Kid Icarus

It wasn't though. UK media was saying we 'hadn't given up hope' there was 'nothing imminent' Countless posts saying we should move on. End up signing him and the same people just went into the Ekitike thread and doubled down. Even then, there's literally nothing saying Ekitike doesn't want to come here, just that his agent is being unreasonable.

Have yous honestly forgotten that we had like 3 weeks of the same headlines and discussion over 'AC Milan can't match Newcastle's offer, Botman is holding out for them to match it because he wants to go to AC Milan' every day?

But you don't know any of that. If you'd have taken from the Botman transfer what you've taken from the Ekitike transfer, you'd also have been saying the same thing about him like 3 weeks ago about how he clearly wants to go to AC Milan and is waiting in the hope that they can match our offer.

Exactly the same mindset would have had us already onto our 3rd or 4th choice after Botman as well. There needs to be an acceptance that if you're going to be ambitious, you're going to be dealing with ambitious players, who by their nature will be looking as high as possible and that them being ambitious isn't some sort of reprehensible lack of loyalty towards your precious football club.

Desperate for what? It's just a football transfer , if this is who Howe and Ashworth want as their first choice and they've done their due dilligence on him, then hopefully we can get him. There are reports he wants to come, Reims have accepted our offer, and that it's just his agent being arsey. Dunno why there's any need to go on like a rejected nice guy, especially when no one knows the full story.

There are a few jilted Johns in here like

It's been reported plenty of times that he wants to come here.

Yeah it wouldn't surprise me at all if they came back to us cap in hand. If it's only the agents standing in the way and they preferably want a payday over none at all then it's possible.

Could do with an announcement and some videos to watch at lunch time like. The media team must have struggled with getting the transparency on the Bot Signal right or something.

My demand was only that we try. Even if we have a season that doesn't work out because of injuries or bad luck etc, I don't mind as long as it's obvious we're pushing in the right direction. I'd absolutely hate it if we immediately started getting arsey about not finishing top 10 as a fan base.

Taylor was a tithouse more than a shithouse. Proper embarrassment

Good logo and a colour that offsets the black and white nicely

£8m for Woodgate or whatever it was was a canny wedge at the time.

Didn't expect to click reveal and start reliving childhood trauma like. Tooms was fucking terrifying.

Aye, he has proper centrist dad energy like

I thought ( nudge nudge wink wink) had been taken down

I don't think anyone doubts he has contacts. It's that the posts about it are vaguer than Septic Peg's lottery winner predictions.

If there's a big gap between signings now and fans start getting impatient (like what happened inbetween us signing Wood and Bruno) watch what he does. Guarantee it'll be something contrarian and positive. He's the most extremely divorced man I've ever encountered.

Weird how our resident ITKer didn't say anything about Pope or Botman coming by posting 'our next signing will have a head' or something 5 days before it happened like.

I think they know the power that they have like. They're basically a football equivilent of a 'too big to fail' bank that's essential to an economy.

It's got no chance of succeeding like. Look at what happened when UEFA investigated Man City and Man City just got private investigators to do the same to them then took their ban to CAS and got it overturned depite blatantly breaking FFP. This is what happens when you create financial monsters with extreme power. Whether we like it or not our owners are likely the be the biggest ones out there.

We'll have done it in exactly the same way tbf, by swinging the big dick of money around. I fully expect Newcastle to act in exactly the same way if Jeff Bezos decided to buy Crystal Palace or someone.

FWIW, I don't think this will stop Newcastle at all, because the double edge sword of the whole money and power thing is that Newcastle have the most money and will be able to weild the most power as a result. Then that monopoly at the top will essentially start whinging about how it was only okay to act in this way when they were doing it and now that it's being done to them it's unfair. With most of these things, they've created their own eventual downfall.

Football and the way it's controlled is a fucking excellent way to learn about how all industries go when there are a handful of companies who hold all the power and are left to more or less self-regulate.

It's canny mad that Matty Longstaff had the confidence to choose 4 and that he was allowed to like.