs. I've got to bloody worry about football again. Still, Tevez off is a bonus. Out for the season would be loverly.

Cool as fuck from Nani for that second goal.

Even weirder than that, two Stoke goals from open play with shots, not headers.

At least the second leg will be entertaining - and I won't have any stress...

Guys, was the ref a little bit trigger-happy? The only thing I have heard is that Real have been putting a lot of pressure on him.

Jesus. Just got back from work. Would have been nice to see what the game would have been like 11 vs 11, but it's been fun. Beeb says the Crouch bookings were both legit. Would have been nice for the ref to have had a word with him for at least one of them, but them's the breaks.

Sorry, we got three - but would still have been second.

We would have been expecting 10 points minimum from the last four games. We got two. Win them all and we'd have been second. This has been such a weird season. Nobody is particularly good, nobody is totally bad. If we'd played this year like we played the last we'd be in with a shout of the league.

Quite. Well we could have had Real at home! Jesus, what an incredible miss by Fuller. Stoke should have won this.

Christ. We're not going to get 5th at this rate. Dive from Lampard.........no booking.

Enjoyed that. Took me far too long to remember Chris Powell's name. Missed Nicky Barmby too, which is a little embarrassing.

You'll not have seen the Alan Smith thread then. IIRC there was a fair bit of wage discussion after relegation, and understandably so. FWIW here's what one Arsenal fan apparently said about wages: ""Arsenal's year ending 09/10 shows the spending on wages at £111m, marginally (approx £20m) below Man Utd and City, with Chelsea being the top spenders. If we look down the list we will see Spurs at £67m for the same period. This is an extraordinary statistic and it needs some pause for reflection : Arsenal spent £44 million more than Spurs on wages in one financial year. This is shocking. Many gooners complain that Spurs seem to outspend us in the transfer market (which they do) and many neutrals and gooners alike think that Arsenal's brilliant book balancing in the transfer market is one of the main reasons why he should not be sacked. At the same time we all know that the addition of 3 or 4 good quality players would probably be the difference in winning the league this season and possibly 2 or 3 previous seasons in the last 5 years. So the question is two-fold : a) why does Arsene spend so much money on wages and b) why do Spurs spend so little? The fact that Arsenal reward their huge swathes of mediocrity should be a source of grave concern amongst us fans. Players like Rosicky on £80k per week, and on a long contract, Denilson, Bendtner, Diaby & Almunia not being far behind is criminal. Spurs on the other hand pay a top whack of £60k per week and the top earner is Robbie Keane and he is currently off the wage bill altogether! OK, perhaps it is not going to be possible for Spurs to remain with such a low top wage, especially if they want to keep some of their best players such as Bale & Van Der Vaart, but what it shows is that Arsene has totally lost it. He is wasting millions and millions of pounds on garbage players and this is restricting him from spending that money on better players. Make no mistake, this is his decision and his alone."

Agreed. Conjo, saying that selling Carrick allowed us to buy Berba, then selling Berba allowed us to buy Modric etc is kind of true, but only after the fact. We didn't want to sell either Carrick or Berba. We didn't buy them to sell them, we bought them because they made us better, and we could afford them. It's exactly as Ian W says, the prime motivation in buying them was to make the team better - but that doesn't exist in a vacuum. When getting Carrick we were rebuilding an entire squad, so despite spending a lot of money overall we couldn't spend a lot on an individual. When getting Berbatov we were only tweaking our squad, so we had more money available, but we weren't quite at the level to spend silly money. In both cases, we were constrained by our wage structure. We could only buy players who would accept good money, but not great money. That will naturally mean you are looking at younger players (Carrick, Lennon, Huddlestone) or players from low-paying leagues who are not yet proper stars (Berbatov, Modric). That in turn will generally mean that you are going to pay a bit less in transfer fees. The OP specifically talks about Newcastle though, and does ask whether you genuinely have a buy-to-sell policy irrespective of a player's worth to the team. That was clearly never the case with Spurs. We bought to improve the team, only selling if (a) it seemed that we had to (Berba, Carrick, maybe Keane) (b) the player was considered to no longer serve his purpose (Bent, Malbranque, countless others). If you want to suggest that Newcastle have a buy-to-sell policy you have to have transfers that don't fit into either of the above. I'm not absolutely sure you do. Bassong can be explained by relegation, Carroll by silly money. Buying at low prices is surely simply a factor of the amount of money you have available. I think Gosling can be justified because he's young, probably on reasonable wages and if fit will improve your squad. The real test will be the next window or two. If you were really buying-to-sell then a big offer for Tiote (say 15-20M) would mean him leaving, and the money generated would go into five or six players. You can talk about silly money for Carroll and the need to rebuild your squad but Tiote, Barton, Ben Arfa and just maybe Coloccini, are the remaining players to build your team around. Selling one of them for not-silly money would speak volumes.

They missed Henry through injury too. I watched a bit of the game, completely played for the draw the whole way through. I purchased MLS Directkick or whatever it is, really enjoying my Saturday's with it now. How did the Crew look? Boring, no creativity. I think you could put it down to the Red Bulls style though, they did well with what they had. Sounds about right. Schelotto was our creativity. Someone has to step up this year, and I'm really not sure who it's going to be. I hoped Rogers and Ekpo would play a bit like Bale and Lennon, swapping wings etc, but Rogers didn't even start in the first game.

They missed Henry through injury too. I watched a bit of the game, completely played for the draw the whole way through. I purchased MLS Directkick or whatever it is, really enjoying my Saturday's with it now. How did the Crew look?

Good. Fuck em.

Surprising that. A quick look at our results shows that the closest we came to buggering that up was against Tunisia in 1990 - saved by an 89th minute Steve Bull goal. Oh, what halcyon forward days. Didn't realise that Turkey had never scored against us, in ten matches.

Seriously? Man, you could walk it in less than that.