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Just his face. Now I'm a Baleba.

Instead of "why would he go to Chelsea over us?" or "If he doesn't want to play for Klopp, fuck him!" or "whoah, 8th choice at Chelsea?!" or "who'd wanna live in London?" we should have a bit of fucking self awareness. We're an absolute state right now, very much in the middle of a down swing, without the funds (or the willingness to spend the funds) to guarantee the club a speedy return to the elite and regular competition for the biggest prizes. There are giant gaps in the team and in the most important positions at the club. And, for the first time, there are big questions about whether the manager has it in him to build a second great team while deviating from the only method that has ever worked for him. London is very attractive for players (especially non-English players) and, you know, people in general. It's probably a top five city to live on the planet especially if you have that much money for shopping, clubs, restaurants, and every fancy-ass experience you can imagine. Chelsea have a top manager AND they're paying all the big money. Delusional not to think they're a great option. Like players give the slightest fuck a batshit owner spending too much money and breaking all the rules and would prefer a skinflint one playing by the rules that's not going to spend to get them closer to success. Get a grip.

I think most of us were pretty high on the Kone and Thuram thing to begin with. Wouldn't be a bad result to just revisit that.

I read that article this morning and I think there are two major issues with it. One is that it basically suggests that they'll need £100m - £150m more than they have coming through the club at the moment consistently every year for the next 5-10 years. That's quite a fucking big gap - CL football alone won't do it and that's not reliable income as it's competitive. There's lots of fluff about making up a commercial gap as that was something that wasn't properly exploited by the old regime but we've been on a long journey to raise that. They need to do it for next season - ideally for this one. And that's just to pay for these signings so far. The assumption seems to be that this is it - a big spree and then spend the next 5-10 years paying it off. Except that not all of these signings will come off, and they'll need to buy more players (whilst potentially carrying the cost of the signings that have failed as they sit and collect their wages for the better part of a decade) and therefore find even more than the £150m extra they need per season. In fact such do they seem to be hooked on the transfer market from boardroom to stand, I can't see how they don't continue. They solve their problems in the transfer market and not on the training field - it's culturally endemic to the club. It honestly feels like the Leeds Ponzi Trap in terms of the attitude of "increase costs now and then hope revenue follows in its wake, and then further increase costs and hope revenue follows even more in that wake, then increase costs...", except they're probably being bankrolled by the Saudis and therefore there's no danger of loans being called in. So the only other barrier is FFP, and their attitude to FFP blatantly seems to be "it'll be years down the line, it'll take years to make the charges stick, we'll tie you up in court and ride out the punishment because it won't fit the crime." They're a fucking cunt club, as I said on another thread, a perfect standard bearer for the modern cunt fan and that loadsamoney part of the world.

That’s a sad piece of news. 26 is no age and I only hope he’s not a young dad. In the wonderful world of social media there’ll always be some warped blerts who try to get themselves noticed, it’s a sorry indictment of the world in which we live in unfortunately. I’m sure Everton will have a fitting tribute to the young man. RIP

I think that I take perhaps a more pragmatic view of these last few days than most; apart from some egg on the face we've lost nothing. Yesterday's result was a better result for us than it was for Chelsea and it's only the first game of the new season. Conversely, if this serves as a huge wake up call for Henry and his FSG skinflint cronies, then perhaps we could actually benefit from the whole debacle going forward. One character trait / weakness that John Henry has I believe, is that he's a hugely vain man, and it will sting that he's been so publicly mugged off, especially by another rich American. The fans, and now the media are on his case, and I expect him to start throwing some money around in an attempt to save face. I've always wanted Kone to come in and I think he'd do a fantastic job as our 6, and maybe a Momo like destroyer like Thuram or Sangare would be another shrewd addition. The window is still open and all is still to play for. Also, just as big an issue is Kloppo's perseverance with the inverted / vacated / retarded full back formation. I get why he tried it, and not without some success and promise at the end of last season, but honestly it's a bollocks formation. If we had the midfielders with the legs to make his favoured 433 work then that would be more beneficial to us than any £115m Ecuadorian money grabbing shithouse, and with Macca and Szobo already added, I believe we're almost there. I'm not prepared to throw the towel in just yet.

So now, as a community, TLW is pinning its hopes on some fella nobody had heard of an hour ago. Fantastic.

I like American chip spice on my chippy chips; it's a Hull thing.

That’s fabulous. I’ve had no luck with my dahlias so far this year. My tomatoes however have not let me down

Speaking of Gorbachev, forget the dignitaries and world leaders, this is the tribute he'd have savoured most. Timmy Mallet. The day after Gorbachevs death.

