TheBrownBottle

The adidas deal next year will be balanced out by the loss of CL revenue. The Sela deal isn’t worth megabucks. We’ll go over £300m turnover this season and likely the same next, but as things stand I doubt we’ll see growth next year unless some trees start being pulled up.

Yeah, the PL are much happier with debt than investment. Which just further proves that the FFP regs are not there to stop clubs going ‘pop’

Got you. Yeah, they’ve got that wrong - it’s more that it means we’re snookered this month. Once 21/22 drops off we’ve got wriggle room again.

It does have an impact, until this season drops off the books (in three years time)

It still has an impact, and we’ll likely be running a sizeable loss this year too, and next year’s income is unlikely to grow at all. I know everyone has been excited by the size of the growth so far, but the reality is that the growth was really down to how badly Ashley ran the club - that was easy. It isn’t easy to see how much more growth is achievable without success on the pitch. There will be room again in the summer to spend, but nothing like what you’d want to push on. Selling a player for big money would allow us to fill the squad with more quality. The other unsaid thing is that our current big names aren’t here to finish mid table. They’ll be off if a big offer comes their way.

No club’s is. Leveraged buy-outs are the norm in the stock market and has been equally treated as the norm in football.

There isn’t a £74m loss in terms of FFP for last season. There will be tens of millions in acceptable FFP write-offs. The big issue is 21/22, which was a £70m FFP loss - that drops off the three year rolling cycle on 1st July. It is us spending big to fix Ashley’s mess which has caused the problem, and means that we’d be very close to the limit this season

They stayed up last season when others were relegated. That’s worth a few bob.

Yeah, agreed - I think you can already see an improvement in performance levels vs the Mackems and Man City. We’ll be winning more games than we lose between now and the end of the season I’d be willing to bet.

I’m happy to cut Howe slack too, as in I think his job shouldn’t be under threat at all this season. But that doesn’t mean that entire seasons just get written off. This season - irrespective of context - will have spent a lot of that ‘credit in the bank’ that he has. I think valid criticisms can be laid at his door this season - I don’t think he handled the schedule of his first European campaign all that well. I’ve never been convinced that a ‘game by game’ philosophy works at this level - all top European managers think about more than simply the next game. But like other good NUFC managers before him, he deserves time. Chancers like Pardew or Bruce didn’t.

Context is about thinking through all of it. Injuries are part of that - but you’re implying that injuries are simply all down to bad luck. The context for some us would be - why is the same medical team here from Ashley’s time? Why has the head physio appointed by Ashworth left when it became abundantly clear that there was a problem? Why is the manager playing football with an intensity level unsuited to playing two games per week? That sort of context is important, too.

Yeah, I’ve read that too. Money talks though. Of course if the option to sell a player abroad or to another English club happens, we’ll prefer to sell abroad. But I wouldn’t be too sure that we’ll refuse to sell to Liverpool. We will if it suits us. We’re not in competition with them at the moment.

Chelsea haven’t breached the rules as yet though. Their problems are coming further down the line - shitloads on amortised contracts for players who aren’t worth close to what they paid for them. Their wriggle-room will end quickly; they also can’t be finishing mid table forever or else those lucrative commercials start to become less lucrative

Big clubs trade players between each other, and given where we at the moment I’d say there’s no chance we reject a bid for a player because it’s Liverpool; it would be rejected if it isn’t the fee we want.

Not the impression I get. They’ll expect pushback.

Bottom half finishes were failures under Ashley, too. I’m happy for a five year timeline to be ‘challenging’. I don’t see why standards get to drop because ‘jam tomorrow’. And if we have five years of mid table, I wouldn’t worry about challenging. We won’t have the revenues to compete.

Bottom half finish is failure, for me - it always is for NUFC. I know everyone talks about ‘the project’, but commercial revenues don’t grow when you’re a mid table side. And the drop in prize money is significant. It would put us back a year, comfortably.

Doesn’t seem that mysterious to me - Howe doesn’t rate the lad at the moment.

The way we play is partly responsible for the fatigue. You can’t play this sort of tactic when playing every three days, and with a squad blighted by injuries. And a lot of teams have sussed us, too. I think next season we‘ll see changes in play style etc. Howe will spend his ‘holidays’ (I don’t think the man rests) thinking of ways to change it up.

‘There’s fack all ‘appenin’, lads’

There’s only one UEFA cup place for league finish. If Liverpool win the League Cup then it’ll drop another in

Hope him and his family are ok. Mind you, they’d need to be armed. I wouldn’t want to break into that man’s house and see him coming down the stairs to investigate

Yep, this is often forgotten. He used to get pelters - and he was utter shite to be frank. He was played on the left, like he was at Leeds, and it was patently obvious that he wasn’t up to snuff. In terms of transfer values at the time, we absolutely overpaid. Still don’t think he was great under Gullit either, tbh, but at least he wasn’t on the left wing anymore. Looked so much better alongside Dyer in Robson’s team.

Can’t agree mate - it’s a matter of public record. There’s no secret slush fund we can draw down from. If were still in Europe and weren’t having such an awful run in the league, then I think there would be wriggle-room. December has cattle-trucked that. The club isn’t able to hide anything, so there isn’t a strategy here - other than perhaps to make their gripes public to join the noise re FFP

No, the FFP regs were there. FMV wasn’t and the related party transactions was watered down. These were brought in to block NUFC’s growth, and they’ve meekly accepted them.