The9

Slightly concerned, Newport County have now signed two rejects from the Skate Academy this summer. Admittedly both from non-league...

It looks sort of pink but compare it to the colour of the definitely red Virgin Media logo...

Good spot, that's definitely a Virgin Media logo - thought we might have managed to get a separate sponsor for the training kit by now, but whatever.

Looks nice, vague surprise it's red... again. Just as a reminder http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/20160511-my-saints-story-southampton-under-armour-new-kits-3108120.aspx. The competition winners (who they've never announced to my knowledge) went over there from 20th-23rd and as it is now the 28th and the kit deal begins on 1st July I'm guessing tomorrow for the kit launch, with stuff on sale on Friday. Still guesswork. The competition hashtag was #mysaintsstory if anyone cares, I know I don't!

If this thread tells me nothing else, it's that we should have tried to sell Ali Dia to Liverpool for £30m - I mean they'd have trusted Souness, right?

What will happen is that the Premier League will get to decide its own rules on numbers of foreign employees. As one of the major UK successes overseas, it may be able to influence any post-EU UK law to allow exceptions (which if they've got any sense they will make on a wage basis so they truly are exceptions based on that exceptional factor). So if anything it'll deregulate who can be signed completely - whether the FA then wants to enforce the homegrown etc will be up to them within the parameters of how easy it is for non UK nationals to get the right to play in the UK (which as I've mentioned could be very easy or very difficult depending on what the government decides to do, but it makes sense to support a globally know successful business which relies on so much international talent). It's got nowt to do with Bosman anyway.

Hoping now we're on a Euros break (just til Friday, the rest of the competition is still going on), we'll see the first promos and the kit itself will be revealed over the next 3 days. The contract starts 1 July, so they'll want to be making money ASAP following then...

This will end well.

There's no particular reason our Europa League shirt has to be the same as our home shirt, maybe we could use that as a "third" where needed. Anyway, here's the new AZ Alkmaar: Socks and shorts might give us some ideas... The long sleeve is an actual undershirt not part of the short sleeved shirt.

I'm not collecting - and now my mate is staying overnight in Folkestone so they're in France by 8am. It doesn't even open until 10am (local) and there are only a few thousand Wales and same N Ireland fans with vouchers, so spreading that over about 6 hours shouldn't be too much of an issue. The 800 or so Saints tickets in Midtjylland given out over a shorter timescale didn't involve standing behind more than about 10 people, so scale that up 10 times and 100 people in a queue isn't too bad is it? The problem I found for Switz v Romania at the Parc des Princes was the terrible signage for red/yellow gates which meant loads of people went through the blue/green checks as well, thus getting checked twice. Basically you can walk across the peripherique bridge to get to red/yellow and there's a separate entrance. The blue/green was four bottlenecks and it took us nearly an hour from Porte St-Cloud Metro to getting into the ground.

A HUNDRED QUID for a jacket and £90 for a RAIN jacket? Jesus. Lovely line in sleeveless training tops for the chavs too. And FOUR colours of training tee? Yikes. Then again we had at least 4 last season, just in two "seasons".

Here's the new Colo Colo 3rd kit - this is interesting (wouldn't want it for a home kit, but quite like the style for an away).

I'm fairly certain there will be plenty of tickets available over there, not many non-Welsh or N Irish will care and a fair few England fans will have Paris accommodation and Winner B tickets to sell to try and fund a trip to Nice on Monday. Saw tickets for every one of the 4 games we went to, some more than others. Ticket portal has sold out of today's official "new" allocation though.

I'm up at 0600 - Eurotunnel at 0950, then driving to Paris with the wife and my dad, 2 of us have tickets, my dad doesn't. In the Wales end, 2 tickets face value. Only got back last Thursday morning after 4 games in 5 days in Lens, Lille, St Denis and Paris.

Because the draw put Hungary, Iceland, Austria and Portugal in the same group and the 3rd place comparison doesn't allow for difficulty of schedule.

I'm vaguely annoyed that my usual Xmas trip "home" to watch a match is going to be accompanied by that bunch of gimps. Though at the moment as it's the same time as Saints v Spurs I'm going to have to keep an eye on Prem tv times before I make any Xmas choices. In other news, all 7 of the Newport County L2 aways I was planning on going to currently clash with Saints home games (or are midweek oop north), though 3 of them will be moved for Europa League so I now have the opportunity to fly direct to the likes of Doncaster or Blackpool from any given Europa League venue...

Won't be much point in a 2017/18 thread until some UA teamwear stuff pops up in "the fall", we're keeping the same brand and shirt sponsor, UA are usually good not leaking stuff and it's not like we have a network of obsessed maniacs tracking this stuff down - for as long as it's stripes. Though any taxi drivers who've taken players to photoshoots for the new kit should probably be blabbing by now.

Giving this a miss this year I think, need to recover the Euros expenditure (won't be helped by a Paris day-trip on Saturday) before the Europa draw. Also new kits...

Just to be clear, other than the bit about the advert, I have no idea if it's like that or not - only that it makes sense that the design is similar to the Spurs leak. Found Toluca's new UA shirt online the other day And Sao Paolo's new UA home was released today: Also the AZ Alkmaar away shirt for 2016/17 was unveiled at the end of last season, looks like a new design with the same collar as the Sao Paolo but a nice bit of bespoke "castle wall" on the sleeve hoops:

I'm just going to point out that Pellegrini was a chequebook manager at Malaga as well, when Abdullah Al Thani took over. They signed the likes of Isco, Van Nistelrooy, Joaquin, Monreal and Toulalan, and broke their transfer record to sign Santi Cazorla (coincidentally from Villarreal) in 2011/12 for 21 million Euros. They'd never had that much money before and it showed.

You'll need to change the sleeve badges to the new circular ones, and (apparently) there's a white box for the red VM logo. But other than that I'd be guessing that's pretty close.

I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in a table that says "clubs have to have spent at least 15 years in the FL in the past 50" and then leaves Newport County entirely out of it, given that they only had a 21 year gap in between their two FL spells. But anyway. Also... "Premiership" - just the 9 years out of date with the naming.

Nike and Adidas are absolutely taking the pee with their "single style" off the peg approach and clubs should tell them where to shove it. I'm not entirely sure UA and the likes of Macron are much different, but as they have fewer teams the kits still look more bespoke than the awful Nike Wrong Socks kits or the tedious Adidas Everyone's Armpit Stripes This Year kits. The weirdest thing Adidas do is make bespoke kits for MLS but give half their teams in the Prem the same templates.

Ah, so the same template as the Spurs leak then, red yoke across the shoulders?

Annoys the sh11t out of me when the wife's babbling on about anything other than the match sometimes...