Chez

Best we (the club) start talking about him as £50m player and get that market perception changed.

if they felt we were overspending on crap players and losing money buying the wrong ones - both true - and corrected those issues, the business could be transformed into better shape financially and on the pitch too. You don't always have to spend money to make a company run better. Also, by and large, the value of Prem clubs goes up as time goes buy. You can just sit on a club (as long as it stay in the league) and ten years later its price will have gone up - especially if you bought it cheap and improved its operations.

Maybe your two questions are irrelevant. After all, a player is worth as much as someone is willing to spend. United needed a right back, so spent £50m on one. Arsenal the same. Is there a buyer willing (or in need) to spend £50m on a right back this summer?

absolutely. if we could get that wage bill down from £114m to say £80m, then we could pay the debt down AND spend more on transfers. Pay less wages but still retain the quality is the tough bit.

SR may not have put a penny in to bridge things. There was money in the bank to cover player purchases to date. Next summer is probably when we get a better idea of what the owners are doing and how they are financing the club. I don't have an issue with what is happening, but I'm not going to credit SR the spend either, yet.

Yes, because the talk has been to continue in the same way as before...self-sustaining, sell-to-buy, buy cheap, sell high. Absolutely nothing has been mentioned about the owner investing in the club/team that I have seen. Question: What do you mean by owner investment mean? A gift or zero interest loan? The former is unlikely given what has been said to date. If it's a owner loan, then I'd question the reality of that. Don't you think a £100m debt is sizeable enough for a club of our size, considering we are not a million miles from dropping into the championship and financial nightmare that would bring?

I haven't a clue what you are on about. Self-sustaining, means the club wont be given gifts by the owners that allow it to spend more than it brings in. it means the club's income and expenditure needs to balance. Not every month or even every year, but over a period of years. We already have a £80m+ debt that will rise to £100m unless payments are made. You can't just keep adding to that debt by making losses every single year. At some point you will need to make a player sale(s) that tip the balance the other way.

No. I think you are right. We will need to sell. £100m loan/debt will just get larger unless we make profits in the coming years that enable us to pay it down. We only make profits through player sales. Might not be this summer, but if not, it will be next.

they have probably used the £26m of the bank loan (plus a bit from the 21/22 Prem money) this summer to buy players, and then could slowly pay off the accrued £100m of debt. However, as you say, to balance the books we will need to sell a player or two. Our outgoings exceed our income. Player sales is the only answer. A Salisu, KWP or whoever will need to be sold in the near future.

I agree with you that someone probably needs to be sold, but there was cash available in the bank to buy the current incoming players, so I don't think we are under huge pressure to make a sale this summer at this moment in time. If we want to spend another £25m on a striker, for example, then I'd suggest we will need to sell Bednarek and/or Armstrong. If we loan a striker, then maybe not. A player with three years on his contract AND wanted by a big club is not going to be sold cheap by us or any Prem side. Two years left and you have to weigh your options, one year and the buyer has the upper hand.

Looking at the figures, perhaps SR are not dipping into their pockets quite as deep as you might think. The follow amounts might be considered reasonably accurate: Bazunu £12m Bella-Kotchap £8.6m Aribo £6m Livia £10.5m There was £26m in the bank when SR bought us, left over from the loan, and I am guessing a chunk (if not all) of the Premier League prize money etc. was paid out at the end of the season - which I realise needs to cover the forthcoming year's expenditure. If Bednarek was sold for say £12m (not a lot of noise about that though) SR wouldn't have to had to put a penny in so far - which is fine by me by the way. Obviously we will have a £100m debt to service, but I assume SR will have factored repayments into our future running costs.

in addition to attacking threat, he looks like he has some idea how to defend. A fair few senior caps for Burkino Fao too. Youth is good, youth with experience better.

at that price, I am guessing about 12 minutes.

from a marketing point of view, you want to maximise these signings, so spreading them (announcements) out a little makes total sense - but get it out before everyone from the marcoms department goes on their holiday.

I thought Nixon was generally on the money about Saints...or is that no longer the case? That valuation of KWP is laughable. We'd want three times that. I'd want four.

Getting a full season out of Calvert-Lewin will help this time round. They can live without Richarlson IMO if they sign another flair player up top. However, if they sell Gordon, then you wonder how big a hole they must be in.

they don't sell Anthony Gordon (assuming the rumours of his move to Newcastle are true) - who looked tremendous last season - to balance the books further and then spend £40m on KWP.

I watched a video - might have been on youtube - about swap deals in football and the agents explained that they didn't happen often because they were just too complicated. Just getting a single player deal resolved was hard enough. Getting two relied on double the work, both players wanting the move and then neither part falling through due to any number of issues that can pop up. I guess if you are one of the agents/players/clubs, the last thing you want is to have to rely on the other deal also happening for yours to happen. Better to stick with one deal at a time. Thus when I see transfer rumours involving swaps, I basically regard them as made up bollocks. Baseball/NFL etc differs because (most) players can just be traded between teams without them having a say - far less complicated.

so sign Sterling, offer Broja in return? Or sign Ronaldo and offer Colwill in return? Not clear how this is gonna work. Swap deals don't happen often. There was the Sanchez/Mkhitarian deal, but it was incredibly tricky and only the fact the two valuations matched and all parties very happy enabled it to happen.

good point. The Daka signing for Leicester might be an interesting comparison. I am pretty sure we will have scouted him, but didn't have anywhere near the funds (£20m) to buy him at the start of the transfer window. He is just the type of player we will have been/are looking at from abroad. Young, pacy, scored goals etc. Yet he didn't make a huge impression last season, all be it that would not be easy as Vardy tended to play on his own up front. He did score about 5 goals though (all be it in a slightly better team than ours) so not a lot less than Broja. I think he will come good, but we've signed a fair few from abroad that have failed, so I'd be all for signing Broja rather than gambling on a £20m guy fro oversees. You can see Broja has `it'. No convinced he wants to play for us though.

Can't see it myself. If we got a £10m offer from a championship side, we might consider it, as we did Che to Leeds, but a loan leads where? If he does well, then what. If he doesn't, then what? Sure we save some wages, but what do you do with them? We will either give him a second season or sell IMO.

My post was about Broja, not KWP.

we should jump and sign Omar Richards before Forest complete the deal.

I know (as Wenger said) we all think our own wives are the most beautiful, but is he not in the `big bucks' category at this point. How much did Wan Bassaka or Chillwell go for?

I'm amazed its taken this long for him to be linked with another club. If you have watched SFC over the last two years you can't fail to have been impressed by him. Hope we can hold onto him, but buying anther fullback this summer could well be essential.