TheBrownBottle

Now don’t fucking do the usual after scoring

Fucking Yes!

Cue zooming in on the bench with Wissa eating his sixth Greggs pasty of the match

@Paully looked pissrd off at that call

It is neither obvious nor correct what you’ve written. They’re not literally two different words - they’re the same word; when it arrived in Ireland as a loan word in the ‘50s they changed the spelling. ‘Crack’ has been used on Tyneside consistently during that period.

No, they aren’t separate words with separate meanings. One adapted a different spelling.

No, in Ireland its a loan word from the Northumberian and Scots English crack. Our cousins over the Irish Sea borrowed it and gave it a daft spelling to make it appear Gaelic edit: etymology below

*10 mins

Play until Man Utd score - that’s how it works. Almost forgot.

Yeah, you’re right - got myself mixed-up

You’re right, had a brain fart this morning!

To be clear, I agree - we’ve seen worse.

Sorry you’ve lost me there - not sure what you mean. I don’t think spending money to get better players than what we had was a difficult task, nor do I think that the Ashley era was some insurmountable problem which you live with for half a decade. In terms of income levels, NUFC are roughly back to where their ‘natural’ level should be.

No, qualifying for any European competition gives that additional headroom - and increases the ‘buffer’ as a result - you’re able to spend 115% of usable income for football purposes rather than 100%. Our income for an upper midtable finish without Europe next season will be about £380m. A different of 15% is £57m of additional available spend. Given that 8th is liable to be a European slot, that should be roughly a given.

If we’re going to be blunt, it was hardly rocket science replacing most of the Ashley-era team. Is Trippier better than Manquillo? Is Dan Burn better than Ciaran Clark? Is Bruno better than Jeff Hendrick? Is Matt Targett a better LB than Matt Ritchie? That’s what it took.

Not so sure Villa were - and we’ve not just outspent them, we’ve blown them out of the water on transfer fees. More than double actual spend, and in terms of net spend about ten times more. I’m ok with 8th being ‘par’. If all things are equal, it should be what a capable PL manager could do with the squad and money at their disposal. If David Moyes was in charge, I reckon we’d have been about 8th each year, regardless of context. But I think Howe is better than that - hence the higher finishes. And we’re underperforming that consistently at the moment - which is a problem.

They are - but our wages & amortised fees are above £300m at this point. Getting three-quarters of it back would be enough to balance it - and I reckon it would be arguable. We’d run afoul of UEFA’s regs, but not the PL’s.

8th is a minimum - we comfortably outspend the rest of the division. 8th is par. Thats not the same as doing a good or even great job. I know 8th comes from ‘8th highest wage bill’ - but there’s an awful lot of semantics around that (we also have the 7th highest, but hey ho). For example - Villa sign Tielemans on a free - rumoured to be on £180k pw. We sign Ramsay - rumoured to be on £100k pw. So our wage bill for Ramsay (if the numbers are correct) is almost half that of Tielemans. But Villa paid nothing in transfer fees, and we spent over £40m on Ramsay. So from a wage bill perspective, we’re better off - but not from a PSR perspective. Howe has done an excellent job up to this season by outperforming that outgoings cap - but on the flip, we’ve spent a lot more than plenty of the teams above us, who also actually look coached and managed this season. We’ve played more games than them, but we didn’t look better than them when we hadn’t.

The money spent last summer - and the likeliness of no European football - means we are very likely to be up against it under the new SCR rules, i.e. there won’t be much to spend this summer. It’ll be ‘sell to buy’ - and lots of the players who need to be pushed out are not worth very much at this point. I’m not sure that everyone is picking up just how much of a fuck-up those dealings were last year - it’s not simply a case of ‘that was a cock-up, let’s go and get better players’.

If we’d been 8th every year I think we’d have a different man in the dugout.

I’ve seen the ‘ahead of schedule’ thing a number of times - what schedule? Does everything think that this much cash would be spent so that the club would sit in midtable for four years? Where should we have been? Genuine question, not being funny

That wouldn’t put us ‘in the debate for being the top club in the world’ outside of the Hopkinson household

That always looked viable to me - momentum is a thing, and when you’re absolutely shit then signing better players isn’t difficult. You also need a fair bit of luck - three of the sky six being mismanaged to buggery helps, and that situation was never going to last; they’ve got too much money coming in. It’s far harder to get from fifth to first than it is to get from fifteenth to fifth - replacing really good players with even better ones whilst keeping it rolling is what the very, very best can do. Last summer was the first real test of that - and fuck me did we fail badly.

*puts hand up* Feel free to go back through my posts - I said Man Utd weren’t buried, and that they could just as well pull ahead of us next season. In no small part because of *drumroll* PSR

100%. Either we’ve signed the stupidest squad of players in world football who need a full week of drills every week to remember how to play football, or something else is happening.