Other clubs' transfers

[KaKa]

1 minute ago, Pixelphish said:

Ah good, this again.

 

Every summer the Frog cries about how his aura club can do no wrong 

 

[bobbydazzla]

6 minutes ago, The Larch said:

Or like entering a new formula one team with a trillion pound backer, but only being allowed to start off in a clapped out old metro until you earn enough money prize money to buy a proper car.

Not even entering a new team, just buying an established but underfunded team and wanting to put the money in that will allow them to compete with the teams that are currently successful and therefore make the drivers championship more competitive. 

[The Larch]

3 minutes ago, bobbydazzla said:

Not even entering a new team, just buying an established but underfunded team and wanting to put the money in that will allow them to compete with the teams that are currently successful and therefore make the drivers championship more competitive. 

But surely there's some external body that can be appealed to, to reverse this grave unfairness?! 

[KaKa]

Hey guys, just be patient and improve your income, here we'll help by signing all of your best players. And if you don't want to sell at a price we deem "fair", we'll have their names in the media linked to our club everyday and tap up their agents until they're unsettled, but we're paying them just the same as you are, honest! Just keep going though, you'll get there eventually.

 

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 12:42 by KaKa

[bobbydazzla]

[Froggy]

8 minutes ago, bobbydazzla said:

 

I never once said all clubs are equal.  

[TRon]

1 hour ago, The Prophet said:

 

Speak for yourself.

 

I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but the only way to compete is to be able to spend as much as the cartel clubs. So I want us to be able to spend our money how we see fit. 

[TRon]

1 hour ago, Curva Sud Milano said:

 

My impression, hopefully wrong, is that they don't care much about making you a top team but are more interested in extra-football business in the UK.

 

 

I think they are not that different to Man City's owners. If they were allowed they would definitely want to be a top team because it reflects more glory on them. The money spent on a football club is like a drop in the ocean to them. 

[Viana]

1 hour ago, Froggy said:

 

And you would hand on heart hold this same view if you were still owned by Ashley and Sunderland were owned by PIF?

I would, because in reality owners are only ever temporary. 

 

I can get on board with the idea of financial limitations on clubs, but right now it's not creating parity it's creating stasis. The top block buy players from the ones just below them who aspire to be in the top block. 

 

That same group below the top block then have to go and find more talent and hope it clicks in the same way. At the risk of rehashing our last chat (which I enjoyed so thank you), selling Garnacho and Hojlund is not the same as us selling Gordon and Isak. 

 

The top clubs can get away by selling outcasts to keep them on the right side of accounting, knowing their revenue streams far out strip others. The problem is you unlock those streams by performing. Look at the reports saying our Sela replacement has been hampered by poor performance. 

 

You may say Man Utd earned that status as a legacy brand, which is fair, but a big part of that journey was investment to keep momentum going. We won the cup and finished 4th, only to then lose our star striker and key targets ultimately settling for Woltemade and Wissa, one of whom is a huge bust.

 

Clubs in our position struggle to convince the talent to stay, and that's in no small part because we can't match their ambition as quickly as rivals like Chelsea and Man City could at similar stages.

 

As I say, pop a cap on spending by all means, but the cap in terms of an actual number has to apply to all clubs. If you can spend 200m, we can spend 200m. If your wage bill can hit 50m a week, ours can hit 50m a week. That's when you get competition.

[Pixelphish]

1 hour ago, Froggy said:

 

It's one of the most important subjects in modern football to be fair.

 

The way the conversation has gone in the last page or two is quite positive.

You're not wrong but it just goes round in circles and everyone set their stall long ago. Any level headed individual doesn't want clubs to be owned by nation states or adjacent nation state actors, being able to spend 3 billion a window. On the same token clubs that were 'allowed' to build revenues on historical success shouldnt have carte blanche to spend 5x everyone else season on season either, regardless of what the PL wants as a 'product'.

