Abacus

Meanwhile, Ashworth considers whether turnips or carrots should be his main winter crop.

Just goes to show how little matchday income is the main factor - it's all on broadcast and (mainly) commercial income

Haven't seen it myself (yet), just people re-reporting the Mail

Some lovely grizzling on RTG about football is now ruined forever and will become a closed shop. Conveniently forgetting that it already is, and besides that they were bankrolled by Short well above their means for years as well. Now it's state ownership that's the problem, rather than who has the biggest most spendthrift billionaire (foreign or otherwise) as if that makes any difference at all to the argument. Ah well, it's all very sad. In fairness though, no matter who you support, I can't see a good outcome from any set of either restrictive or unrestrictive rules. If anything, there should have always been more rules about owners who actively try to rinse a club instead, as if it was OK to exploit a club instead of putting your money in.

If the related parties rule goes re sponsorships as well though, the revenue part of it could be less of an issue.

I'd imagine various other forums from clubs wanting to cherry pick our players will be taking this proposal well. So, for a balanced and unbiased opinion, I'm off to skim RTG.

I want us to be able to keep the talent we took a risk on and brought here, and to strengthen the places we've needed to and then compete with the might of clubs with the income of Man U, or the attractiveness of London, and to stop the talent farming/ having to sell home grown players that the rules have caused to happen. Liverpool and Leicester to a lesser extent have both shown that it doesn't make the league a foregone conclusion with the right combinations of scouting and management. Longer term, yes it's not the right answer either. But then the ambitions of the Man City (and our) owners can change, as can everything. For instance, IF there was such dominance, I don't think global interest in the league would carry on growing as it has, and that itself could be a factor in what some owners want from it. In the meantime, I'd await the crying of certain owners who you could argue have treated the league as a cash point to be monetised and protected with a certain amount of glee as well.

Let's not count our chickens but, I think if true the rules were snookered anyway in two ways. First, everyone can see the ridiculous consequences of PSR on certain clubs, that it's going to mean years of appeals and legal challenges and which they must also suspect they might lose. Secondly, there's us. If forced to sell some of our better players this year, we'd only use the money to reinvest and keep coming back stronger. If six clubs were really trying to hold us back, perhaps the penny has dropped with enough of them that it's only a matter of time and they're going to have to accept financial reality and deal with it, so might as well bite the bullet now.

I think part of the trouble is that, in most cases, we wouldn't really be happy with doing a Man City or a Chelsea either. Well, maybe just for a bit There's an always going to be an element of "well, other clubs were allowed to do it, so where's our moment in the sun?" for us. Whilst, in the back of our minds also thinking that two wrongs don't make a right etc and getting into a pointless tit-for-tat with other historic wrongs about fairness in the sport. For me, in this thread, the argument has always been more about how you stop other more devious forms of controlling the league, in which FFP, coefficients, etc are causing intended or unintended impacts on clubs and more importantly their fans. It's a right old mess and can, at times, make you forget the actual football and concentrate on (temporary) owners and incompetence in the rules instead, which is a fun old way to live when it's supposed to be an escape. But I'm sounding like a broken record as most of us vaguely think the same and it's probably been expressed better by others, so I'm going into the chat thread to read about people's awful pints of Guinness instead.

Nah, of course there'll be people listening when you make valid points. Think we're all a bit narked with a draw today as well like you must be too. I have no problem at all with Spurs building the way they have, or reaping the benefits of that. Ideally, it's how everyone would do it IF everyone was starting from a level playing field, which they aren't. I have no idea either how you cope with an owner that plays by the rules but hinders you in the long run which applies to a lot of clubs. But then, I can never personally forget that in a different example of bad ownership that Spurs were quite happy to join the ESL, wreck the entire league permanently and entrench a non-competitive advantage for themselves when they thought they could, showing the reality of it, and at that point the moral high ground argument about doing things the right way is sunk. You sub-human scum .

Out of all of it, and there's a lot that does, it's the coefficients that bother me most. Get into the champions league against the odds and try to break into the big time? Well hard cheese, you'll get put into the toughest group and get less money as well for no sporting merit reasons but just BECAUSE.

