TheBrownBottle

Definitely is, I’d hope it’s target no.1. Not convinced that Trafford is that player, but that’s just my take - I’ve been wrong a million times before

Overpaying for English / PL talent. The lad has hardly pulled up trees this season. Tbf I’d rather wait until the end of the summer and see who comes in - but we seem to have spent the last few years operating from a shortlist prepared in 2022.

100%. When I was younger, Serie A was comfortably the world’s best and most attractive league - it’s where all the best players and managers wanted to be. This meant that it didn’t have to be Milan, Inter or Juve to be an attractive proposition - Sampdoria, Fiorentina, Lazio, Roma, even Parma could attract elite managers and players easily. The likes of Bari and Genoa could attract big names and pay big salaries. This applies to the PL today - and NUFC would be more attractive than all but five clubs in the PL, which means it would comfortably be among the fifteen most attractive jobs on the planet. The PL having so many of the richest clubs skews people’s view of the club in terms of its standing - for example, if NUFC went knocking at the door of any manager in the Bundesliga outside of Bayern, they’d likely listen.

I hope the rumours are unfounded, as it would suggest zero has been learned after last summer I can remember on CM 97/98 you could only have 15 players on your shortlist - does our scouting team have the same requirement?

The same group of people who’ve spent the last half century seeing their game slowly down the river and passively did the sum total of sweet FA to stop it? I’d bet the usual will happen - lots of mumbling and grumbling, a handful of angry conversations on the radio, some beard-stroking articles in the broadsheets, and the outcome being completely unchanged.

So far he’s done that twice as often as scoring

Yeah, 100%. It being shit then doesn’t justify it being shit now. Though I wonder if the aliens ever gave Michael Knighton some billions whether he would’ve spent it on his club …

Honestly, I wouldn’t be making that assumption

Yes, I agree generally re pressing - but our squad-building has been poor in regard to implementing it in our chosen style of play. In fact, it’s been a right mess for some time

Agreed - if Iraola was appointed, we’d be immediately asking him to change his style of play. The intended style of play really should be a key decision when a DoF appoints a head coach.

It definitely pre-dates Americans buying-in. Until the 1980s it was against the regulations for football clubs to be administered for a profit. Spurs were the first club to be floated in the 1980s under Irvine Scholar, and once the commercialisation started it just didn’t stop. British owners were often grubby little hypocrites who would play the altruism / ‘putting something back’ card, but really it was often about ego-stroking (or later on profiteering). The PL was well-established (including its practices) by the time the first US-based owners started rocking-up. The Premier League was already a ‘super league’ like the proposed ESL - it is why I don’t get quite as stoked up as some re the ‘cartel’. We spent the 90s in every meeting of European super clubs with our owner pushing for everything that is in place and for a ‘European Super League’, and there wasn’t so much as a peep from our support about it at the time (because we’d have been in it).

You’d hope that a football manager would have some semblance of knowledge of a players’ value, mind

The administration of football in England is an absolute mess, and ‘‘twas ever thus from the moment the Football League was formed. The PL is odd in that it works as a company, with each club being an equal shareholder - as is the FA. So they collectively appoint the likes of Masters - and this lack of independent regulation is part of the problem. He’d need to be voted out by a two-thirds majority. Historically, football was governed by the FA (the national team, grassroots / amateurs, the FA Cup, the laws of the game) and the Football League (the professional leagues ie the top four divisions, plus the league cup). Both bodies were in constant conflict - the northern-based professionals in the north (the Football League) and the posh amateur public schoolboys in the south (the FA). The PL breakaway was backed by the FA as an act of political spite vs the Football League (with promises that it was in the interest of the English national team - to reduce the top flight to 18 clubs, and potentially even 16. Still waiting on that one!). The PL breakaway was really to achieve exactly the conditions we see today - it was really first touted in the late ‘80s, when about a dozen of England’s big clubs met to see if they could hoard all the TV money (including Newcastle). It’s always been a grubby cash-grab, and our club happily fucked over 90% of the other professional clubs in England (ticket receipts used to be equally shared, as did TV revenues between the 92 professional clubs). It is probably a wee bit rich for us to bang on about ‘the cartel’ when we’ve been in the vanguard ourselves of fucking over English football for nearly four decades - but ethical consistency isn’t usually the dominion of football supporters

Eye of the beholder like you say - I was born in ‘82 - but Arsenal, Spurs and West Ham were London’s biggest to most people. After that - it was much of a muchness - Chelsea have always had decent gates which would put them ahead of the others, but they didn’t have much of a history. Sheff Wed?

His biography reads like he was Epstein’s favourite pimp tbh

They were London’s fourth biggest club and had won fewer major trophies than Huddersfield during my childhood, and I was born in the ‘80s. They weren’t bigger than us when Abramovich came in.

It’s the American model that the mostly US owners are looking for - US sports are the embodiment of the ‘closed shop’. It’s a bloody awful model.

Isak went to Liverpool, Gordon is linked with Bayern (and they wanted Woltemade last summer), Tonali and Livramento will likely join an elite club - and that’s not allowing for the likes of Bruno and Hall. Comfortably a third of our squad could play at that level - at least according to managers of those clubs.

The best players want to try to win the CL, not see it as epoch-making to qualify And with the best will in the world, the League Cup is borderline meaningless to top players.

Spurs’ income will still dwarf ours and Villas next season even if they are in the second division. We’re not gaining on them in any meaningful sense.

Yes, it’s a mess, yes the rules are fucking ridiculous and there to ensconce the status quo. But we knew that already, we know the rules - it’s why last summer wasn’t just a case of signing a couple of duds but the manager ‘didn’t get his first choices’. It was gross professional negligence and has likely set us back years. The incompetence that led to this is incredible.

‘Centoonnial’

We took three points from those last five fixtures last season - so more than that would be an improvement at least