No I don't know the answer and frankly I doubt we'll ever get one.

[Froggy]

1 minute ago, Pixelphish said:

You're not wrong but it just goes round in circles and everyone set their stall long ago. Any level headed individual doesn't want clubs to be owned by nation states or adjacent nation state actors, being able to spend 3 billion a window. On the same token clubs that were 'allowed' to build revenues on historical success shouldnt have carte blanche to spend 5x everyone else season on season either, regardless of what the PL wants as a 'product'.

No I don't know the answer and frankly I doubt we'll ever get one.

 

I think when proper discussion is had, there can be some movement. Kid Icarus has already said a couple of things that made me see things slightly different. There's middle ground to be had.

[Kid Icarus]

3 hours ago, leffe186 said:

 

It’s somewhere in between. Like you, I can completely understand people hurling scorn at the idea that PSR has been born from integrity and I have no illusions that football club ownership has ever been or aspired to be some kind of paragon of virtue. But at the same time I have been doing that additional deduction you talk about for nearly 30 years now. I’m really fucking tired

 

You talk about wanting what Man U and the other rich clubs had for decades. You did have what they had. In the 1997-98 Deloitte Touché report, Newcastle had the 5th highest revenue in the world and the 2nd highest in England. I wish they had brought in some version of PSR at that point. Would it have preserved the hegemony? Maybe. Newcastle, Villa and Leeds had benefitted from being on an upswing just as the Premier League and its TV money came in. They were all in the world’s top 20 at that point.

 

Some form of PSR in the late 90s might have stopped Ridsdale fucking Leeds up. It might have stopped Ken Bates overspending and having to sell to Abramovich, and if it didn’t it would have restricted him. It would have stopped Shinawatra and Abu Dhabi ejaculating money all over Man City. It might have even stopped Leicester going into administration in 2002, and despite @KingArthur forgetting it they did end up getting a billionaire owner. It might not have helped Villa under Deadly Doug, but it might have stopped them overspending to try to keep up with Chelsea et al. And I’d like to think it would have kept you guys at the top too. 

All water under Stamford Bridge now of course. What it wouldn’t have done though - and what it doesn’t do now - is definitively stop other clubs from competing. The idea that the successful clubs all pulled themselves up from their bootstraps is silly of course. But within the rules…Bournemouth did. Brentford did. We had far more resources than them…but fewer than you in 1998. And we did too. 
 

Fans just have to suck it up for the most part. It’s not your fault that your ownership squandered that opportunity and then totally fucked everything by selling to that cunt Mike Ashley. We couldn’t make Levy do all that stuff he did, although we could buy enough tickets and merch to help him along. I hate Arsenal by law, but they have been brilliantly run for the most part including longstanding support for women’s football that is now really reaping dividends - literally. Their fans are lucky bastards…but we could have done the same and so could you.

 

I’m glad you don’t want unrestrained spending and I believe you - but there are absolutely loads of Newcastle fans that do. There are lots of Spurs fans that would think the same. I disagree with them all. I just think your club, supporters and owners can bridge that gap within the rules anyway, like we did. You’re a huge club, the only one in a large city with a big supporter base and big, beautifully-located stadium. The Saudis have already been upgrading infrastructure, put a ton of money into the first team squad, is working on (and ploughing money into) the stadium and new stadium possibilities, put a ton of money into upgrading the youth development team and taking players from other clubs. They’ve even invested in the women’s team, although that’s false-started. It will happen far quicker than it did with us because we were generating the money ourselves. Why not be patient?

I'm not sure what you mean by making the point that we had it? I don't think anyone's denying that we did, but I also don’t see what that changes about rules put in place decades later that makes it artificially extremely difficult for any club except a select few from reaching the top.

 

I disagree that Brentford or Bournemouth have done anything tbh. We've seen too many of these clubs come, have a fleeting run at success, be seen as darling upstarts in the media, and ultimately fail because they have one bad window, one bad appointment, one bad season, or when they're anywhere near successful their talent gets snapped off them by the clubs they're attempting to compete with.

