Manny

Now I’ve just felt a pang of regret imagining the success we could have had with *checks notes* Gretar Steinsson at right back.

"We have a duty of care to a player who's been with us since the age of 7 and who has a young child." Pathetic, gaslighting excuse of a football club. Like they've never sold players down the league who've been at the club since they were kids. Like they've never released players with young children before. But when you're surplus to requirements those duties of care go out of the window; when you're a potential 15 goal a season forward, then the duty of care extends to rehabilitating you when you're a domestic abusing rapist. No surprise that most of the staff who are keenest on Greenwood's 're-integration' are the ones involved in the football side of the operation - who've probably been the same staff who've happily de-integrated many better people, but people who don't make them look quite so clever when they go out onto the pitch. Cynical, double standards cunts. As Pete said on the football ramble - Utd's 'investigation' should have consisted of two questions: "is that your voice on the recording?" and "when's your fucking taxi turning up?"

Here's Endo (top) vs Lavia (bottom) from FBRef. My take from them is that Endo is a more rounded player, but loses out to Lavia on a few individual metrics - particularly in ball carrying and tackles/interceptions. A lot of this is role-defined though.

I reckon we still might go for Gravenberch - we've been linked with him for too long by too many reliable journos for us to not be interested at all. There's noises that Tuchel can't promise him game time and that he wants an orthodox 6 (they've been linked with Sangare themselves) - he's even casting doubt on Kimmich's role in the team for him. Gravenberch isn't an orthodox 6 either but he's tall, athletic, mobile and has a pretty wide skillset so there's a chance the club see him as someone who could grow into that role and bring something else to it. He's also versatile and could play one of the more advanced 8 roles in the team as well so we'd be adding depth there as well. It's putting 2 and 2 together, but I wonder if we've signed Endo as a player on modest wages for a modest fee who can slot straight into the team at 6 for a year or so whilst we work with a player like Gravenberch in the background, and let Bajcetic develop. He then goes on to fulfil a Milner-lite role in the squad in the future. There's an argument that Thiago could take that profile but he isn't as mobile as Endo, nor is his fitness as reliable - and he's on high wages with only a year left so his long term status in the team isn't as suitable.

Spot on. The recent noises from his camp that this was the reason he went to Chelsea ahead of us is complete fucking fluff. He went there for more money, almost certainly. That's his right, and there's an argument we should have matched it - but to claim that he felt let down by us chasing Caicedo ahead of him and then going to the club that chased and signed Caicedo ahead of him (for months) is a bit fucking rich.

What to make of this signing depends massively on what else happens, I suppose. I don't have a problem at all with signing low-end fee players - some of our best signings recently have been for relative peanuts and bought from relative obscurity (Robbo and Gini the obvious ones, £33m for the pair from relegated sides) and, call me weird but I quite like seeing creative thinking like this rather than indulge in the same "activate cheat code and go out and blow a record fee on a dead cert" that we see from the likes of City and Chelsea. But his age and fee make him a pretty underwhelming pivot from Moises Caicedo: if the club is going from a 21 year old outstanding first team ready prospect for a club record fee to a 30 year old workhorse for a modest fee then it doesn't scream a coherent strategy. Basically, there are a lot of options in between Moises Caicedo for £110m and Wataru Endo for £15m. But then he might be a complete alternative, I guess. Maybe we were targeting him at the same time as a ~£40m Lavia so we could have a bit of experience in midfield while Lavia and Bajcetic develop. Maybe we're now buying this Brazilian lad but he can't come til January. Maybe - and this is the wildest one - given he's played a lot of games at CB but he's a capable midfielder, he's an alternative for Robbo and an alternative for a younger DM we're planning on going for now. I guess the point is working out whether he's the Caicedo alternative on his own, or if he's a smaller part of a wider change of plans. I'll reserve judgement but I can't shake the feeling that this is yet more evidence of a confused strategy that's being made up on the hoof whilst we get through our 4th DoF in 2 years.

Football is now so ridiculous we’ve got people who helped a club spend loads of money telling us how another club spending loads of money is sustainable and A Good Thing.

https://twitter.com/Ryanbabel/status/1691430239090401280?s=20

Yeah this window is a bit of a standalone one for them as they've offloaded players like Havertz and Kovacic, who had very little book value as they'd been around for a few years and don't have long left on original contracts, and Mount who they got a whopping fee for who was pure profit as a youth teamer. But those kinds of 'assets' are pretty rare for them - OK they've got some youth players they can sell (they got decent money for Loftus-Cheek and will likely do reasonably well with Hudson-Odoi and Chalobah etc.) but without >150 Chelsea appearances they won't represent the same kind of return as Mount did. And they won't get many more Havertz's because it'll be six years before this summer's crop of players are in a similar place on the balance sheet - as you say, trying to offload one flop next year for some kind of return will be next to impossible (legally anyway). I just don't see where the (legal) money comes from to make them sustainable - commercial revenue takes ages, CL revenue is insufficient and subject to competition, and player trading - which they've been pretty good at in fairness - is of limited return for them now, ironically because of the same accounting tricks they've pulled to sign them in the first place.

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.

Said it on another thread but Webb and his band of cunts are just little Englander made baldy manc. How Webb ended up head of PGMOL and not Met chief commissioner, given his penchant for “look tough and do fuck all” is beyond me.

Also though, and I know I'm howling at the moon here, how the fuck is Chelsea's spending even remotely allowed by the "powers that be"? They've spent ~£950m since Todd took over, and a whopping £1.3bn since COVID, and only recouped £528m in that time. So they've spent £150m or so shy of a billion quid net on transfers in three years. They've spent more money than the entire Bundesliga has since their change of ownership. What the fuck is the point anymore, with this kind of shit, with state wealth everywhere? We do ourselves no favours but it's not a remotely level playing field. It's not even a fucking field anymore.

