The9

Leicester achieved what they did with a squad of players NO-ONE was trying to sign away from them. "...but Leicester" does not mean everything has changed. It has just illustrated that effort and teamwork can beat quality and big wages, but only as long as the quality and big wages don't also have the effort and teamwork. It's also shown that you have to be bloody lucky to get away with having a small squad, but we found that out last season and the season before, and everyone will find it out again and for the forseeable future. The fact everyone has more money is only beneficial to Saints' recruitment if we choose to hike up existing player wages or if we want to lure someone from outside the Premier League and no-one else who has the same money boost is interested. It'll just lead to wage inflation, again, but we are all going to see bigger European names selling players to smaller English clubs - and in that context we might be better off recruiting players who'll come for more than they'll get abroad but less than the English-based players are asking for.

I think this is nonsense, fwiw. If you're good but the way in which you are good happens to play into the strengths of your opponents, you need at least one alternative. Pochettino's Bielsa-led style is always high-press and his use of it in England has been in a very specific formation, which doesn't allow a lot of flexibility if the opposition happens to be very good at switching play, or otherwise avoiding the press by shifting the ball quickly. It often seemed like Pochettino's Plan A was "high press" and his plan B was "have a break from high press for a second because we're knackered". It certainly suits him being at Spurs and having the resources to pick two players for every position, and shrewd use of squad rotation with a second tier of nearly-as-good players has meant he avoided the two usual problems of fatigue from pressing and a disjointed team from rotation. They did look properly shattered second half against Chelsea though.

I don't get your logic. We play in stripes, but we have a clearly different kit to Sunderland (despite both being adidas) and Stoke this season already. As for the "colours inverted", they're not, Stoke's kit is black with green and ours is green with navy. They're not the same brand, so how is it "lazy" when it's clear that adidas used that colourway for us and Swansea away but in completely different styles, and Stoke's kit doesn't look like anyone else's in the Premier League and is made by a completely different company? What's your thought process there? One of them saw the other's and decided to copy it? Except in a different colour, without the stripes, branding, and release it at more or less the same time? Actually the Stoke New Balance shirt came out first, too. It's just coincidence, and not particularly surprising coincidence seeing as "diagonal sash shirts" as a style have been around for over 130 years. In fact Everton had a black shirt with a coloured sash on it in 1881. West Brom wore a kit with diagonal in 1878. It was popular early on because all you needed was a strip of material to make you look different to all the plain shirted teams. Even polka dots has been done (early Bolton) - everything's going to be derivative somehow, that doesn't make it "lazy". Anyway, your suggestion to "go back to the previous one" is a lazier option than anything! Also it's unclear which "previous one" you mean. We wore navy away last season, that's been a "once every 5 years" option. To summarise, this: doesn't look like this:

No one's mentioned it because it's clear that all the guy's done is slap (a poor version of) this season's sponsor on it and doesn't know about it one way or another. Just like he doesn't know anything about 2016/17 Under Armour styles beyond what's been seen with the Spurs shirt - and he hasn't used any of those design cues in the shirt anyway. If I was going to stick something together as a mock up it would have a big ole' yoke on it like the Spurs leak - which is not to say the new Saints shirt will. Pretty sure this is clear that Veho is a two-year deal so they'll be off the front of the shirts after next week.

If we're with them for 7 years I'd be surprised if we don't get at least ONE wide white stripe reworking at some point, there's only so many ways you can do stripes before you're repeating yourselves. Recent trends: The last white sleeved shirt was the Championship promotion one in 2011/12, if you assume the "all red" adidas shirt was a red sleeve with a white flash, anyway. The last "striped" sleeve was the striped flybe sponsored Umbro kit of 2008-10 - which was also the last 2 season home shirt. 6 years without proper striped sleeves! Red home socks for every season since the League One promotion (black socks with the sash kit, red away socks for that one) and due to the hooped Umbro socks before that have not worn predominantly white socks since before Umbro took over the kit in 2008. Saints have had plain red sleeves and predominantly red socks for the past 2 seasons, even post-Cortese. At the start of next season, Saints kit will have featured branding (or a lack of branding) from 4 different manufacturers in the 5 years since 2013: Umbro, adidas (two seasons), unbranded, and Under Armour. Due to general weirdness, the home shorts colours since the summer of 2010 have been white, black, red, red, black and black.

Again the failure to be able to quote quotes means I have to type "that means the PL having some kind of FFP and that won't happen" before I can absolutely take the p155 out of the Skate for failing to realise that the Premier League voted for FFP back when Cortese was still Saints Chairman, (he voted against it because presumably he'd already planned on spending Markus' legacy without asking anyone else and didn't want the massive influx of cash to be hampered by exactly the kind of controls that the Skate thinks don't exist, On balance I think the Prem is right to have the regulations, but the implementation of them is completely unfair - though "But Leicester" is the comeback for that one too). Anyway, here's an easy to read guide: http://www.financialfairplay.co.uk/financial-fair-play-explained.php

Careful, you'll have MLG all over your case saying that traditionally they should be made of grey wool or something.

