SteV

Caulkin's much better when he takes a serious approach to things like he does here, as opposed to the ‘bantz’ approach of PotT.

And to be fair, he’s about to play in a European final, which if they they win will see them back in Europe next season

Very much doubt any kind of checking will be done on a wide scale basis. Much like the cup final at Wembley, promoting the idea of it is more the deterrent than actually doing checks.

For reference the current Fun88 deal is worth £6.5m per season.

I reckon it was probably ankle-related as the very first thing he did when he came on v Brighton was go into a block challenge near the touch line and he came out of it limping quite heavily

Surprisingly it doesn’t look like he’s on massive wages at present. Around the £100k mark. So even allowing for the fact he would probably want a reasonably substantial increase, that would probably be (just about) within our current structure.

If anybody’s up for a bit of nostalgia, if Antwerp beat Union St Gilloise on Sunday that wins them the league and qualifies them direct into the final CL play off round, so they’d be one win away from the group stage. *although they’d be Pot 4 as well so we couldn’t actually get them.

Oh aye, it won’t happen, just stating that it is a theoretical possibility at present.

Can see him being bang up for taking a 90% pay cut

Sits just in front of me. There’s a small group of them, probably in their late teens. Always seem quite pissed up, but not in a negative way. They’ve been absolutely loving it this season (obviously). Great time to be that age and going to the match when things are as they are now.

Might be worth mentioning that’s it not absolutely cast iron yet that’ll well be in Pot 4. All depends on which teams get through the qualifiers. Admittedly, it would take a lot of ‘surprise’ results for 6 teams with a lower coefficient than us to qualify and therefore bump us to Pot 3. Looking at some of the teams in the qualifiers and I have to confess to never having even heard of the team that’s won the Polish league. And that’s where I am now, googling information on Rakow Częstochowa, just in case. Eddie Howe has a lot to answer for…

If anyone is now in a state of wanting to absorb every single thing Champions League related, the draw for the preliminary qualifying round is three weeks today. I’ve posted this link before, but if like me you’re a bit of a sad twat for dates, scheduling, coefficients etc. this site is absolute porn: https://kassiesa.net/uefa/calendar2023.html

I think we’re probably a better team than pretty much everyone projected to be in Pot 3 (Lazio are decent tbf) but it’s still a big ask for us as a team not having been in the CL before to be going somewhere like Milan and winning.

They allocations I posted are just estimates at the minimum allocations we could/would get given. So theoretically Milan or anyone else could give us 15k again if they wanted to, I mean they won’t cos it a different world now and that almost never happens anymore, but they could.

It’s always surreal/amusing when you spot yourself in one of these.

Based on the above and some quick google stadium capacity checks, I reckon the following is ballpark what we should expect in terms of minimum allocations for teams currently confirmed in the group stage: Barcelona - 2750 Napoli - 2736 Dortmund - 4068 PSG - 2485 Benfica - 3232 Feyenoord - 2559 Bayern Munich - 3750 Real Madrid - 4052 Atletico Madrid - 3400 RB Leipzig - 2353 Porto - 2522 Salzburg - 1476 Lazio - 3635 Crvena zvezda - 2650 Sevilla - 2136 Inter/AC Milan - 3790 *as I say, they’re very much just ballpark estimates as a quick search shows Chelsea got 3819 at Dortmund this year and Man City only took 1800 for Madrid (could have been all they wanted like).

Barca aren’t playing at the Nou Camp next season as it’s being redeveloped. Playing at Montjuic, which holds 55k, unless the plans have changed?

Did I hear @Heron get a good luck message for his upcoming wedding last night?

I think Chelsea at home made people realise we were at least genuine challengers. Spurs at home was the first time I became really confident.

Could just be those that responded to the club survey on ticketing last week?

Can’t see Leeds beating Spurs by 3 like.

Imagine the media frenzy if we end up with PSG

Is that the craic with Ukrainian teams? Hadn’t really paid attention to that this season. What’s the fan situation there? Are they getting many ‘home’ fans, and still the normal restrictions on the number of away fans? Don’t think I’d fancy a half empty stadium like.

Anybody else starting working through various possibilities on SkyScanner? ?

The dream that we always knew was possible. We’re not a middling PL team that should be grateful for a fluke season where we qualify for the big league. We’re Newcastle United and we’re fucking massive.