Hanshithispantz

I can see what you're trying to do here but you come across like a 79 year old who's just discovered the internet culture war.

They'd probably appreciate some constructive critisism then.

People can smile as we get relegated all they want like. If there's legitimate critisism to be made though then I don't get why we shouldn't make it? We're struggling in the transfer market and it's obviously not just becuase it's January and we're in a bad league position.

Like absolute nonsense like this. 'instant gratification culture' Sorry I'd prefer we weren't relegated like.

But I don't think many people are actually offering un-nuanced opinions? There's been 1 or 2 but most posters have been discussing what they think of our attempts in the window, I haven't seen much genuine negativity towards the new owners. Overall, I can't begin to wrap my head around those people moaning about 'only 2 signings', DOF taking too long etc. Check yourselves man. They've bought the shell of a football club with no soul, heart or infrastructure. Like it's perfectly reasonable to 'moan' about only 2 signings because we're very likely going to get relegated. I just cannot see the benefit of not being critical when there's obvious reasons for it. It's not being unappreciative.

Think we're bordering on happy clapping at the minute like We're infinitely better off now than we were under Ashley, and that's the case even if we do get relegated, but if we cannot discuss things that we think need to change then what's the point? You can be over the moon with our current situation while also thinking that we'd be better off with someone advising them on the football side of things. I can think Ashley is a cunt while also thinking we got absolutely tortured with the Chris Wood deal.

Ashley isn't here though, they are. It's completely fair that they're judged on what they have and haven't done. I'm not saying 'PIF OUT' but there needs to be recognition of where they're going wrong. Going into January with Howe and Nickson dealing with transfers seemed a bad idea months ago and it's looking a bad idea now. As for Digne, Villa took advantage of a situation and got a good deal. Again, these aren't rare incidents. If you're on the ball you will make good deals. We did with Trippier. They're both top internationals so aren't the rule in themselves but if you go down the ladder a bit you'll see fair deals being made all the time for players more than good enough to improve us.

I mean Digne went for a pretty decent £25m from 1 prem club to another, in January, not all fees are completely outrageous. It's feasible someone like Cisse could go for cheap. It's hard to properly judge transfer fees as they're random as fuck at times, but Cisse like deals aren't some thing of the past. Maybe they're harder nowadays I dunno but I would be suprised if there weren't strikers out there who would do very well in the Premiership for £10m.

Aye thats it. I'm not expecting much from the consortium until we get a DoF in, there may be 1 or 2 suprises before the window closes though (at the end of the day Howe and Nickson will know a lot, as much as I'm not fully confident in them). Dokko has obviously went a bit over the top, aye Completely undersrandable to be frustrated that we look to be getting relegated though, if we do the PIF take their share of blame.

My prices aren't way out, I'm just stating what we paid for them. The point being that we identified players for reasonable prices and under Carr we did this regularly. You absolutely could find another Perez for £2-3m in todays market.

You're just pulling figures out of your arse here though, the market across the board has not went up as high as you're suggesting in the last decade. Absolutely no way Tenerefe are getting anywhere close to £15m for a Spanish second devision forward. We see teams make shrewd signings all the time.

Like @Toon No9has just mentioned, someone like Azmoun wouldn't cost £70m. The reported fee is something like £4-5m. Now whether or not he's any good is beside the point, there are dozens of players like him who we could pick up for less than £10m. For reference we bought Perez for a couple of million and he came in and scored 3 in 3. Perez (of back then) would be overlooked nowadays because he wasn't high profile enough and wouldn't have Premiership experience. If we're talking just January. We bought Cisse in January for about £10m. When it comes to players like Botman and Carlos I completely agree, selling clubs know they're in the drivers seat so we have to play it clever. As great as it would be to get them in early we cannot just toss absurd money around without trying to negotiate.

The reason we're finding it difficult is because we're exclusively going for extremely obvious, high profile deals and players from the Prem.

If we identify a player who would improve us we can still buy them though. It might cost us a little more but I doubt some minnows in the Argentine Primera are going to be giving it the big licks if we offered them above market value their players.

It obviously just comes down to them not being cutout for the task yet. They wouldn't be putting big bids in for defenders if they weren't serious. It' ignorance rather than malace I just wish people would stop pretending January transfer windows are some kind of mythical beast.

We should stop locking nonces up and instead put them through a GRUELING JANUARY TRANSFER WINDOW.

We might be trying to land a Jean Paul Gaultier sponsorship or something.

In fairness I do think centre backs are a position where it's probably worth overpaying on. The ammount of shite CBs out there is ridiculous. Feels like finding a genuinely good one is harder than any other position.

Just for reference, the players Stan is talking about here are Kieran Trippier and Chris Wood. He is aware of this. Why he has made these comments is anyones guess.

Surely more to it like as I cannot imagine us turning Lingard for 6 months down at £3.5m like

Yeah, I'm not sure what other people are seeing like but I think it's been clear most of the window that we're not doing too great. Our squad is absolute shite and outside of some obvious big money signings we seem to be really struggling to identify players. £25m and reportedly £80k a week for Wood is incredible. That's like 2-3 players worth of wages and transfer fees of Wood's quality

Aye, there's always some modern, sexy version of football which we all want to play, like Total Football, Gegenpressing or Tika Tika, but a pragmatic, defensively solid side has pretty much been the basis of most Premiership sides since as far back as I can remember. Tony Pullis' Stoke were 'negative football'. I deffinitely want the sexy football myself though.

Tagliafico - Gosens on the left and Trippier - ASM on the right could border on pervertion.

Also Gosens and Tagliafico could both play together.

A proper LWB is important if we ever want to go 3 at the back like, we need one. We need centre mids just to be able to play football at all like so they go top of the list.