Fucking hell. I try and avoid transfer dick swinging, and I don't think that Lavia was the answer, and I think Chelsea have massively overpaid for both him and Caicedo, but to be publicly beaten to your main targets with ease by those whoremongers is fucking toecurlingly shite.

Grujic should've stuck around, Nat Phillips style. He'd have been first name on the teamsheet yesterday!

I'd agree with you up to a point, to be honest. The loss of Ox and Keita are a complete irrelevance. They counted for just 6% of league minutes last year, 8% in the Covid season and even in their best year in between, only 19%. They genuinely don't feel like a loss. The youngsters of Bajcetic, Jones and Elliott basically took their minutes last season and I'd much sooner give them time on the pitch than bring on Naby with 10 minutes to go to get him injured. Hendo and Milner going was a shame in terms of leadership and experience, but MacAllister and Szoboszlai more than make up for their loss of minutes (Hendo and Milner counted for 28% of league minutes last year; AM and DS's totals for Brighton and Leipzig would have been equivalent to 50% and that's not factoring in the shorter German league season) - and they're better players to boot, certainly in terms of age and technical ability. But we've botched it on Fab's replacement, there's no doubt about it. We need a defensive midfield version of MacAllister or Szoboszlai - and there's no sign of one. Lavia is a good player and would improve us in so far as him being a square peg in a square hole, but he's not at the level of the other two. And that's not to mention the other issues in the squad at centre back and so on. But more concerning for me is the reading between the lines of the football direction of the club (off the field). At our peak we just seemed to act more decisively, and we seemed to be able to work on multiple deals at once. This season we just seem to be getting bogged down on one target at a time, or one sale at a time, incapable of multitasking - and such is our obsession with value that we're basically getting drawn into interminable sagas where the market valuation of a player is moving from above our valuation to way above our valuation while we dither - and we're losing all the initiative on deals. I can't shake the feeling that if Lavia or Caicedo were being chased under Edwards, we'd have either just gone in and secured them quickly and quietly, or we'd have just promptly decided we were never going to reach agreement on valuation and gone and secured an alternative quickly and quietly. We just feel a bit of a mess at the moment - I'd personally stop short of calling us an embarrassment but we definitely aren't what we were, and there doesn't seem to be any urgency to try and get that side of the operation back to what it was.

Agreed. Were they to sell to raise finances though, Valverde would raise more actual cash as he joined from Penarol on a pittance a few years ago, so he'd basically be pure profit. He's the likelier deal in that sense, but he'd be a MacAllister-esque fit at no 6. Tchouameni would only represent a small financial uplift as they bought him for big money a short time ago so he wouldn't transform their spending power - although he's the better fit for us. Not that it matters though. At best I can only see us having "enquired" as to their availability, Madrid saying they'd sell at the right price, them explaining the right price and us pretending the signal got cut off as we went through a tunnel or something. Even likelier it's some bellend knowing our fanbase is desperate and making shit up for clicks.

Not disputing that - my point though is that if both us and Chelsea were in for Lavia and Caicedo (and Caicedo as a priority and for more money) then there's really little difference in our respective positions on Lavia, so he'd be daft to view Chelsea as somehow being 'keener'. If he goes to Chelsea it'll mostly be for cash, long-term financial security, and his agent whispering sweet nothings in his ear as he stands to get a fat slice of Todd's free cash bonanza - the argument that he would go there because we showed some last-minute interest in a player who went to Chelsea anyway doesn't wash with me.

In fairness if he goes to Chelsea after they've paid a world record fee for two midfielders who'll be getting in the team ahead of him, he's even worse off than a 2am shag. He's asking to get messed around like some doe eyed dickhead chasing a girl who's barely even interested in him, except when she's feeling a bit depressed and wants the attention. We might be desperate but we'll treat him right - largely because we've got no choice but to line him up against Bournemouth at the weekend.

That Tovoleri chap has had him in "deal done" territory for weeks now for both us and Chelsea. He's a non-aligned Twitter version of the "welcome to..." threads.

Helps when £1.6bn that should have been paid to the previous owner is written off, so the debts of the transfer spree of the 00's and beyond are effectively paid up, and they can just go on another one. If this saga has done one thing, it's reminded me why I despise these classless, game-torching cunts at a cellular level. A club for gormless simpletons to wank over transfers and the one-upmanship that surrounds them - a standard-bearer of the godawful social media age of transfer fuckery.

Romano probably loves Chelsea and that Shane Warne’s potato faced uncle looking cunt owner of theirs. When you get paid for bullshit transfer stories, the club of constant transfer bullshit is almost certainly your best friend. They’re fucking made for each other and this grim cunt timeline we live in.

But… football is so properly governed though..?

No way they’re signing both. Surely. They spent £550m NET last year - they’re in the black this year but only to the tune of £50m - so just the half a billion down for two seasons. With no CL football. Not like they were spendthrift before - they made a profit of £30m in 21/22 but were -£190m in 20/21. Unless there’s something very dodgy about the terms of Bowhly’s purchase they’re in all sorts of FFP shit.

Leave the money slapped on the table, Everton for James Rodriguez-style - worst case scenario is it fucks Chelsea over even more. They're already having to raid the club shop guide dog donation box and flog half their first team squad, whilst simultaneously having to pull out of the Tyler Adams deal post-medical just to scrape together a bid that's not gone in yet and still sounds lower than ours. As long as it's there it's forcing them to keep doing stupid shit. And if he comes here after all this? Can't say I'm that arsed about it. I smell agent fuckery anyway. 15 minutes at Kirkby with Jurgen and he'll be dropping his cunt advisors off the nearest bridge.