Keegans Export

Ben and Todd, sitting in a tree, K I S-S I-N-G

Haven't Chelsea lost something like £600m over the past 3 years or so?

"Excellent" because he's saying things we want him to say

It's definitely the sort of deal I can imagine us doing, and element of risk but potentially a good price.

I'm not totally convinced but have to trust Howe on this one. If the last season or two is his floor and Eddie can raise his level over the next 6-12 months then he should be a very promising addition.

Choo-fucking-choo baby 🚂

I've decided to believe that things are so quiet because we actually are pursuing targets that haven't yet leaked in the press. Trafford in on Tuesday, a new name out of the blue emerges on Wednesday, signed by Friday.

Christ, horrible news. Worse enough someone being taken so early but to leave a new wife and young family behind is heartbreaking.

But this is the key thing - the PL can't decide what we can and can't receive in sponsorship money. They can only decide how much of that goes towards our PSR figures. We could actually (attempt to) achieve the opposite of your concern here. Let's say Riyadh Air say "We're going to give the club £20m/year to call it the Riyadh Air Training Complex". As I understand it, the PL can't stop them putting the money in the clubs bank account, they can just say "Ok but we're only letting you use £5m/year towards the PSR figures because that's what we think is the market value". That's pretty much as I remembered it. That line only makes sense if you're talking about two separate companies (eg. Adidas and NUFC) rather than two companies with the same owners.

I think I know what you're talking about and unless I've either misremembered or they've said something different more recently it was a very vague, wishy-washy answer about "wanting the right partner" To me, that kind of proves my point that this has never been about getting as many APTs through and is actually more of a business case by brining in non-AP sponsors.

As I pointed out, they could have tabled a sponsor, been told by the PL we had valued it too highly but still put it through at the value the PL are happy with. After three full seasons, how much money have we potentially lost out on by just waiting to see if the APT rules change? You can call people out on speculating, but that's exactly what you're doing tbf. The only difference is you're basing your speculation on "PIF know what they're doing, they're playing the long game" whereas I'm basing mine on the fact that maybe they don't really want to push or even challenge the APT rules and would rather attract non-AP sponsors.

No whinging campaign here, just trying to engage in discussion.

That's fine but the issue is we don’t really know what the PIF reasons are. I mean, in the example I gave we could have left £15m on the table, how much more are they expecting it to increase by to make that worthwhile? It suggests to me that they are very much in business mode and are looking for non-related parties rather than looking to push the existing rules to their limit.

Say we proposed Saudia Airlines as a training ground sponsor at £10m/year. PL say no, max is £5m/year. In what way is saying "OK, well we won't do it at all then" the best strategy? Remember nobody is stopping Saudia paying the £10m, it's just that the PL will only allow us to put the £5m towards the PSR calculation. Either the APT rules get thrown out and we can start claiming the full £10m/year towards our income or they don't and we're leaving £5m/year on the table. That's £15m since the start of the first full post-takeover season.

There is plenty of evidence that journalists are capable of committing crimes against humanity tbf. Surely you've read Chris Waugh's weekly transfer (non) update?

No way we've had an agreement with Southampton for over a month and the only person who knew all along was a random Irish betting site with 3k followers

A Ciaran Clark red card saved us from someone doing the same about Joelinton

Funnily enough, he's always been the one I liked the most of all the names we were being linked with last summer (Guehi, Silva, Diomande etc). He seems to have all the physical characteristics we look for, plus he has really good numbers in terms of progressive passes/carries which we might want if we're looking for a Schar replacement.

Congratulations, you are now a sports journalist

I've been banging this drum for a while but I hope our failure to land Perdo leads to a slight tweak in what appears to be our strategy. We already know our starting XI is a match for anyone, we've seen it plenty of times. A quality starter at RW would be an obvious upgrade and a new CB would be ideal due to Schar & Burn being the wrong side of 30 but otherwise I think our best XI is brilliant. The problem is the drop off as soon as one of our key players gets injured. Schar/Burn/Botman isn't bad and Barnes is a good backup to Gordon but aside from that we're miles off it. Obviously bringing players in who aren't fancied by our rivals (eg recent injuries, form) because they are available for less financial outlay is a risk, but so is leaving us short on depth heading into a PL/Champions League season. If we could bring in an immediate starter at RW and then spread the rest of the budget across CB, CM and CF - players who aren't going to walk straight into the side but offer a solid alternative to flogging Bruno, Tonali and Isak three times a week then I'd be happy with that.

Tit

Article I read had their contract offer as €6m/year which would be well within our range but yeah, massive agents fees etc.

From the outside looking in, the problem is that our "small pool" of targets is putting us in direct competition with teams who can spend considerably more than us. Hopefully we haven't limited our targets to the established, 'perfect' players because this sort of thing will happen more often than not. Either we get quoted an extortionate price by the selling club or we get blown out of the water by Chelsea, Man Utd etc.

We're less aware of how long other clubs take to do deals because we're not constantly checking forums/social media to find out what they're up to. I don’t think we actually particularly slowly in the transfer market.

Nice of our owners to send a massive lump of cash to the team that have been sniffing around Isak all summer Maybe they can find a few million down the back of the sofa for a training kit sponsor while they're at it