Keegans Export

Yeah but Guardiola is tasked with winning the Premier League/Champions League, not qualifying for the Europa League. Brentford have just beaten us at home, scoring three times in the process and they've spent £300m (net) less than we have in the past five years.

What does a bust look like though? Because if it's finishing lower-mid-table then there's every chance that's where we're going to end up this season. If we're finishing 8th or above then yeah you have to say we'd need a top appointment to do better than that with the group we have, but we're 12th and that gap to 7th/8th is getting wider not tighter.

The squad is considerably more than one or two players away from competing at the top level and our commercial + matchday + broadcast revenue isn't enough to fund the surgery required so our only option is to sell someone we'd rather keep for a substantial fee and invest that in three or four new players. Before last summer if you'd said we'd lose Isak and Tonali and have that £200-250m to spend I'd have backed us to pick up six or seven good players and maybe even leave the overall squad in a better position to compete on multiple fronts. Then summer 2025 happened...

There are lots of very good reasons to stick with Eddie, but this isn't one of them. I strongly believe we have to look at a different market for players but because I don't really have a clue who those players are, does that mean I'm wrong? We have a team full of experts who's job it is to find those players so the fact that some mug like me can't draw up a shortlist doesn't mean we therefore have to keep doing what we did last summer. Sorry to call you out here, I see a lot of people drop that line and it does annoy me a bit because it takes away from a lot of very credible, valid reasons why he should stay.

True, but seeing as we've got to go to Chelsea, Arsenal and Man City that may well end up as 27 points from 11 games

There are lots of reasons why the last two games went the way they did (or are going) but he is definitely one of those reasons. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Yeah that's it. His job ultimately is to increase revenue substantially and quickly - then we can realistically talk about competing at the top end. I'd have been happier if he'd been able to give some specifics about that - acknowledge that we need to move quickly because those above us aren't standing still, that previous moves have been too slow and that he is being given autonomy over a lot of the decision making. Tell us that you're going to be creative and ambitious about growing commercial income.

I don't disagree with any of that, and yes ultimately his job is to get our income on a par with (or as close as possible to) those clubs. The question though, is how are you going to do that? The ambition is great, but what are they actually doing to close the gap? The low-hanging fruit has long since been plucked and I haven't seen anything in the way of creative thinking or pressing on with ambitious projects.

Personally I'm not miserable at all. This season has been frustrating but this has been a great few years to be an NUFC fan and I'm sure we'll be bouncing back either later this season or next. What I don't like is the constant drip-drip of ultra-ambitious talk without any real movement on the things that might get us there. Every year we delay, the gap between us and the teams between us and where we want to be increases and makes the job harder.

Exactly - either he doesn't really understand what that's going to take, or he thinks we're daft.

I can't get my head around that 2030 thing. We're in 25/26 and it looks like we'll be rebuilding without Champions League football in 26/27. That gives us 27/28 and 28/29 to position ourselves as challengers by 29/30.

100% If Hopkinson is the guy, then he needs to be given a substantial amount of autonomy.

Haven't listened to TalkSport so no idea if this is accurate or not

It's hard to separate the respective jobs Howe and Emery have done. Emery clearly had more to work with in terms of both squad and sellable assets but his experience at the top level vs Howe has shown at times. Obviously Howe has the League Cup to his name. Both look like having two CL qualifications in four years. In either case, expectation-wise they're both largely in the same boat - 7th/8th is par, anything above or below is over/under achieving, depending on how they get on in the various other competitions.

He doesn't care how it looks. It's just setting him/us/potential buyers up for the summer.

7th - with potentially a Champions League R16 and a LC semi final - is a good season imo. I'd take it now, 100%. I also don't think there's that much difference in terms of keeping/signing players between CL and EL. Even if we make the CL again we're still a tier below those teams who are in it every year and competing for their domestic league titles (eg. Isak) and we've seen that players will still pick the bigger clubs over us even when we've qualified and they haven't (eg. Mbeumo, Cunha). Obviously making the Champions League increases our headroom but I'm thinking more about how attractive a destination we would be for potential targets.

I think we'd need the FA Cup winners to qualify for the CL via the league, then you'll have 1st to 5th in the CL, 6th and 7th Europa and 8th would be Conference League.

Bring back Uri Geller!

Could just as easily be the opposite. It's obvious that the squad needs a lot of work and if Eddie has been reassured that (barring a spectacular capitulation) they're going to stick with him, he might be happier waiting until the summer to see how things play out.

That's a seriously impressive away record for Emery. It's clear we've had issues away from home for a while and the numbers back it up

A fairer comparison might be Howe at NUFC vs Emery at Villa seeing as those figures cover Howe in charge of a fairly recently promoted Bournemouth and Emery at Arsenal (presumably)

Luke Edwards said it was top 8 and making progress in other competitions. Hard to argue against a Carabao SF and top 16 in the Champions League. Two tough FA Cup ties so far.

There's two separate points here; Have they done a very good job overall and are we in a better position than we've been in my lifetime? Yes. Are we close to being one of the elite "top clubs"? No. Yes, we made the top 12 of the Champions League but how many of those teams around/above us are currently midtable in their domestic competition? Top teams don't have to choose one or the other. You're also speculating about Eddie and the DOFs - presumably just Mitchell because clearly him and Ashworth never fell out? How long did it take them to replace him? Were there no other options than going through "the process" of spending months and months on a hire? Howe did a poor job but he's not a DOF and the blame lies at least in part on the ownership and their employed Directors.

Sorry, but by what metric are we even remotely close to that? We've made the play-off round of the Champions League but it's tanked our league form. Our record against the other "top teams" is dire. The gap in terms of commercial income is vast. Our facilities are average Premier League level at best. One poor transfer window and suddenly we've fucked ourselves but which "top club" is just letting the manager get on with it without the structure in place to support him? We can blame Howe for the transfer window (and I've done that myself to an extent) but he never should have been in that position. It may end up costing him his job but the way we go through executives doesn't suggest it's entirely just Howe throwing his toys out of the pram.

It's not even that we could have got better players for less, it's that we seemed to have signed players to play a style of football we no longer seem to play.