Abacus

I think it just means we've offered 10m on the transfer fee, so it's just badly phrased. And might not be true. From Lille's point of view, they are in no hurry to sell, and would no doubt love some sort of bidding war by dragging this out. Get Milan to match our offer? Great, then we'll probably increase ours. Play it out all over the media? Great, maybe someone else will join the auction. Might be time for me to check out on updates on this one till nearer the end of the window.

A tiny snippet in the Times saying Burnley want £40m for Pope, which would cause us to move on (quite right too). Not sure whether that means the rumoured £10m release clause is real or not, if that's true.

That's one of the least convincing taste tests I've ever seen. "Amazing!" The body language of the woman in purple also implies she's a hostage, and her lanyard suggests she's an employee. Now, come on William, please stay sane for just long enough to convince the EFL. Were all rooting for you. (Although, I would say as friendly advice. If you really are a fantasist, then your fantasies are at quite a low bar re owning a bit of Sunderland. Even if it's not possible, it's still quite a surprisingly poor ambition for someone who can just make up their wildest fantasies in their own head.)

Yeah, I nearly said Peacock as well. Really clever player, always seemed to pop up at the right time with a goal. Most of that promotion team are seared into my consciousness, in fact. We went on something like a 10 or 11 game winning streak at the start of it, and I've never been so disappointed as when that streak came to an end. I think it was Grimsby that beat us. The teenage me then went on my first massive football sulk afterwards, which must have lasted about a week. In fact no, I'm still not over it.

Slightly left field choice, but Barry Venison. I remember getting him from Liverpool, and just his attitude and character helping to change the way the team looked at itself, being positive after years of mediocrity. Fine, it was towards the end of his career, but both him and Beardsley just seemed to roll back the years, like vintage wines.

Well, if so, in a dream world I'd like the following; 1. Proven CM - Paqueta 2. Proven CF - Don't know. Osimhen? 3. Young wide / CF - Ekitickle 4. Proven winger - Diaby 5. Keeper - Don't know. Pope? 6. Regular CB - Botface And then I wake up and we've just got Sheki Kuqi and Seydou Doumbia, on loan.

I hear if he runs around the world anticlockwise that he's so fast time goes backwards.

To be fair, there are at least ten players in the squad I'd rather see go before him. Only reason to sell him is that he's one of the few that might earn a fee. But for what - maybe £10m? He's a useful squad player and probably worth that much to us. Someone to play in the cups and to bring on for the last 20 mins of games that you're just seeing out.

Oh gawd, I didn't know that. I've just googled it and it's really upsetting. In retrospect, I shouldn't have used him as an example knowing that, he was just someone that came to mind as someone whose career was blighted by injury.

So, just reading on here, this is a second recurrence of the same injury. Perhaps his recovery has been mismanaged by Reims, but really who knows. I guess they have a medical department too and wouldn't want to risk throwing in a saleable asset for a fairly meaningless tournament. My genuine question (and it's not specifically related to Etikite) is whether some players are genuinely, physically, more prone to injury. Or whether it's just down to bad luck / poor medical teams / training. On the bad luck thing, the law of averages says there will be some players who just pick up injury after injury for no good reason. We've all seen players who end up constantly on the treatment table (I'm thinking of Dyer for example), but how much of that is down to actual physical problems? And if there's an actual physical tendency for a player towards getting injuries, is there any way medically to predict that?

Apparently, our sponsorship deal with Fun88 was worth less than both Crystal Palace and Burnley's deals. Good old financial genius and 'great businessman' Mike Ashley strikes again.

I think we should gazzump everyone that Milan want to buy, just for a laugh.

Clearly not, if his leg really has fallen off.

After all this, he'll fail his medical with an arse-strain.

Not disagreeing, but on the other hand, the kit manufacturers make a great deal more than that. We may be locked in to Castore, so for this year it may be moot. However, opening up a whole new market for them to sell into would greatly increase the value of the rights to them, presumably allowing you to renegotiate / negotiate a more valuable rights deal with them, ultimately bringing more money back into the club. As well as also allowing you to justify higher sponsorships elsewhere, as you can demonstrate you have a new market to tap into. Fun88 may not have been top of the priorities this year, but I'm glad they've ended the deal early to give them more room for manoeuvre in the future. Besides, I'm going to buy that third kit. The Saudi colours with a gambling logo on sounds like a collector's item to me

Can't wait for this to happen, and for the resident financial experts to chip in with a positive spin. "No, all the money isn't gone. It's just resting in their account."

Hahaha, this is so comically bad. To be fair, though, we could always chip in a few disney tokens ourselves for a say in running their club...

It's another week or so. I'm probably fretting over nothing, admittedly.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but that's how it looks to me too. Having the structure of the deal that Reims would accept out there as fairly common knowledge, and making it clear that personal terms are yet to be agreed seems like a come and get me plea. Not sure I buy this delay being down to the tournament he's in either. His agents aren't playing in it are they? Would there be such a delay if the likes of Real Madrid came calling, I wonder. Sounds more like letting others know there is still time to jump in. Likewise, medicals. These can surely be done anywhere now. No need to fly into Benton to get him to cough and tap his knee with a hammer. Pure speculation and I hope I'm wrong, mind.

According to their local paper, they are about to reap the benefits of Steve Bruce's vast experience as a squad builder in the transfer market. He needs to freshen up the squad, you see, they've been together too long (players' fault). But he'll be working on a shoestring budget, mind, and it'll take time (excuses in already). The local paper wonders whether he'll have access to his old clubs' most exciting young talent, mentioning Newcastle and Man U. (I can only think of one exciting young talent here, and no way should Bruce be allowed to get his mitts on him.) But what other fresh innovative thinking has the master wheeler-dealer got in mind? That's right. He's planning to sign Hamza Choudhury on loan.

Hardly. I think his job is to tell it to them straight. And then launch into a medley of Fog on the Tyne, Coming Home Newcastle and "Sunderland's a massive club".

Feels like one of those awful Covid games where they were only allowed a few in. Commentary is pretty dreary as well, which doesn't help. Mind you, not sure what they could say, other than playing I-Spy with each other.

There's a typo in the first bit of the article, it should read; "any transaction between a club and any third party that is not an associated party of the club". It's saying that everything over £1m is called a Threshold Transaction. These are all automatically checked to make sure it's definitely with an unrelated third party, and not with an associated party. The compensation we're paying Brighton for him gets checked because it's more than £1m. It's only if they decide it's actually with an associated party that they do the fair market value test. Because Brighton are very obviously an unrelated third party to us, that part of it shouldn't take long and the fair market stuff should be irrelevant. In fact, I'd have thought that bit should have taken about two seconds, since the clubs aren't allowed to be in the same league and linked each other in the first place. But hey. Then they also check Ashworth's own wages are what we say, to make sure we're not hiding costs by funding him via some other linked company.

Zinchenko was linked to us very speculatively a few pages back. Probably nothing in that, but even so, still be quite interesting to watch him playing in Scotland vs Ukraine tonight, mainly given we've obviously got a gap at LB right now.

"The EFL are pleased to announce successful the takeover of Sunderland today. The consortium is led by Allen Stanford, Walter Mitty and Roman Abramovich's dog, all of whom have passed our rigourous tests with flying colours."