Has anyone started the 'Welcome to Liverpool' thread yet? That's been working out well for us....

They’ll sell them to Saudi Arabian clubs that definitely have no ties to Chelsea.

More dahlia porn. I’m becoming more interested in dahlias than that other thing.

Apologies for the formatting - This is from The Athletic.... For the third transfer window running, Chelsea’s spending is the talk of football. More specifically, it is Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital’s seemingly insatiable appetite for large transfer fees that is dominating the conversation. A deal worth £115million ($146m) for Brighton midfielder Moises Caicedo has ensured that Enzo Fernandez held the British transfer record for just six months following his £106million move to Stamford Bridge. Liverpool, edged out in that pursuit, now appear to have been deprived of their secondary midfield target after Southampton’s Romeo Lavia also made his preference Chelsea in a move that will be worth £50million plus add-ons. That means Boehly and Clearlake have committed north of £300million in transfer fees on central midfielders alone in 2023 once deals for Lesley Ugochukwu and Andrey Santos are factored in. Overall the numbers are even more staggering: Lavia will take the total transfer fee commitment past the £900million mark since Chelsea’s new American owners assumed control in June 2022 — and they are not done yet. Caicedo celebrates his move alongside his mother (Photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images) A new goalkeeper should replace the loan departure of Kepa Arrizabalaga to Real Madrid, and the club would like to add two more attackers — and all this without the revenue from a primary shirt sponsor (yet), or Champions League participation in 2023-24. No other club in the world is operating this way, and it is fair to say that Chelsea’s approach is ruffling feathers. There are growing whispers of rival clubs complaining to the Premier League about their spending, the manifestation of a broader disbelief inside and outside the game that such outlay could possibly be compliant with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, which allow clubs to lose around €90m over a three-year period. What is more, last September they were placed on an FFP watchlist by UEFA due to the size of their losses. Yet Chelsea believe they have a strategy that will keep them on the right side of club football’s financial controls. The Athletic will endeavour to explain. You — and eventually football’s governing bodies — can then make your own mind up. Transfer fees are overrated A big obstacle to understanding what Chelsea are doing is that the way most people routinely think about football transactions — namely, by focusing almost entirely on the transfer fee — is often not the way that most football clubs think about them. And certainly not Chelsea. Here is an example: Club A signs a player for £50million and gives him a five-year contract worth £100,000 a week. Club B signs a player on a free transfer and agrees to pay him around £400,000 a week. Which player do you think is more expensive on a yearly basis? If your answer was Club B’s signing, you are on the right track. A weekly wage of £400,000 equates to an annual salary of a little more than £20million, while the total cost of an amortised £50million transfer fee over a five-year contract with a £100,000-a-week salary on the accounts is around £15million. Viewed within this context, it is very possible that the most expensive player acquisition in English football history might actually have been Erling Haaland’s move to Manchester City in the summer of 2022, once the Norwegian’s massive salary, signing-on bonus and agent fees are added to his nominally cheap £51million release fee from Borussia Dortmund. It has been widely documented that Chelsea have exploited the legal limits of amortisation (the process of spreading a transfer fee over the length of a player’s contract for accounting purposes) in order to make their spending money go further. All of their January signings were handed seven- or eight-year contracts, lowering their yearly cost on the books. Fernandez’s deal broke the British transfer record (Photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images) UEFA ruled that, from this summer, transfer fees can only be amortised over a maximum of five years regardless of contract length, and the Premier League is likely to follow suit sooner rather than later. But even with the closure of these “FFP loopholes”, amortisation remains a powerful tool to help power Chelsea’s spending. And they’d already used the rule to good effect before the rule change came in. What is more, Chelsea will not play in European competition this season so do not have to worry about being within UEFA rules for now. They will of course hope they return next season for many reasons, but the Premier League give more leeway and therefore Chelsea more time to sort themselves out. So they believe they are all right. Others are less sure… Chelsea are selling, not just buying. But is it enough? Boehly and Clearlake have generated more than £250million from player sales in the past three transfer windows. Around £200million of that has been made this summer, primarily through the departures of Kai Havertz to Arsenal, Mason Mount to Manchester United, Mateo Kovacic to Manchester City and Kalidou Koulibaly and Edouard Mendy to Saudi Pro League clubs. That figure comes nowhere near to balancing Chelsea’s outlay on transfer fees, but for accounting purposes it does not need to. Transfer fees for player sales are registered in full on the books immediately, minus the player’s remaining amortised cost. The good news for Boehly and Clearlake is that the majority of the players they have sold in this window had either been at the club long enough to have relatively small remaining book values (Havertz, Kovacic and Christian Pulisic) or are Cobham academy graduates (Mount and Ruben Loftus-Cheek), who represent pure profit when sold. Havertz, Mount and Kovacic alone netted Chelsea close to £100million in accounting profit on player sales. That in theory could bankroll as much as £500million in transfer fees amortised over five-year contracts, without tipping the club into the red on player trading in the books. It would of course mean that income