Kooiman

What a goal. Like watching Brazil.

Remember when Shola put a bit of muscle on around 09/10, he reminds me a lot of him in the way he moves.

Read this in the Isaac Hayden interview and fell in love with Bruno all over again.

Mildly fascinated by him. I don't think the original owner is in charge anymore. I think it's a mix of agent fed lines and guesswork. So many of his 'exclusives' are player centric. When Ornstein and the like are crediting him you know he's getting info from somewhere. The fact he's not doing anything public facing (TV, Radio) is also interesting. All of these confidence tricksters I've seen come before end up chasing that and get exposed.

Canny little NBC documentary on them. I think their marketing has improved massively in the last 18-24 months. I'm still not convinced they'll do well this year though. Too many players that go off the boil for 8-10 games a season which you can't do in this league if you want to stop up.

Van de Beek is the perfect comparison actually. He's more of an 8 than a 10. I think you're right, but it's tricky. They want to be challenged, the money isn't great (relatively). It's why those Ajax graduates feel so hit and miss for me.

Please no. I look at him and see the same issues that plagued Davy Klassen and Siem De Jong. He's a system player benefitting from a talent imbalance against weaker opponents. I'd say he's got slightly more about him than De Jong or Klassen, but that's not saying much given both of them had a horrendous time outside of Dutch football. If we sign him you'll soon see he's just a Dutch Sean Longstaff.

Milan were clearly happy to do a deal early in the window. I don't doubt Allegri wants to keep him as he's a good player, but I saw they were linked with a young lad at Parma too that'll cost a bit. They're probably trying to offset it.

It might sound like I'm huffing glue, but if there's any silver lining to this, it's that Isak's seen the club make clear and consistent efforts to sign replacements and help facilitate the move he wants. 12 months might feel like a life time, but I think with a bit of Eddie 'High Performance' Howe charm, we might be able to get to next summer and then let him go wherever he wants.

It's a massive fee for a club that hasn't shown much aptitude to developing young talent with raw edges. Good luck to them.

It's a good question and goes back to a post I made a while back; which phase are we in? To your point, we're not able to offer a better situation than say Liverpool/Chelsea/Man City, unless we're actively pitching as a stepping stone which I hate. Then you're talking about the players that Aston Villa and teams aspiring for the spots in 6-10th want. MY question is, are they good enough to consistently get you into the top four? It's so hard to compare to the last team to do this (Man City) because there's less space on the dancefloor than when they did it. They also cycled through players at a rapid rate in the early years. For every David Silva and Vincent Kompany there was a Jerome Boateng and a Steven Jovetic. Their miss rate decreased as they got smarter, but that's because they learned about shopping at that end of the market. The perfect run required now feels almost unattainable, especially when much of it is funded by selling some of your success stories to rivals. Liverpool fans love citing Coutinho, but they were also Liverpool with masive revenue streams and less scrutiny. That's why I feel we're being boxed in to signing lads like Nicolas Jackson, who to be frank, we know will never be a 20 goal a season striker. We're being asked to make do with misfit toys while selling our best player to a team that didn't take a risk on him in the first place.

Just from a depth and priorities standpoint, does it not seem odd to be lumping this money on a forward when Zirkzee and Hojlund exist? I know the latter has had ample chance, but Zirkzee had one season and is now second or third fiddle depending on how you see it? I can't claim it to be your opinion, but Sir Jim was meant to bring good governance and ambition. I guess the latter box is being ticked, in a way, but the former still seems scatter gun and cack handed.

We've been done by the narrative this summer. Facts and truth are diverging in my opinion. We've been made to seem disorganized or like we're unappealing (the talk of knowing our place in the food chains is nauseating). In reality, we've tried to show ambition after our best season in living memory. We lost Ekitike to the league champions, we lost Joao Pedro to a team in London that no doubt offered more and have actually spent an outrageous amount in several years. We lost Mbeumo to a club that was willing to pay him 250k a week if reports are to be believed. The same club has Jadon Sancho on more and Antony on 100k a week just gathering dust. We simply can't afford that type of wastage. Liverpool just sold a striker to Saudi Arabia at a heavy loss in the same summer they bought Ekitike for a smidge more—knowing no one in Europe would match the price Saudi were offering. I get when fans mock us, that's the point of fandom, but when writers/talking heads don't apply critical thinking as to why we're obsessed with good financial governance I end up confused. Particularly when those same people want to mock us for not wasting money on inferior options outside of the lists we spent months/years curating. I'm certainly not saying the club did everything right, that's impossible, but I don't think they've drunkenly stumbled through the window either.

It's for a sure problem if only because of the mental impact it has on opponents these days. I'd like to think Eddie has been putting time in to try and find that solution. I think the Sela Cup games will be an interesting insight into what that looks like. The games in Asia were clearly just to get the legs moving.

Endrick is a young lad that's married and loves Jesus. Do you know how much the Bigg Market would corrupt his pure little soul? Especially with Tino floating around the scene again.

What a guy, he looks a million dollars here, even if he also looks like if 'meet your new step dad' was a person. Pure showman. What's his record been like this summer for us? I tend to see him more as a reporter of stories over someone that breaks them.

We're giving Ben Jacobs a thread? How has it come to this?

I must say, seeing Liverpool writers try to pitch the line of 'But really, is there anyway back when he's said he wants to leave?' is nauseating.

Oh well. As much as the market has been impossibly tough for us, Isak should be kicking himself for his part in things. There was a path to a transfer but by being so vocal and throwing his toys out he massively weakened our position and forced a lot of our business out into the public and made it immeasurably harder to get stuff done. Fair play to Eddie for staying strong. It's going to be a long road back.

I don't think even Froggy would disagree that it's a bit ridiculous to have cried poor and needing to sack multiple low level staff only to then sign over £200m worth of forward talent without any notable sales to offset that.

Oh well. Another one bites the dust. I was very excited if not a tad trepidatious about us spending so much money on him. That was as much to do with PSR as it was any concerns I might have about Sesko translating well to English football. It's a gut punch in a summer filled with gut punches, but that's football sometimes. I have to believe the allure of restoring Man Utd and the belief they're on the right track is what convinced him. I could air some gripes and grievances with PSR, but I've almost put a hole in that drum from banging it this summer. It was never going to be easy to predict the long-term under PIF/Reubens but I certainly didn't expect this. I look forward to seeing how Eddie navigates us out of this.

I now have this picture in my head of Sean just walking around St James' Park making sure stuff gets done (hitting enter on a keyboard, answering the phone at the front desk etc). Sorry it's been a long day.

We were talking to Milan about Thiaw before that came up.

If it turns out Duncan Ferguson called Sesko to convince him of Man Utd I for one will be hurt.