Hughesy

I think that's exactly right - it's basically an insolvable problem and everyone protects their own vested interests. My dad, brother and I have season tickets but we live in the South East. My dad has had his season ticket for 50+ years and all three of us have over 100 loyalty points. Attending a home game is a 600 mile+ road trip and my dad, in his 70s, does this 10 or so times a season. But he's realistically never going to drive up for a midweek Carabao cup game, so he's not going to get a cup final ticket. Do I think that's fair? Not particularly, but I understand why the club has decided to prioritise people who have attended the Carabao cup games.

I'll never understand how highly rated Cantona is in these lists.

I think you’re confusing the concept of whether a player has proved to be good value after the purchase with the idea that, at the time of purchase, the price we paid seemed too high and we might have got a better deal / paid too much because other clubs saw an opportunity. I certainly recall thinking at the time that £13m for a 30 year old defender who was pretty average seemed quite a lot of money to pay. If you didn’t, that’s great.

I think it’s easier enough to argue a case for overpaying for Burn, Targett, Wood, Barnes, Hall and Livramento. Even Tonali as the most expensive Italian ever (I think?) could be seen as an overpay. It doesn’t mean any of the signings above are bad signings per se. With Hall and Tino, hopefully the fees we paid will be bargains given their obvious potential, but we’ve dropped a pretty large amount of cash on them.

Got to disagree on this - compliance with the rules is calculable and, in January, all reasonable major incomes could have been projected very easily by any accountant. For no real reason - bar perhaps no one at all wanting any of the likes of Trippier, Wilson, Miggy, Longstaff etc - we are in a position where everyone knows we need to sell and fast. Inexcusable as far as I’m concerned.

Staggeringly bad management of our finances if we knew about a potential breach in January and didn’t sell then. There was no realistic way we were going to get into the CL in January, so it wasn’t worth the gamble. Now we are scrambling around with a few days to go and everyone knows we need cash quickly. Embarrassing stuff.

If we were genuinely in danger of breaching PSR, surely we would have tried a bit harder to sell either in January or before the end of June? There doesn’t appear to be a huge amount of urgency.

Given how much we paid for him, I'm not sure (absent a minimum release fee) how many teams would be in for him. My assumption is that the fee would need to be well north of 100m before we even consider it.

It's quite interesting that despite our academy being seemingly terrible for years, we could end up with a first team squad containing Longstaff, Anderson and Miley. Obviously there's a long way to go with Anderson and Miley, but it would be a surprise if they didn't end up having good (and potentially very good) careers in the PL.

Really excited to watch him play and develop over here, but confess to be a little anxious that the generally held belief is that we've overpaid. It's been an odd window - if someone had offered me Tonali, Barnes and Livramento, I'd have thought it was a good window, but £125m makes me wonder if there was better value out there. That said, we've barely put a foot wrong on signings...

Think Lavia from Southampton could be a decent shout to strengthen our midfield a bit. Although not sure if Man City have an option to buy him back.

Don't know about anyone else, but I'm delighted with pot 4. Would love to have a group packed with some big names for our return.

Still astonished that the job he's done doesn't attract more praise in the press. I get it - sportswashing etc. But it is truly astonishing. It was a miracle we stayed up when he took over. To then follow that up the next season with a cup final and potentially a top 4 place is staggering.

Surprised people were so convinced he wasn’t good enough. Always thought he’s looked positive on the ball, with good upper body strength. Certainly good enough to be in and around the squad at the moment.

Personally, I don't think we should go much over 60,000. I'm sure we could fill 80,000 seats for big games and/or if we are doing well, but you only need to look back at some of CL campaigns under Robson - quite often our attendances were in the high 40,000s rather being full sell outs. I'd much rather have a packed 60,000 stadium than risk having a 80-90% full 80,000 stadium.

The stadium design is a massive issue. The pre-expansion SJP was far louder than the post-expansion SJP and one of the factors is the loss of noise from the design.

Still haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to be there with my dad and brother. That said, I can’t wait. Got a weirdly positive feeling about this. Bruno and Joelinton are going to have blinders.

We've got a far far better chance of winning this than we did in 98 or 99. The situations aren't even comparable as far as I'm concerned.

Not sure how anyone thinks Anderson is to blame for this. Real shame though as Liverpool look pretty average.

Ha ha - I'm a lawyer. Small print is my day job... I mean - it is what it is. I can't do anything about it now, but I'll know for next time. To be honest, it didn't even cross my mind that cup attendance would be a factor until I saw something on twitter the day before the semi about what Liverpool did. It didn't cross my dad's mind or my brother's, so I don't think it's that uncommon. And I don't recall it being a factor for the two previous finals I went to (albeit I was a kid then so I wasn't buying the tickets!).

I think people are probably allowed a day or two of airing their frustrations with the process, given how long people have been waiting for a cup final.

That's fine - the policy could be literally as vague as "cup attendance will be a determining factor in obtaining tickets to any related cup final". That would leave everyone better informed than they were.

I don't know if any other club do it. My point was that it wasn't clear that you needed to attend cup games to attend a cup final - there's a whole heap of both confirmation and recency bias in assuming this was clear to fans or that fans should have guessed that this was the case. As I've said before my family and I live in Kent, so travelling up for midweek cup games wasn't necessarily that doable, but given we've had 3 season ticket for over 30 years and each season ticket has nearly 100 loyalty points on it, I thought we had a decent shot. Had the ticketing policy been made clear, we'd have bought tickets for cup games and just not turned up. Quite frankly the club could have used a variety of different criteria - loyalty points, length of time you've had a season ticket etc - and any criteria they choose would have had its merits. I don't think it would be arrogant to create a policy in the ST T&Cs to make it clear how cup final tickets are allocated, but we can agree to disagree on that one.

Unfortunately that's exactly what will happen.

I don't think it would be strange to inform season ticket holders how tickets will be allocated before a season starts. Could literally include a line in an email - not a particularly onerous undertaking. Not everyone is going to reviewing the ticketing allocations of other clubs and extrapolating NUFC's policy.