TheBrownBottle

Yep. I’d happily see a reserve side vs Arsenal to ensure full fitness for Blackburn (other opinions do exist, though)

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Divvunt wreck him unnecessarily Eddie

‘Hi Graham, it’s Kyle Louis-Dreyfuss, would you like to manage Sunderland? It’s a division below where you could get a job, and you would need to take around 5% of what you earned in your last one, plus when you get sacked after a couple of months because of a bunch of whingy impatient cunts calling for your head your career would never recover. So how about it? Graham? Are you there?’

If that were true, then the league cup games would have the best atmospheres of the lot. But they don’t.

How many left backs do we need?

I enjoy watching famous tax dodgers getting contracts to build new HMRC buildings in the city. Irony means far more than propriety to me.

The value of her shareholding doesn’t change, she’s diluted as she can’t keep up with PIF’s input of funding. She was aware this would happen at the beginning and said so herself. She’s a minority shareholder with a management contract from PIF - nothing in terms of share proportion changes any of that. I wouldn’t be crying too many tears over it.

Yep. No one with the scantiest knowledge of football would ever call Everton a ‘small club’; for a man in Masters’ position to do it is unbelievable

I’ve always believed that the solution would be to limit investment as a proportion of income, inversely proportional to existing income, using the club with the highest income as a cap. So you cap Man City’s current owner losses to say 5% of income, which if their income is £700m would be £35m (roughly what the current FFP guidelines are), but you might allow the club with the 17th highest income the ability to have 100% owner losses. So if the 17th highest club has an income of £100m, their owner can invest another £100m. Alternatively you could have caps entirely income-dependent and not relative to each other - so perhaps a £500m bar with no allowable losses above £25m (5% of £500m, but no additional millions allowable above it - so a club with a £600m income can still only lose £25m), and grade it down - so perhaps £400m clubs you’re looking at 10%, £300m you’re looking at 25%, £200m you’re looking at 50%, £100m at 100% etc. That would allow owners to grow any club, but investment growth would slow the higher actual income becomes. Probably a shite idea, but that would be my fix.

FMV is the biggest issue, it has to be said. I’d have a bit less of a problem with it if it was administered via an independent arbiter. It’s so obviously fixed at the moment its disgraceful

Next season. Given UEFA’s rules from next season (and especially the season after) the club are going to need to pull their finger out re commercials and matchday income. I hard to picture how exactly we catch up with Spurs at the moment without a new ground and some serious sponsorship money

They can sell any narrative they want, doesn’t make it anymore true. Mike Ashley is a billionaire, but we weren’t a billion pound club.

We’re not the ‘richest club in the world’ by any metric. The PIF isn’t the same even as Abu Dhabi’s ownership of Man City or Qatar’s of PSG. We’ve known since the takeover that this wouldn’t look remotely like Man City. What’s happening is that the likes of ‘True Geordie’ are just realising what most of us realised two and a half years ago - that there are significant constraints which we’ll be operating within. The PIF either knew about them beforehand - in which case it suits their plans - or they didn’t, and they’re thicker than Ashley when it comes to due diligence.

Well, you’re not looking at the whole pie Amanda

True enough, I wasn’t one of the great doubters there mind And Gordon wasn’t exactly your ‘moneyball’ signing. He was pretty well known

Great. Happily, we took advantage of all of that with the signings we made in the last two years. Minteh was the only one I wasn’t familiar with, and I’m far more of a passive observer of football these days.

And yet, incredibly, a half-switched on football fan can identify good players and bad ones. For all of the waffle and data crunching around it all, most teams tend to sign players that all of us have heard of.

Yep, that is absolutely fucking nuts. We’re comfortably about half a decade away from being in that position. If it’s true, the club should be asking very serious questions of all involved.

*NUFC proceed to buy Tommy Svindal Larsen*

Given he's an NUFC fan it all seems like a perfect fit, but he's been at Brentford for quite some time - I'm sure he'll have had other approaches; maybe it would be difficult to persuade him to move?

I would think she's effectively the ownership representative - acting like a chair - rather than running the day-to-day football or commercial operations I hope so, anyway

It honestly just sounds like Henry Winter has never played Champ Man. He should try it; it would blow his socks off

When Ashworth explained it on TV, about being in the middle of a wheel and spokes coming out to different functions, he just sounded like a middle-management airbag who’s job is simply delegating stuff for others to do. Hopefully there is a lot more to it than that, but from what I can tell he didn’t actually directly do owt.

Exactly. Apparently he isn’t involved in scouting all that much, he only finalises contracts etc. We’ve got a training ground to build too - and I’m sure that will have soft landscaping if he want to get his gardening gloves on