verlaine1979

There were rumours of KL trying to sell pretty much from the moment her father's will came out of probate, but no real rumours of a buyer until Gao came along. I'd guess that she was desperate to sell from the very beginning (Saints probably being the largest asset in ML's estate) but that she struggled to interest anyone else in paying top of market for a mid-level PL club.

This - 47% possession must have been almost entirely passing it between the back five, as the ball hardly stuck for longer than two passes in midfield and attack. None of our CBs are great passers, and yet we're set up for them to be our chief playmakers. Hence the number of times Bednarek ending up passing it straight to Pickford.

I really doubt he took out £200m in ultra-high interest loans in order to gain access to Southampton's hyper-competitive real estate market. We're not talking about a sliver of Hong Kong here - pretty much anyone with a pot of cash and a desire to lose most of it would be welcome to regenerate any bit of Southampton they like.

The more I think about what you're saying, it really boils down to 'our owner is poor, so we can't expect him to invest money that he might not get back'. That's a noble sentiment, but cold comfort when other owners are rich enough to SPEND money and not give a sh*t about getting it back.

Gao has pretty much already said that his purchase was motivated by a desire to move money out of China (I can find the interview if you want chapter and verse) - we don't need to speculate. And every decision he's made since has been in line with that thinking (no fattening of the pig, as someone quoted earlier). To continue the porcine analogy, most of the other club owners in the PL have bought their pigs with the intention of pampering them in the hope that they'll win a rosette at the county show (prestige, politics, billionaire entertainment). Our owner has bought a pig with the intention of making sausages.

I take your point about not wanting to get into a slanging match, but I'm genuinely curious about something: if Gao bought us purely as a vehicle for moving money out of China and into the comparatively safe-haven of UK regulation, are you okay with that? For him it might make sense to only think of the club as a financial instrument, but that creates a situation where the owner's incentives and motivations are completely opposed to the incentives and motives of the fan base - and that's a terrible foundation for the long-term health of the club.

What other owners do isn't irrelevant, because we're in competition with those clubs. You keep harping on about business acumen, but a competitive landscape with topography as obvious as this hardly requires a Harvard MBA to read.

Your reasoning would be sound if return on investment was the chief motivating factor for most top level club owners. Since it isn't, your reasoning falls as flat as your patronising tone. It's not entitled to want your club to compete on a level playing field with everyone else.

Moreover, since debt is converted to equity, the notional value of the club increases by the amount put in. Obviously he'd have to find a buyer willing to match his valuation, but he'd have to do that anyway, and a successful club with better players is worth more than a relegated club with dross.

Because every other owner is doing it (since only a tiny handful of clubs are transfer spend positive or neutral). If those are the table stakes of the game, then anyone who can't afford it shouldn't be playing.

I get tired of repeating this, but NO WE ARE NOT. Owners are allowed to inject up to £105m over three seasons as long as they make good the loss by converting debt to equity. There is no rule preventing Gao from giving a serious and meaningful boost to our transfer budget - especially when we've had consecutive years of profit. In other words, we're about as far from being constrained by FFP as a club in our position could possibly be. Oh, and before anyone brings up wages, there's already a mechanism for annual increase in the FFP rules, and we've sold everyone we had that was decent

He was only on for ten minutes, but we have to build the team around Djenepo. He's the only player in our squad with more than one good quality.

What makes you think Gao is interested in 'delivering' anything? I've always thought the club was a place for him to park money outside of China, with the rhetoric around continuing our 'self-sustaining' model simply a convenient way for him to avoid explaining why he can't provide any additional funds.

Eh, if Rohl was the wunder-coach responsible for all the good things RH achieved, why did Bayern take him to do a video analysis role? I think you've mistaken correlation for causation.

The success of modern German football is all about athleticism, and we must have the least athletic squad in the league. We have midfielders without stamina, central defenders without strength, and strikers without pace. Added to that, there's an almost uniformly low level of technical ability which means we pass the ball slowly & conservatively, and have very few players capable of taking the ball past an opponent. Essentially, our squad is the exact opposite of the one RH thrived with at Leipzig - whether that's his fault for coming here, or our fault for not recognising the disconnect is a valid - but at this point futile - question. From his comments before the 2019 January and Summer windows, I suspect RH expected more leeway to transform of the playing squad - no wonder he looks peeved.

Our midfield is too slow to get close enough to the ball to put in a tackle.

Flowers, Ruddock, Le Tissier, Rod Wallace and Shearer - that's got to be a couple of hundred million at today's prices.

More likely that he believed/assumed that anyone who read his coaching manual would have everything they needed to do the job.

You're being pretty obtuse. Regardless of how good or big Celtic are, the standard of teams Elyounoussi is performing against is substantially lower.

I hate to break it to you, but we're really not one of the best teams at anything any more.

Eh, it's generous calling his Liverpool, Spurs and Wolves goals the result of pressing. None of those were a concerted team press that turned over possession - the first two were plain old charge-the-goalie and hope moments, while the Wolves goal was the result of a nothing clearance played under zero pressure and a hopeful header forward from Hoj that the defender unaccountably missed. He didn't miss his clearance because of our pressing - it was just a plain, unforced error. If we're going to rely on the sum total of gifts and worldies from Djenepo to get us over the line this year, then were f*cked.

Harsh, but spot on.

There might be strife between the two of them, but it's much more likely to be to do with the obligation to buy KL's 20% that has apparently just kicked in. If Gao made some contractually mandated commitment to invest funds at the time of the purchase (which it would have to be for KL to try and enforce it) a) why wasn't any mention of this made at the time to mollify fans worried about the new owner, and b) why did club mouthpieces like Krueger immediately start talking about no change in strategy and being self-sustaining at the fans forum and in interviews?

This is definitely true, which is why the start of the season is worrying. Sure. we're not in the relegation zone yet, and we have played some tough teams. But on the performances so far across both defence and attack, I'd say we're definitely within the margin of error where we could easily lose those two or three games that typically make all the difference and go down.

Eh, does anyone actually consider winning the Championship as silverware?