verlaine1979

Exactly. By using a loan sourced from outside PRC wasn't he explicitly going against the wishes of the Chinese govt? The whole 'currying favor' theory has never made sense on that basis. Far more likely that he was trying to move money out/establish a source of wealth somewhere democratic.

If Romeu is the main differentiator between topping the league and having the worst form in the league, maybe Ralph is right to want an additional DM.

Obafemi's not a finisher. There's a reason we remember him for the spectacular goal against Chelsea. It's because he rarely finished the meat and drink chances.

This reads like Gao is holding one of your family members hostage.

Agreed, for the most part, Though to the surprise of no one, I'd put Armstrong in that team ahead of Steven Davis.

Armstrong is decent (occasional dangerous loss of possession aside) but he's not remotely in the same class as Tadic.

It's not unreasonable. Neither Walcott nor Redmond are reliable finishers. They have other strengths, sure, but confidently tucking away chances isn't among them. Both far more likely to score the spectacular than put away a one-on-one.

Annoyingly true - for all the ups and downs of recent seasons, you've always been able to count on West Ham coming along and absolutely bullying us for 90 minutes twice a year.

Presumably, with transfer/contract catastrophes like Haller, Anderson, Yarmolenko and Reid weighing down their books, West Ham won't be making any meaningful transfers for the next three or four windows.

We're crippled by our ownership. Everything else flows from that. Nothing simpler.

If everyone knows that the only singular aspect of our financial circumstance compared to our peers is that our owner is skint, why does everyone bring up our transfer failures (Carillo, Forster, Lemina) as if they are the problem, rather than an inevitable risk factor that any business would have to factor in to its sustainability planning?

Whether you like it or not, football clubs in the same league are extremely comparable as financial entities, and ratios like transfer net spend and wage/turnover make for a reasonable basis of comparison. If those things are roughly equivalent between clubs who still exhibit substantially different spending behaviour, we're entitled to ask why. More than half the clubs in the league are loss making on a pure P/L basis. We are not alone in making less money from operating income than we spend on operating costs. That is just the nature of football ownership right now - it is inherently speculative, and like any leveraged position, if you don't have extra cash to support yourself during a squeeze, you are f*cked. That is the situation we are in - we have similar income, similar wages and a similar rate of unsuccessful transfers to several other clubs, but because we do not (apparently) have access to short term (i.e. 2-3 seasons) bridging capital from our owner, we are handicapped compared to many of our immediate peers. A self-funded business model only works if your competitors aren't burning debt/investment to try and put you down.

Our wage to turnover ratio is high, but we're not an outlier by any stretch. For the most recent figures I could find, we're on 77% while Everton and Leicester are 85% and 84% respectively. Palace are on 78%, while Brighton and West Ham are also both over 70%. Post-promotion ratios for the likes of Villa and Leeds aren't available from what I can tell, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are on par or ahead of us. Over the past five years, all of those clubs, apart from Palace, have a net transfer spend of over £100m (Everton being at the top with +£275m). Palace are more modest with a net spend of +£56.2m. Our net spend is -£2.8m. It must be acknowledged that it is the ownership that is crippling the club's ability to spend on both transfer fees and wages, as we aren't even close to being a unique case in terms of our ratios and deficits.

I guess that's what I'm saying. It sounds like the club has no ability to cover even a short term positive transfer balance without it creating unacceptable risk (and as someone says above, Lemina is only going to bring in £4m or so). If true, that's a staggering level of constraint for a PL club to be operating under compared to its peers.

I know we have to sell to buy, but if we really literally have to do it in that order rather than just balancing the books at the end of the window, we must be in a truly dicey place financially.

Eh, don't blame him. Who in their right mind risks the rest of their career to do their current employer a favour?

He played pretty much every game for Liverpool, but in a side that fell quite significantly from the standards of the previous season.

As above, if he's aiming for a bosman he's got far more to lose by going 100% and getting injured than by coasting and only getting £150k a week from West Ham or Villa rather than Spurs or Leicester. If he's free and fit, someone is going to take him, because he's a proven goal scorer. Form is temporary n'all that.

No - he's a known quantity. As long as he's not crocked he'll get a very good contract as a free agent somewhere regardless of how hard he tries with us. He guarantees goals - someone will pay.

If we can only get 20m for Ings now, he'll go for virtually nothing in January.

If the players who want to leave at the end of their contact are morally obliged to sign new deals out of loyalty, is the club equally obliged to offer new contracts to players it doesn't really want to keep? Or does the expectation of loyalty only go one way? And let's not pretend that we were the only option before retirement for a promising Bayern youngster and a proven PL goal scorer in his mid-twenties - we weren't doing either of them a favor. Being upset with players who are still under contract agitating for a move is one thing, but holding it against players if they leave when their contracts are up is just pointless.

No shit.

Ah, so you'll listen to what Marcus Rashford has to say about racism *after* he rescues China's Uighur population from their current predicament. Makes sense. I assume you were against Brexit on the principle that we should've been expending our energy bringing democracy to Saudi Arabia first, before we dealt with any trifling questions of parliamentary sovereignty at home?

I'd swap Vest for Sanchez....

Still can't quite believe how appallingly that game was managed. They weren't even subtle issues - we were overrun and didn't try to do anything about it. And yet now we'll be stuck with Southgate for most of these players' careers, all because of two lucky knockout draws in consecutive tournaments. An Italy team whose only superstars are both the wrong side of 35 - that was the chance.