 

The post PSR 'model' club knocking on that ceiling have been Southampton, Swansea, Leicester, Wolves, Everton, West Ham. Of those it's only Everton who didn't end up relegated, having failed for the reasons above, while pushing their faces on the glass ceiling.

 

Now that group is Villa, us, and potentially Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth. Let's see any in that group have sustained opportunities at CL finishes without huge fall offs and/or the top 6 taking their talent by throwing their completely fair game and not at all unfair financial weight about. 

 

Spurs breaking into the top 6 as a regular predates PSR as well so I don't think you did anything in that respect, other than box clever with player trading pre-PSR. If you'd got to where you are now by means of investment you'd have been able to at the time too, you wouldn't now and I'd argue you couldn't by boxing clever now either.

 

The patience you speak of is based on something that I think many understandably believe is a false premise - that success is just a matter of waiting, as opposed to something that will forever be deliberately and artificially placed beyond our grasp.

 

 

Edited yesterday at 13:54 by Kid Icarus

[Kid Icarus]

1 hour ago, leffe186 said:

I think it’s very often true, and I suspect it’s far more often than you think. Flav the Spurs podcaster did a survey a couple of years back (around a time that the Qataris were rumoured to be interested in us) and was taken aback by how many Spurs fans disagreed with him (and me) and would be happy to be owned by a country.

 

Just look at The Prophet and TRon. All fanbases have people who either care or don’t care about it, to varying degrees. And I suspect all fanbases have a lot of people who want unrestricted spending but don’t want to say so out loud. 

 

 

 

 

I'm sure it very often is the case but I refute that

 

2 hours ago, leffe186 said:

Every single time a Newcastle fan says “PSR stopped us from buying X and that’s annoying” they are by extension saying “we want to have unrestricted spending”. 

 

[leffe186]

3 minutes ago, Kid Icarus said:

 

I'm sure it very often is the case but I refute that

 

 

Yeah my bad, didn’t realize I’d said it was always the case.

[Sidg]

O

[The College Dropout]

31 minutes ago, Sidg said:

O

The ultimate contract bullies.  

[Yorkie]

I can't believe it has to be pointed out that "I don't like PSR" doesn't = "I wish my club had a disproportionate advantage over everyone else." 

 

Any sensible observer would agree that there should be a form of regulation when it comes to spending. Let's just have a rules system which is fair and doesn't enable a small group of teams to hoard all of the most coveted players on the market. 

[Mattoon]

The false premise of having to earn your right to be where they are too is a misnomer, they cherry pick the players under the guise of player trading giving other teams a financial way in, when in fact all that is happening is you're ceding competitive advantage whilst temporarily and falsely bloating short term funds, meanwhile they continue to grow revenue, setting the FMV standards, ergo adjusting the glass ceiling everyone else lives under. It's nigh on impossible to break the ceiling as it will always come down to them hoovering up the talent, offering more money for managers and players and preventing teams from equaling their income as they continue to speed off ahead in their Bugatti Veyron telling you, you need to learn to run faster.

[Yorkie]

1 minute ago, Mattoon said:

The false premise of having to earn your right to be where they are too is a misnomer, they cherry pick the players under the guise of player trading giving other teams a financial way in, when in fact all that is happening is you're ceding competitive advantage whilst temporarily and falsely bloating short term funds, meanwhile they continue to grow revenue, setting the FMV standards, ergo adjusting the glass ceiling everyone else lives under. It's nigh on impossible to break the ceiling as it will always come down to them hoovering up the talent, offering more money for managers and players and preventing teams from equaling their income as they continue to speed off ahead in their Bugatti Veyron telling you, you need to learn to run faster.

 

Fucking exactly.  "Just sell your best players to the teams you're trying to catch, duh, it's not difficult." Aye alright m8.

