Abacus

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."

Three permanent quality signings plus a couple of astute loan signings (with options to buy) wouldn't seem outrageous. That's half a team. One real problem we'd have then would be that none of the current players contracts run out this summer and many which aren't regulars now are on decent wages. We'd have about 35 players then for 25 squad spaces. It'd be almost as much work to move that many players out or on loan.

If that's true, then it's pretty daft from him. I'd always want to meet my predecessor in any job, at the very least to find out what they thought the problems were. I might well not agree with them, of course, but that's a different matter. It sounds like every Man U manager has needed a football ally in the boardroom, otherwise decisions just get made by a committee of dolts. That boardroom person might not have been Ragnick, and fair enough. But they need someone. They moved from Ferguson, who essentially ran the whole club, to a series of different types of managers who then have a bunch of marketeers above them, who aren't football people, making the decisions. They can buy whoever they like, player wise. And that always just seems to be the answer. "Let's just get rid of these players who don't care, and then just buy some new ones that do!". But until they change that culture from the top, they're on a spiral downwards imo. It's like the Ashley years for us - as owners they've no idea of what football means and that permeates every strand of the club.

I find it quite interesting that Man U have decided not to go ahead with keeping Ragnick on as a consultant for a few days a week. Seems like another fine mess. The official reason being that it's because he's managing Austria, as previously agreed, but they just hadn't realised how much work that would be. It's hard to escape thinking they are either incompetent in thinking that, or they decided he wasn't good enough after a poor season as a manager (a completely different role), or that perhaps ten Hag didn't want him there. Anyway, to the point. If Ashworth's role is essentially being the infrastructure guy, the man who keeps everything ticking and makes sure the club is being run properly, isn't there still a gap for a technical director of football? A sort of elder statesman who maybe has contacts in the football world and can provide support and advice when needed. Understands the club, has been around the block and can be a shoulder to lean on for a manager when we hit inevitable rough patches. I'm not saying Ragnick as a person, I'm just saying that's the kind of role Man U have lacked as they've bounced from manager to manager, wasting money on bad signings and focussing on the wrong things, and reading about their recruitment strategy it seems an obvious miss from their boardroom. If you could turn the clock back, it would have been ideal for the likes of Sir Bobby to be in that kind of position. Alongside Ashworth I mean, not instead of, because I think the roles are different. I wonder if there's anyone out there who could do such a role for us.

Whereas I think he'll mainly be filling Charnley's role of buying paperclips and whatnot. Urgent! Printer ink levels are dangerously low, the office fridge needs a quick wipe down and Brenda from admin has gone and left a Muller Fruit Corner in there that's about to go out of date.

And Trippier. As well as the policy of extending player contracts before that under Ashley just to avoid spending on new players. If it's reliable, then according to Transfer market (or whatever it's called), we've got one of the highest age squads in the PL at 28.5. We really need to freshen it up, and if we want to spend big money, then while the odd bit of experience is great and it's got to be taken case by case, in general I'd rather spend that on a 25 year old rather than a 30 year old. NB, Burnley's average age was higher at 30 but they're gone now. Villa had an average squad age of around 26.2, over two years younger on average than us, so less of a risk to them I'd guess.

Funnily enough, Bruce has insisted now that all West Brom players need to move to be near to the training ground so they don't travel long distances. So he clear knows this could be a problem, but still didn't do anything about it for us. He also excluded himself from this new rule of course, because he still wants to live in the North West.

Hate this guy much more than Pardew. Should be banned from the city forever.

They reportedly lost nearly £150m last year. Despite them blaming Covid for around £100m of that, the underlying position still doesn't seem terribly healthy to me. Especially since their own website records them as losing just over £96m in the year before Covid. I'm sure it's all absolutely fine though.

The thing is, those asset valuations only make sense if you expect income will continue to grow as they have done. So, I expect r0cafella is right, and it's a gamble by their new owners that TV money continues to increase exponentially. I'm more of a pessimist there, since we seem to be heading towards a global recession, and it has the feeling of a bubble ready to burst. Meaning I don't know what supports that pyramid scheme idea of constant growth. That said, whilst I correctly called the tech bubble bursting, I also thought the internet in general was just a fad for nerds. So what do I know? And here I am now, come to think of it.

I expect that's true. I'd just wonder how they'll be able to justify it given the landscape has changed since RA took over. If you've had inflated related party sponsorships to boost your income, that's one thing. You can at least point to precedent to back up those future deals. But if you've been reliant on an a wealthy benefactor and are still making losses despite you probably being as successful as you'd expect to be, it'd be tougher to justify that level of spend.

It's not simple, and it's quite unclear as to how it will have accounted for.

Abramovich bought Chelsea prior to FFP (2003?), and I think much of the loan was incurred prior to those rules coming in. In any case, FFP is based on losses over the most recent 3 year period, rather than the whole length of time of an ownership so it's not that relevant. In theory, though, writing off the £1.5 bn does make them a more valuable asset. But there's no indication he was calling in the loan anyway and besides, even if the value of the club as an asset goes up, it makes no difference to FFP anyway. Though, I'd be interested to see how they account for the debt write off - I'm assuming it would have to be done below the line, rather than as a direct profit. Regardless, in their shoes, I'd be more worried that they regularly lose money anyway. Longer term, they won't be such big spenders any more I'd guess.

Joe and Lascelles went for the same ball. Lascelles landed on him and injured him.

Leeds seem well up for it at Brentford, who don't seem up for it at all so far.

Bloody typically if that's Lascelles last game for us, and he's gone and knackered Joelinton for months. Talk about a liability. Talksport speculating an Achilles or a fracture, but they don't know.

Yeah, I'm not saying there was anything dodgy about it. Just wondering what was in it for Atletico to agree to that. From their point of view, Trippier was worth X. It wouldn't make any difference to them if we were relegated or not - in fact, it looked like we would be. They'd want what he's worth. You tend to put in performance bonuses for untested younger players.