I'm thinking our medical team should stop checking reflexes by hitting players' knees with hammers. But, bad luck Jamaal, you surprised me with how good you were when needed this season.

Which is fair enough re the long term plan and I completely get why you'd want someone to be actually prioritising football things for a change, what I'm questioning is why he is seemingly doing it so publicly given how limited sympathy Man U will get, allowing clubs to hold them over a barrel.

Ratcliffe comes across as a bit of an idiot in all of this. There are going to be some tremendous gardens around the country.

A master at his craft. In real life, I'd bet there's not more than 1 in a hundred people here that would want rid of Howe, and each of that minority need a crane kick to come their senses. Criticism is fine, of course - it's a discussion board after all, and the best managers always have coaches that will challenge them. Not that we're coaches, just a bunch of well-meaning idiots myself included, which should probably be the subtitle of this forum.

Well, we're going to have to disagree then, in a scholarly manner. I was mainly just sticking to things on the pitch and ignoring the PSG robbery, but then you have the ridiculous cup draws, the Tonali situation and the freak injuries trying to cope with a squad built by Ashley after years of neglect. If you're talking off the pitch, then the years we couldn't or wouldn't compete is comfortably trumped by realising that the cards are stacked in such a way to stop us, or anyone else from doing so. Maybe saying that's bad luck is describing it wrongly, but we certainly did it at the wrong time. Thing is, we were finally playing like we all wanted and were ready to give it a go (well ahead of time) from where we should have been. Shit luck, as I say. Edit; it's still been a hell of a ride and nowhere near as dispiriting as some of the Ashley years, so I'll definitely give you that.

Sadly, or happily, I've been around NUFC for a long time. I've not seen any combination of shit luck like this before. And I say this having still enjoyed an amazing European adventure, two decent cup runs and still the chance of a crack at some sort of European football next season. This season is one of what ifs, and as they say, it's the hope that kills you.

Yeah, I think most people are just frustrated with the way the season has gone and need someone to blame. I know it's a forum, but I don't know any of his own circumstances and I'm not prepared to throw him under the bus. Howe will know more than us and has asked us to back him, which is good enough for me. And, sorry if this sounds naive, but with Howe sometimes you just need to trust someone who has been working his arse off to turn things around for us since day 1.

At least we've probably used up all our bad luck for a decade this season already. And, re the surgery, I think in a lot of ways I'd be less worried about him coming back from it a different player, so hopefully he can keep his morale up during the lay off. Not only have ACL treatments come on in leaps and bounds but he's never been one to rely on explosive pace in the first place, but more on his intelligence and positioning. (Anxiously awaits news of a freak brain injury on his way to the hospital.)

As far as I know, the first injury was pure bad luck, but then it wasn't picked up properly for a couple of games which wasn't great, that's all agreed. There was a period of rest and rehab after what's been described as a marginal call to go that way. And then it was 'healed', but with continuing scans which all said he was OK to carry on playing. So it was presumably just another piece of pure bad luck that he got another completely unrelated injury in the exact same place. If that's what the position is, why has Howe now come out saying the decision for him to play was wrong with hindsight? NB if you think I'm coming at this from a position of complete medical ignorance, you should be aware that in my teens I watched multiple episodes of Dougie Howser MD, and followed this up in later life with a refresher course by watching House, until it got silly.

If that's what happened, I think that's what Howe has to say rather than keep this in-house. It would only take one specialist or Botman himself to come out and deny this version of events for the whole thing to come tumbling down. I guess the thing here is that, if, with hindsight, it was the wrong call that they do learn from this. Maybe it was a coin toss decision that could have gone the right way and everyone would have been congratulating themselves, but from the outside it does seem a gamble in retrospect. Incidentally, if the advice was to rest to avoid surgery, maybe he should have just actually rested instead of playing professional football repeatedly.

And also, leaving aside that he's a Brazil regular and all, there wouldn't be all this noise around him (Klopp apparently wanting him etc) unless big clubs weren't actively trying to unsettle him. Can't think of a more important player for us, for what he brings both on and off the pitch.

Not sure the Saudi Dreamland Station would want rollercoasters going to the gallowgate for branding reasons. But divert the rollercoaster to the newly sponsored Middle East Stand and Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt.

Get all 50 of them new jobs in Beamish.