needs to consistently come in over the five years in order to keep ‘paying off’ the fees for incoming transfers. Chelsea’s estimated amortised spending in the past three windows under Boehly and Clearlake, using initial transfer figures reported by The Athletic, comes to £157.2million; this significantly lower number is almost entirely offset by an accounting profit from player sales of £149.6million over the same period. Mount was sold with all the profit banked immediately (Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images) It is clear to see, then, that big clubs have more room than it might first appear to manoeuvre in the transfer market without falling foul of FFP — and the restrictions themselves are loosening; from the 2023-24 season, clubs judged to be in good financial health could be permitted to lose as much as €90million over a three-year monitoring period, triple the old limit of €30million. Because a club’s accounts are published almost a year after the relevant deals take place, it is currently too early to know if Chelsea’s current spending will see them post a loss or profit. But in terms of hitting that number over three years of about €90million loss, it is worth bearing in mind that last year’s accounts saw Chelsea post a £121million loss (€140m). The season before that saw a £156m loss (€181m), which was the second biggest in Premier League history, so the club will need to start turning a profit soon, whether that be through increased player sales, improved commercial deals or a return to the Champions League (where you’d expect to make about £3-4m per home game). Time will tell, but time is exactly what the amortisation of these transfer fees is buying the ownership. Boehly and Clearlake identified on arrival that Chelsea were ripe for a massive rebuild, with a combination of expensive players almost fully amortised on the books and an academy that produces a steady conveyer belt of saleable young footballers, as well as a handful of elite prospects good enough to become first-team contributors. But there is another key aspect to what Chelsea are trying to do… The wage bill is coming down In the course of the financial due diligence that preceded their takeover last year, Boehly and Clearlake quickly identified that Roman Abramovich had been happily paying what they regarded as a “Chelsea premium” in terms of player salaries. Base wages were well above the market rate across the board, with almost nothing tied to performance-based incentives such as Champions League participation. The massive squad turnover at Stamford Bridge over the past year has been as much about shedding contracts as players. Boehly and Clearlake have been determined to bring the club’s salary commitments down to a competitive market level, and they are well aware that the earning expectations of footballers tend to rise as they get older. Since the restructuring of their football operation around co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley at the start of 2023, Chelsea have placed renewed emphasis on targeting players aged 23 or younger, with Christopher Nkunku (whose transfer was agreed almost a year ago), Axel Disasi and goalkeeper Robert Sanchez the only exceptions. Younger players tend to be more amenable to lower base salaries with performance incentives, which gives Chelsea the opportunity to start them at a more affordable level and then reward the best performers with pay rises as time goes by. Lavia will almost certainly be on a lower wage as he begins his career at Stamford Bridge than former Southampton team-mate James Ward-Prowse is on at West Ham. Behdad Eghbali (left) and Boehly are leaving rivals confused and concerned (Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images) Chelsea also remain committed to longer contracts even as amortisation benefits are reduced; Boehly and Clearlake believe they give players greater security and the club more protection on the value of their assets. It is hoped that lower salaries across the board will mean players who disappoint at Stamford Bridge will not be as difficult to offload as Romelu Lukaku and Hakim Ziyech, two of the last lavishly paid survivors of the Abramovich era. There are still some high earners on Chelsea’s books, Raheem Sterling and Nkunku chief among them. But overall Boehly and Clearlake believe they have saved tens of millions of pounds in annual salary commitments for the first-team squad — money they are re-deploying to spend on transfer fees. Chelsea’s strategy is not without risk Boehly and Clearlake have essentially re-made Chelsea’s squad as an investment portfolio: a collection of talented young footballers committed to Stamford Bridge for what should be their prime years, but whose transfer values could fall as well as rise depending on any number of variables that can affect individual development. Not all of the signings are expected to flourish, but the talent identification and development skills of the staff led by Stewart and Winstanley are being backed to ensure the successes outweigh the failures. If they do not, Chelsea will likely under-achieve on the pitch and these amortised fees will add up, limiting their options for correcting course. One of the Premier League’s oldest squads has been transformed into the youngest by owners attempting to scale up something akin to the recruitment models of Monaco, RB Leipzig and Brighton to power an elite European club. Chelsea must now balance an economic requirement to develop the young talent they have assembled for themselves and for others, with the more immediate football demands of competing at the very top of the sport. This particular tightrope has never been walked, or arguably even attempted, by a club of such size and recent winning pedigree. Can you lift the Premier League or Champions League with almost exclusively young players? Will assembling a group of players largely in the same age bracket prove an impediment to developing the kind of dressing room dynamic made possible by the best blends of youth and experience? Boehly and Clearlake are betting the answers to these questions favour them, and that their approach to transfers and squad building puts Chelsea on a path to sustained sporting success as well as financial growth. Everyone else in football will be watching closely to see what happens next.