[Froggy]

5 minutes ago, Mattoon said:

offering more money for managers and players

 

Who Newcastle? Because that's what was heavily reported in the summer. 

[leffe186]

1 hour ago, Kid Icarus said:

 … 

 

Spurs breaking into the top 6 as a regular predates PSR as well so I don't think you did anything in that respect, other than box clever with player trading pre-PSR. If you'd got to where you are now by means of investment you'd have been able to at the time too, you wouldn't now and I'd argue you couldn't by boxing clever now either.

 

The patience you speak of is based on something that I think many understandably believe is a false premise - that success is just a matter of waiting, as opposed to something that will forever be deliberately and artificially placed beyond our grasp.

 

 

 

Well that makes a lot more sense. If you really think that, then I get why you went down that line.

 

We absolutely did not only “box clever with player trading”. Levy came in as Chairman after ENIC bought the club and realized that to compete with the top teams he had to tear it all down and build it up. I remember being at the first game in 2004 - it was almost an entirely new squad and we were just trying to work out who everyone was. Pretty much everyone from the previous season had been released or free transferred away. We signed a ton of cheap youngsters and players from the lower leagues and abroad. Our wage bill was £25M that year. He brought in Frank Arnesen to be a DoF (our first IIRC) and completely revamped the youth and backstage teams, totally new scouting teams etc. That was the Santini/Jol year.

 

The wage bill had been stripped to the bone and would stay that way for a while. Everyone was on bonus-led contracts. We were saving money so that we could revamp other things - in 2007 we bought land for a new Training ground which was finished in 2012 or thereabouts, and obviously we were also saving and planning for a new stadium. 
 

As fans, it was exciting but also frustrating. Frank Arnesen immediately got poached by Chelsea. We’d get raided by bigger clubs regularly - Keane, Carrick, Berba early on, Modric, Bale, Kyle Walker etc later on. We lost out on a ton of players due to wages and Levy being tight, not to mention Chelsea’s shenanigans that just got them a slap on the wrist over Eden Hazard etc. We also were paying through the nose (although by this time I was out of London so no season ticket) for the privilege, being reassured by Levy “no pain, no gain”.

 

So (IIRC isn’t that one of your Pet Hates, starting a sentence with So? ) yeah, we did operate within PSR criteria, and it was often really irritating and tough. If we’d got to where we are by ENIC giving us a billion pounds and buying tons of players - or even just by “clever player trading” I wouldn’t be in here having these arguments. It took us 8 years or so to build a new training ground, over a decade to build a really good squad, and  15 years to build a new stadium.

 

Could we do exactly that now? I dunno. The first year the Saudis came in you got Bruno, Chris Wood, Willock, Burn, Trippier. The next year you got Isak, Gordon, Botman, Targett and Pope. In contrast, back in 2004 we brought in eighteen players, and the highest spend of them all was £8M on Andy Reid and Michael Dawson from Forest. Everyone’s got more TV money now and there’s so much more risk involved. We’d probably be able to spend more for starters. Your Saudi money will accelerate things massively.

 

Success is obviously not a matter of waiting, although it often feels like it’s all we can do as fans. 

[KennyUtd]

5 minutes ago, Froggy said:

 

Who Newcastle? Because that's what was heavily reported in the summer. 

Must be true then.

[KaKa]

1 minute ago, KennyUtd said:

Must be true then.

 

 

Let's not even get into the agent fees, player signing fees and the bonuses they add on to the contracts 

 

These jokers really think they're slick 

[Froggy]

4 minutes ago, KennyUtd said:

Must be true then.

 

David Ornstein tends to be reliable, yes.

[KennyUtd]

Just now, Froggy said:

 

David Ornstein tends to be reliable, yes.

Unless he's quoting what Man U players are earning Froggy. 

According to you most of your 1st team squad are on £24.50 a week and a free bus pass.