Interpolic

Just looked and the respective fees were £3.5m for Carrick and a million less for Butt. Factor in wages, age, potential and the probability that Carrick will have been chomping at the bit to sign and it's a shocking football decision.

Nicked my fucking joke, the arseholes.

There are some good figures on there actually yeah, can't post it as on my phone but the article is called In The Premier League, The Sun Always Shines On TV.

If anyone can find figures for how TV revenue has increased over the years then that may come in handy, because the way I see it TV revenue has shot up yet our overall takings have plateaued.

Yeah, that explains the £50m difference.

I have no doubt that we could fill our ground at significantly higher prices if we were playing the sort of football and getting the sort of results Spurs do year-on-year.

We don't make enough revenue that's the problem. For some reason it's drastically reduced. Revenue isn't the be all end all of financial info though. For instance if we still did our own catering our revenue would be quite a bit higher, but that doesn't mean we'd be making more money after costs are taken into consideration (likely the opposite is true considering we decided to outsource it). You're splitting hairs over a few quid, we bring in £50m a year less than Spurs and I think that's a good reflection of where we both are as clubs.

A big part of it is we leave ourselves massively short in various positions every single transfer window, because we're always hanging about for value or whatever.

Admitting Carroll can do more than play in a route one side then saying you don't want to sign him in case it means we play route one under Pardew. You're basically saying you want the manager to fail hoofing the ball over Cisse's head next season as long as it means he gets sacked, presumably we can then sign Andy Carroll to play in a side that doesn't necessarily play route one. Your argument is all over the shop, stop throwing your toys out the pram. I'd have Carroll back and I also want to see Pardew gone, don't see why those ideas are mutually exclusive.

Jesus.

It's not just matchday revenue though, is it? That's not much more than a third of a club's revenue these days. And I think most people would be willing to pay a touch more to watch football that isn't entirely joyless anyway.

Yep. Him coming back was magic, while Solano and Elliott did decent jobs when they returned. Can't think of any other successes off the top of my head.

We seem to spend a lot of time on here talking about former players returning to the club, despite the fact it hardly ever happens.

He's got a massively valid point about us standing still in revenue terms, which equates to going backwards since other teams have went forward in this respect. Mock away though Stu, you seem to enjoy yourself doing it so knock yourself out.

Well that went better than expected.

:lol:

Hatem getting stuff signed by Sgt Slaughter, starting to get a touch worried about his weight now tbh.

Maybe Chelsea will give their fans a season they deserve this time around.

Erm...

Barton's a total fucking prick.

Think about it. How many players leave Wenger's Arsenal and improve, and how many leave and go backwards? He wouldn't need to be Arsenal standard to do a good job for us.

Cronky's right, every single player who has somewhat failed at one club has always failed miserably at every club they've went to since.

It'll be interesting to see who we sign this summer actually, if we buy 2 left backs and 2 central midfielders because they were good value I'll be spitting blood. The needs of the team need to come first possibly at the expense of a few extra million quid, and the needs of the team are to make us less toothless going forward.

I don't think we need another centre half if Coloccini stays, at all. We need 2 or 3 players that can play up front or wide though and that's about it.

Would imagine if it's true that he was too busy fucking around on his phone to have a proper discussion the first time around then we'd never go in for him again.