Yes. Its the only show I'd say is as good.

You'll order a Liverpool one and a Chelsea one will arrive.

The only positive I would add to the above is that a lot of the staleness has left and the first XI are pretty new and the likes of VVD and Trent have been given greater clout, so Jurgen at least should have a fresh audience to go at

I prefer Pepsi to Coke and Burger King to McDonald's. By far.

Maybe Bajcetic is the someone we’ve identified early?

who cares, any unsavoury comment is fucking abysmal. No ‘but, again’ just don’t go there. Someone has just been told someone they love won’t be coming home tonight.

He was on stage playing guitar singing Allez Allez with Jamie Webster at a BOSS night last week. He’s not moving anywhere.

No, I want them to get their fucking shit together and buy someone who will help us now and over the next few years. Whoever it is now I'm going to be underwhelmed, not because of the player himself, but because they sold us on Bellingham, then it was "four or five new signings done quickly" then Lavia, then Caicedo... and the season is underway and they've done absolutely none of it. So whatever they do is going to feel like a booby prize to me and others, but they can't think like that, they need to stop being fucking useless and go and get what we need.

The third rule Anton Stach is that Chelsea outbid us for him.

Sales conference in Bolton

Proper Gherkins are boss. Soggy, vacuum packed ones from McDonald’s are terrible, though.

For the asking price it's definitely worth the risk. Get him regardless.

In 2005, 2011 and 2015 referees were advised to show a card for a player brandishing an imaginary card. So it's not new, it's just yet another public reaffirmation of a regulation that is supposed to have been enforced consistently, but has really been ignored., for most of this century. That's what gets me. It'll probably be enforced this time around for about four months, then, yet again, ignored. Same goes for time-wasting - always a sanction there for it, but it's the refs who have been to blame for it getting worse because they ignore it until about the 80th minute. So now they've been told to do what they should have been doing for decades, and, again, they'll probably do it for a few months and then ignore it again. So it's not new rules that are needed. It's old rules that need to be treated as rules all the fecking time. And, over a long period of time, they never, ever, are.

Looking at their squad now I think you can probably expect the following to leave for enormous money to Saudi Arabian sides that have absolutely nothing in any way to do with Chelsea - Lukaku, Chalobah, Hudson-Odoi, Ziyech, and Cucurella,

6 months later everyone screaming for us to do a Brighton will be screaming he isn't ready yet

That's all well and good for us to be saying as throwaway comments, but if our policy is really going to become "let's see who Brighton want and go for them" then we're every bit as clueless as many of us think we are now, and then some.

Just further proves my theory that accountants and financial instruments are 90% of what’s wrong with the world. Fire them all off into space.

RICO!!

Is Turdseye for real or is it just his (ever so tiresome) schtick?

Of the options left, Kone is the one for me, Clive. I like the idea of Andre, picking up a player straight from South America, but it sounds like a deal that could drag on as Fluminense want to keep him until at least January. Adams' knees would explode on day one of training.

It's all about getting the signings done now. Asap. We are already way too late to get the best players, now we are fighting for the expensive scraps. Very very disappointing. Amateur hour at our club unfortunately. How it has gone this far is mind boggling.

McDonald's is inedible shite.

Well, it certainly can't be argued that Lavia proved himself at Brighton, he was completely non-existent there.

Webb has set new rules that it needs to be absolute howlers before the ref is asked to watch the monitor. Now they got that extra loop hole to use.

No one cares.

Against Chelsea he made a few very good clearances and interceptions. Including one which he cleared when a tap in was about to happen 3 yards out. People only see what they want to see. Some have bought so blindly into the "Trent cant defend" narrative that they simply ignore his good defensive actions during the game. Note, I'm not saying he is a top defender but I'm saying he isn't as terrible as made out.

Every "Welcome to Liverpool..." thread starter is getting a negging whether the player signs or not. Them's the breaks.

Can anyone imagine the shower of shite we have as referees in this country being willing to accept scrutiny like this?