Stottie

I don't do twitter, but when I searched the club name, some people on it seem to think Fenerbahce are about to sign Soldado.

I nearly got in with facebook but the email account it uses has already been registered with a password I can't remember, and more trips to error 502 when I go to reset it.

When Bellamy signed, I remember Coventry fans coming on the old forum with a photoshop of Bellamy as a Barbie Ken doll with a tagline of "He gets in the box! He falls over!" or something similar. I don't know how representative they were, but they seemed well glad to see the back of him.

Some keeper stats here. No save percentage, but you can calculate it from shots on goal and goals conceded. It looks like Adrian had some dropoff from his previous high level in the past season, but still saved a higher percentage than Randolph, so Bilic must have gone off him for some reason. Even if it was high profile howlers, Randolph didn't do better on average in the same team. In 14/15 Adrian conceded two more goals than Rob Eliot, despite facing 44 more shots on target, nearly 50% more. Even allowing for differences in shot quality, that's a huge difference. Some people praised Eliot for not being as bad as expected that season, but I reckon a better keeper would have kept us up. http://www.foxsports.com/soccer/stats?competition=1&season=20150&category=GOALKEEPING&pos=Goalie&team=0&isOpp=0&sort=6&sortOrder=1

Transfermarkt shows him having 50 games of playing time in Serie A over two seasons, the first with his club (featuring Dybala) comfortably mid-table. You would think the typical player from there would get playing time in the Championship. Benitez will remember him because he scored a 40-yarder against Napoli in 14/15. The shot was hit centrally though and the keeper comically lost the bounce.

If we don't have the cash now, we could of course just buy players on installments like many other clubs. You don't have to buy absolutely everyone with cash up front. fwiw, if Haidara on 22k a week is typical of the deadwood, 6M a year from Spurs would cover five of them's wages. Or quite possibly the percentage of all of the deadwood wages we'd have to cover to get someone else to take them off us.

Has all the parachute payment been spent already?

As the squad stands, relegation battle. I expect us to get a keeper in, and if he does well, that should keep us above the scrap. A striker, preferably one who can also play#10, and fairly comfortably mid table. Based more on Rafa than analyzing the individual parts. The quandary is what to do with Ayoze. I don't think Mitro is trustworthy and should be replaced.

Maybe Citeh think there is a good chance of him not quite hitting their level, so having a below-market-value option and cash in hand now is better than hanging onto him. A loan will expose him to playing in a poorer side. The buyback means limited reward for the buyer for a lot of risk, changing the whole deal. For the player, he gets to play CF (presumably) and develop further. Rashford won't be playing CF at Man U. Based on this and the talk of a fee for the Tammy Abraham loan, it's hard to see us buying or loaning anyone from the PL.

Which one? How many Lomana Lualua's do you know? Kazenga? Lomana? (spelling?) Come on pretty mama Key Largo, Montego... ;D

Great business for Leicester. Pity we couldn't get in there.

Olive in hope that we get him in. Finally, a replacement for Moussaka Sissoko!

Maybe it was just the Rocky connection making for an easy chant, but I thought the fans there liked him in a folk hero way.

A DM who can pass, dribble and do dragbacks in tight spaces?

I think Bellamy was more of a good spot by SBR than us buying a widely regarded talent, so perhaps the fee wouldn't be that crazy. Bellamy had lost a full season to injury at Norwich and then struggled in his first season in the PL at relegated Coventry. His earlier success at Norwich had been in the second tier, so again, credit to SBR for knowing what he could do. Robert would be frighteningly expensive.

Well I'm off to Youtube for some Demis Wise scouting.

Reminds me of the photo the Chron posted on their website that showed Anal sat in front of a computer with the browser open at nufc.com.

It is certainly economical and may even be noble to not be part of the crazy fee and wage inflation going on, but there's only so much magic Rafa can work with the players he has available. Some time in the next 30 days or so, we are going to have to bite the bullet and spend the money. AM (I still like Cairney who could also cover for Shelvey), DM, upgrade on Mitro up front, and keeper as a minimum. I trust we have options sounded out and lined up already for at least some of those positions. With all the mad money swimming about, it's easy to forget that Leicester won the league just over a year ago without big wages or big money buys. There may be a vast gulf in spending power between clubs, but the difference on the pitch is far smaller.

I don't watch it, but MLS to introduce video review in all games for goals, penalties, straight reds, and mistaken identity. https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2017/07/20/major-league-soccer-implement-video-review-league-wide-beginning-aug-5

ponsaelius said the other day that we shouldn't sign anyone West Ham are supposed to be after. This makes it sound like good advice.

Not many people watch it, but in Japan, the conventional satellite broadcaster who covered the PL has been down to two live and three delayed matches since last season. They used to have five live games. The new broadcaster of the five live games is a mobile app (!) that is much cheaper to use if you have a contract with one of the three big mobile phone networks. So PL is basically being used to get folks to switch their mobile over to that company.

For Gibson, I hope there is a sell-on clause. It sounds a bit crap that other clubs are free to tap up schoolboys, but that must be the way it is. I wonder what will happen when the next obvious starlet like Wayne Rooney comes along. The tap-up schoolboys rule and loans system in combination mean that larger clubs can hoover up all the promising kids, give them golden hellos when they are old enough to sign pro forms, and then just loan em out so that they end up playing at the level they should be at anyway. Everton are way ahead of us as a club, loaning and signing Lukaku for 28M should have shown that, but even they haven't stopped Ross Barkley engineering a situation entirely to his own benefit. So it can happen to the best of them. Imagine if we had a new star and he got himself down to a year on his deal. People would be calling the club all sorts.

If they are offering him a two-year deal that he's happy with, it would be nice for the club to let him go without trying to hang on for an extra 0.5M from somewhere else. The lad came in and did what we wanted. Good luck to him.

As for Mitro, yeah sell. I quite like him, but he wastes too much time trying to score points against opponents rather than trying to score goals.

Well-spoken managers like Martinez are always likely to overhyped by open-shirts, presentation-over-content type coverage like MOTD when things are going well. This kind of excessive build-em-up sets things up for a stronger knock-em-down when the pendulum swings the other way. Managers don't get long these days to begin with. Martinez inherited a brilliant back four from Moyes, with the only issue being Distin's age. They shouldn't have ended up with the problems they did, even with allowances for Europa League fatigue.