I really don't like that design, there's something about the white stripes being slightly, annoyingly, thinner than the red ones. Plus the socks are basically identical to last year's with the UA logo on. And the red is slightly too dark. Also don't like the weird multi-line stripe on the shorts, which still looks like an adidas one either - is it meant to be grey or what? Don't like the use of the faux Prem sleeve badge which afaik will be white with the purple lion (see above), dunno why you'd bother mocking up one in different colours to that which will be used - though maybe they'll be using the multi-colour club-colour matching MLS logo model and I just haven't heard about it? Still better than the 2012/13 and 2013/14 kits though.

Griffo isn't the same as the others. Also has never been funny.

With the exception of the bloke flicking it on, it seems to have worked for Leicester.

But as Greece proved in 2004, you can win the Euros.

Except he's got the FA Cup Final, so...

Contract starts from July 1 and last time we had a new kit, adidas announced the release date at the start of June, teased designs through June and released the home and away shirts on the last working day of June. They basically can't sell anything before then due to the outgoing adidas contract. I'd anticipate a similar timescale, possibly tweaked to take advantage of interest in the Euros, especially as the players usually come back to training in early July and they'll be wearing UA when they do.

There aren't many UA shirts to leak (Spurs is above).

Some of us aren't knee-jerkers, but this was posted at the end of September - and couple of weeks later I apologised for suggesting we could come 13th and said I still thought we'd come 8th... don't mind if we get 7th or 6th though. Even so, we HAVE finished below all of the usual "top 6" except Chelsea and maybe Liverpool, did come below Leicester like everyone else, (but still above then-peers Palace, Stoke, Swansea and Everton), and below West Ham who I said we "probably weren't worse than" - but "can't see us being worse than Sunderland, Norwich, Watford, Newcastle, West Brom, Villa or Bournemouth" turned out to be right. Nice to see my Martina assessment had already been heavily revised by then, I think it's become fairly standard that he is now preferred to Cedric in "defensive" matches and that he's not an obvious weakness, we hadn't really worked out that was the... plan(?) by then.

Not really, it's completely pointless other than raising money for a charity which would be better off asking for 1% of the weekly wages of the people involved. I honestly couldn't care less about a load of ex-players going through the motions and would still have to seriously consider if it was worth it even if it was free. Fair play to them for the penalty idea though, it's at least a novel sideshow that will get some interest.

Yep, well when people make sh111t up for the sake of a crap joke...

???

I'd be surprised if Celtic didn't have some input into the final outcome.

I'm fairly sure that's one of the reasons they're going without a name sponsor from next season. It's just the Premier League. No FA Carling Barclaycard Barclays or ~ship. Hopefully people will get the message eventually.

Precisely this, allied to the fact that with the right timing a club can get players for a year or two before they naturally move up to the higher wages offered by the clubs in that Elite bracket.

Net spend isn't, but practically any other season total wages is. It's been proven to be a very strong correlation, stronger than goals scored even. This season is of course an anomaly, just like Leicester are for pretty much everything else.

Aside from the awesome kit, the lack of official 125th celebration (and the dreadful red nose badge) was more of an embarrassment than anything that actually was done. But is a 125th Anniversary really a big deal anyway? 130 passed with barely a word last year. The 40th Anniversary Cup Final thing seemed to be a bit of an "old man's" event to me, even though I know we have an older fanbase than most due to demography, I was very surprised at the decent turnout when I personally didn't see anything or even know it was happening. Then again I'm not even going to Kelvin's testimonial so it's partially my priorities on non-competitive matches and partially the "before my time" thing. I had a bloody good time celebrating two promotions and a JPT win, so it's not that...

It's the bit where we need to go an entire season fielding a core of about 14 players with hardly any injuries or suspensions until it barely matters that'll be the problem. Like it is for every other club every other season normally, and like it most likely will be next year. Will be interesting to see if the reallocation of funds more evenly makes any significant difference to the ability of "the rest" (inc Leicester) next season or if it's the case that we're already in a bizarre post-modern world where hugely paid squad members exist to "not play for other teams" as opposed to actually playing for their employer in any useful fashion, rendering their monetary advantages irrelevant to the business of winning the League. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that even with the gap closing, the usual "top 6" will still have all the best players on the most money, and the presence of new managers at Chelsea and Man City (and maybe Man United) might give their lazy stars a kick up the ar5e. But on the bright side, there will still be lots of interesting signings of some higher profile players for "the rest" as well. Then again I said Leicester would "do a Saints" and drop off to 6th or 7th... but they'll be glad of finishing that high next season.

It was sh11111t in concept and execution when some people decided to do it at Man City last year, God knows why they'd want to do it again.