SteV

Chelsea’s wage bill is incredible viewing. £450k a week on Chilwell and James. Chilwell has 9 PL league starts this season and James has 5.

Oh for the days of Arabic TV piracy…

You’d probably get more bites if you just said McTominay and Billing.

Yes. Not sure if you were located in some part that I’ve never seen, but it’s without question bigger than majority of PL away concourses. Absolute night and day compared to somewhere like Burnley.

That’s a confusing take, because it’s significantly bigger / more spacious than most other grounds in the league?

When you say ‘barely any space inside’, are you talking about the concourses? If so I’m confused as they’re absolutely enormous compared to ‘old English grounds’ like Burnley, Leeds or Sheff Wed?

Not been announced officially, but seems to be around 7.8k.

Concur. Queuing in silence outside the ground for one of them double decker buses back to the town centre, after witnessing us lose one of the worst games of football I’ve ever seen, is etched into my memory.

As impressive as he’s been, and even allowing for substantial inflation, given he cost about £35m, I’m not sure they’re really comparable.

Wouldn’t that just be folk clustering together with mates, rather than actually not being there? Given the way they allocate away tickets I don’t think there’s any real benefit to getting a ticket and not attending?

Can’t see him ever leaving that region again for the rest of his career, given how much of a home boy he seems, and how many teams, at a lower level than Sociedad, there is kicking around there.

They have actually played 10 games since we beat them, so they’ve basically become the worst team in the league bar Rotherham, since that point.

They don’t really ‘decide’ to give anyone the extra place. It’s entirely down to each country’s coefficient points. But we look in a pretty strong position to get an extra spot.

Two that we’ve been linked with are Whittaker at Plymouth and Rowe at Norwich. Haven’t really seen enough of either to make a proper judgement, but Whittaker especially is putting up very good numbers in an average team.

Pretty good effort by Arsenal to have acquired the team they have with a wages to turnover ratio of 51%. Aye, they’ve got massively bigger turnover than the likes of ourselves and Villa, but they still seem to have managed things very well. *that’s 22/23 like, so won’t include Rice, who I imagine is one of, if not the, top earner. And Havertz. Although they shipped out Xhaka and Pepe, who were both probably on a reasonable whack.

So despite only being in the Premier League for 16 of it’s 32 seasons, they’re still somehow sixth in the all-time list of clubs making the biggest losses in the PL… https://x.com/kieranmaguire/status/1764914698552594729?s=46&t=OQLMckSuatbpqWF13Al4mQ

Yeah. But good to see him getting plenty ‘Sterling’ tap ins at the back post from balls across the box.

Yeah, they might, but @Keegans Export’s reference to a new stadium being “incredibly unlikely” was in reference to them starting redevelopment (if that’s what is decided upon).

They’re not going to spend the fortune it would cost to redevelop SJP, and then go and build a new stadium any time in following 25 years (at a minimum!).

Yeah, maybe incredible success on the pitch, and superstar players, is enough to attract ‘tourists’, regardless of atmosphere.

But that’s a self defeating prophecy. Tourists (or whatever you want to call them) want to attend because of the (perceived) atmosphere. No atmosphere = no tourists. Not to mention an improved atmosphere contributing to better on pitch performances.

Yeah, they could, and probably should, but that will involve moving people, or changing another section to safe standing, and we know that will cause a degree of friction. But they’ll just have to deal with that.

I think most people would probably say that’s all very true. And most of us would also say we don’t really have any viable solutions on how to do something about it.

Have a look at Man City’s home record in 06/07 season.

For the our game there in December @LFEE found some street parking about a 15 minute walk from the ground. Not sure if he can remember exactly where it was?