ponsaelius

My word.

Was pure shite like. Hate pre-season. Highlight was seeing so many overweight yer das fuming at the Hellas players taking time oot to have a lie down on the pitch.

Both Diame and Perez will be ahead of de Jong in the pecking order. And rightly so.

no doubt the club have been fucking him around all summer long.

Son and Wanyama/Dembele are probably the starters who Spurs could be improved upon most easily, but you'd probably have to be buying a £50-60 million player to do so. Dembele from Dortmund, Keita from Leipzig, maybe. That kind of level. But they have their sights set on higher than Spurs.

Well the problem is they literally can't improve their team without going out and buying a genuine top class player. Their first 15 players or so, are extremely strong. They tried adding to the squad last year - Sissoko, Janssen, Nkoudou. £55 million worth there, and they didn't really do much except fill the bench. To improve, they would need to add a real marque signing, and that would mean breaking their strict wage budget. Something that's not gonna happen during stadium building. I can understand why they aren't buying.

Think they'll do very well again tbh. Probably will sell Sissoko and get Barkley before the end. A bit of continuity for them is fine, they've got a young and growing team. Still think they could do with another forward but they didn't struggle without Kane last season

Spurs are building a stadium. Their budget is limited.

30k isn't a bad effort in the circumstances. We got 36k in our first Champo game in 2009.

Prudhoe getting a shoutout on sky telly, what a time to be alive

Sunderland will be top half of mid-table. That league is pure shite.

Jees.

The last time I listened to Total Splurt was about 6 years ago and Ando was saying exactly the same thing about Cabaye, while praising Bruce's signings of Craig Gardner and David Vaughan.

hope the club liquidates

West Ham fans like his attitude but all seem to agree he's basically shit.

We're going for Adrian as well apparently. Honestly don't think he's that much of an upgrade on what we have, but maybe I'm underselling him.

Watford are in talks with Karnezis.

Of course he would be a backup, or an option. That's the point. It means we're replacing Murphy with a younger version, rather than using his freed space to bring in a new first choice. Disappointing, and shows we have fuck all to spend.

Jees, we are scraping the barrel here. Pathetic stuff.

I'm going back a few pages but I'm interested again as to why people rate the Bundesliga so highly as a league. It seems to be largely from the fact the national team is successful and that there was an all German CL final 4 years ago. I find German football a bit of a contradiction for me. It has lots of ideals that should be admired - cheap tickets, full stadiums, 51% fan ownership, focus on youth development. If I lived in Germany I think it would be fantastic to be a match-going supporter. However out of the top 5 leagues it's easily the one I watch the least from the armchair, and I would now probably not tune into anything other than maybe Bayern vs Dortmund. I find the atmospheres bizarrely sterile despite the huge attendances. It's like watching Pro-Evo crowd, full of colour and the bouncing up and down happening without any correlation to whats going on on the pitch. Then I also find that tactically every game is very similar, with teams playing largely the same style of football and the same systems. Add to this the clubs that have competed at the top in recent years are often plastic, corporate style clubs - Leverkusen, Wolfsburg, Leipzig, Hoffenheim. Despite the good ideals, it always comes across very packaged, sanitized and boring. I'd struggle to list the derbies too, other than Dortmund vs Schalke. All seems like something I should enjoy, but I really struggle to do so. Find it dull tbh.

anyway if Qatar weren't spending it on Neymar's salary they'd be spending on funding ISIS wahhabism so it's probably for the best

Flip is right. He is going because of a combination of the money, the new challenge, the greater responsibility, the location, and that he's joining a team who are - in all honesty - a similar level to the current Barca side. Barca only beat them last season by 1 goal, thanks almost entirely to Neymar himself. Arguing that it is PURELY the money is a poor argument. If in an alternative reality APOEL Nicosia or BATE Borisov paid his release clause and offered him the same amount of money Neymar would not be going there.

Don't really have any issue with any club from a lesser league spending loads of money. FFP and the way European Football is structured is screwed anyway. If some dirty oil state wants to pump billions in and fuck around with the establishment then good for them. Hope Chinese clubs join UEFA as well.

Top players could go and play in the Moldovan league for all I care, tbh. Ligue 1 produces endless amounts of talent every year that gets raided by foreign clubs. Some external financial backing takes a player the other way and Barca's worldwide fanboys are having a whinge about how unfair it is.