Hughesy

I was very much against the Wissa signing at £55m. Woltemade sounded pretty exciting as a prospect. That said, it wasn’t like there were loads of good strikers who moved last summer who we missed out on that we didn’t try to buy. In fact, I’m not sure there were any. Even now, you look at the strikers around, it’s quite hard to see obvious targets. Clearly there must be someone half decent somewhere, but there does seem to be dearth of good forwards.

Probably our best player last night after Hall. Been a revelation over the last few weeks.

What a player. That’s all.

Yeah - I don’t really disagree with that, although I’d query if anyone would really care about the Conference League (either players or fans), so almost not sure it’s worth the extra games. Top 6/7 should be our target, but I think the circumstances of this season have to be taken into account and Howe’s been dealt a tough hand (some of his own making to be fair).

I’m still not sure what people are expecting. Leaving aside the starting point that Howe inherited and everything he’s achieved since then (2 CL finishes, a cup final, a cup win FFS, going deep in almost every competition), the fact is that our realistic finishing place is somewhere between 6-8th. I certainly don’t expect to be finishing top 4 every season - the gap between us and the Big Six is enormous. One sub-par league season isn’t a disaster after the Isak drama and the most number of games played in the entirety of Europe.

I won’t. And I want him to stay and turn it around. I just fear that something’s broken or he’s run out of ideas. hopefully I’m just panicking and those with calmer heads prevail and they get through this rough patch. As I alluded to (I don’t post here much anymore), I’m fine with finishing 10th in PL, but I want to see some signs of improvement for the rest of the season.

I don’t quite know how I’ve changed my mind so quickly, but after being firmly in favour of giving Howe the rest of this season and at least half of next and accepting that we might not qualify for Europe this season, today has finally made me wonder if he’s got it in him to turn this around.

I initially wanted to put down £150m but thought I’d be regarded as delusional. To my mind, none of them are top 4 wingers. If we want to be a top 4/6 team on a regular basis, the overall level needs to go up pretty quickly.

I find him infuriating to watch and, to be honest, I’ve never really rated him even when he was contributing. He’s technically just not that good - as said above, his first touch is poor and his passing isn’t crisp or accurate. As soon as we aren’t playing on the counter or have a low block, he become completely ineffective. Frankly, if someone offered me £100m for all 4 of our wingers, I’d probably sell them all and start again.

What’s annoying with Elanga was that he actually looked fine for his first few games but a lot of fans seemed eager to get on his back. His confidence is absolute rock bottom now and he really is playing badly now

I’m sure we were 6th in the XG table before Sunday, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Rory Smith’s a really good journalist and is very self-deprecating in his style, so I wouldn’t take that too seriously…

Lots of analysts really rate him.

I think Jackson is hugely underrated and would do really well here. Not sure I’d pay over £60m for him, but he’s definitely worth 50-60m in today’s market.

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.