Village Idiot

He's staying put. That's just last minute brouhaha to get a better deal.

More than anything, I think there needs to be a plan in place. Many times it seemed that Penfold et al just went for whatever player they managed to find at a cut price, ending up with a players that were decent on paper, or at least decent gambles, but the squad made little sense taken as a whole. The relegation season was exasperating on that regard. Now, if there's anything Rafa has in spades, is plans.

Yeah, even when you actually splashed the cash, in the relegation season, it was spread around a bunch of mediocre players because DEALSSSSSSS.

Athletic have signed a guy from Mali for their youth teams, after he spent two years playing in the Basque low leagues. This has created a bit of a stir among their most purist fans. Are they pushing their homegrown rules?

Barça promoted to Liga Adelante. I honestly don't like B teams in the second tier. I don't think it will be particularly helpful in bringing through more players, either.

I suppose they took that video during some "dead" leg of the parade, but it's still funny as hell

The endless tides of excited Getafe fans surround the open top bus as the city comes to a stop to celebrate their La Liga promotion. https://www.facebook.com/futbolwaltrapa/videos/1386431268077310/

Watching the second leg of the Liga Adelante promotion playoff between Getafe and Tenerife. 2-1 at the end of the first half, absolute cracker. Nail-bitter for the fans* *For the sake of the argument, let's assume Getafe has fans.

Yeah, it would kill one of the largest sources of cynical gamesmanship. Probably needs a lot of trials, though. Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk

http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/40311889 The International Board to take up 60-min games with clock stoppage for consideration. I say bring it.

Looks like that the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund that owns ManCity is going to add Girona FC to their collection. ManCity and Girona have had an affiliation deal for a few years, with several City players going there on loan. Guardiola's bro (and uber-agent) will probably become a shareholder too. Nothing shady about this, really. Nope.

They will just play a bunch of friendlies against those sides. It's less preposterous than it sounds.

I suspect this is a mistype, but the prosecutor in the Mourinho tax fraud case has released a document that would imply that Mourinho signed his contract with Real Madrid before agreeing his release with Inter.

Watching the ConfeCup highlights, Tim Cahill starting in 2017, the state of the Aussies man...

What's the latest with Veratti signing? Will it happen? This is going to be the saga of the summer for us. My bet is it will happen in August, and we'll beat our transfer record for him. Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk

We have informed Everton that we are triggering Deulofeu´s buyback clause. We`re probably moving him on, though.

Espanyol. New owner has been rather sensible; hasn't showered money on them but shored up the debt - which they badly needed - and let the football people run things.

Are there any success stories of clubs being taken over by Chinese companies? Wanda has a stake in Atlético, but it's still early days. The Chinese people that took over Espanyol seem pretty slow and steady, very hands off. Peter Lim is Singaporean, not Chinese, but Valencia are a disaster.

Him and Ramis at the heart of the defence was the best thing going for Eibar this season - besides Pedro León bothering to be a good footballer again.

No way you couldn't have outbid Villarreal if you wanted to.

Yeah those. Thanks a lot! Seems he kept churning them out until a couple years ago.

Years ago, there was this dude that used to make comedy youtube Tottenham related videos. People used to post them on here. I'm looking for them to show them to a Spurs fan friend of mine, but for the life of me can't find them again. One of them featured Tottenham signing a manager whose experience was only playing FM, and signing Kim Källström, Freddie Adu... the lot. Anybody on here recall those videos? Cheers.

Holy fuck, what a tragedy. RIP

More worried about the jokers upstairs than the manager right now. Valverde's good, question mark is whether he can handle a star studded dressing room. But we need to nail this transfer window, Madrid have a better squad, plain and simple. Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk

They can. The whole thing was cleared up after the Javi Martínez case. Either club or player can activate the clause. It was never a matter of foreign/not foreign, just whether clubs were able to activate the clause and thus avoid the massive tax burden that comes from the buying club giving money to the player so the player activates it himself - it would be considered a wage and thus come with a 50% tax spike. What happened is that there was a gentlemen's agreement between Spanish clubs to treat the triggering of release clauses as a normal negotiated sale - since the seller would never see any of the extra money paid as tax - but there was always the looming treat of somebody not honoring that agreement. Athletic tried that with Bayern, but it was ruled that clubs could trigger the clause all the same.