verlaine1979

Would love it to be true, but Long has been played football at a high level for 13 years. If he hasn't learned how to weight a pass or pick a finish by now, I suspect the problem isn't something that can be trained away.

You don't get Ajax's best player for £11.5m anymore.

You can see why RH didn't think there was much point in going. In the main, the squad he took has a distinct look of 'people young enough not to get jet lag for longer than a day or two' about it.

Who is the #12 they keep recycling the ball through?

In a world where proven top league ability now seems to start around the £50-60m mark, and the very best players are all £100m+, the kind of young players with potential we used to buy are already £20-30m+. You think a player with Mane's goal scoring record and European experience would still be £12m? Look at the contrast between his record prior to joining us and Djenepo's over two seasons in a similar quality league (45 goals 32 assists vs 12 goals 7 assists) - I'm hopeful that the latter will be as effective and exciting to watch, but in terms of demonstrable productivity, there's no comparison. If we'll never buy players above £30m, we're already priced out of the running for the next Mane.

On that basis, I'd definitely go with zero chance of getting him.

You're either being deliberately obtuse, or you have trouble following an argument. Why are we having this conversation in the first place? Because the reactionary response to asking for more signings is that someone always comes along and says: what, you mean recruit like Norwich/Middlesborough/Fulham/QPR?! To which an entirely reasonable and factual answer would now be - no, like Wolves. The rest of what you've written is just sophistry. Fulham and Wolves spent almost exactly the same amount of money; ten players IS equivalent to '91% of a new first Xi', everything else on your list can be written off as rounding errors in debate that are irrelevant to the crux of the point articulated above. To remind you: this entire conversation is the result of people arguing whether signing large numbers of players is inherently destabilising. If a significant number of posters didn't believe this to be the case, there'd be no need to have the discussion at all.

My point wasn't that they replaced 91% of their first XI, just that this is what an additional 10 players represents. Anyway, you just seem to be making it up at this point. Until Fulham and Wolves spent comparatively huge money on an unprecedented 10+ players each last season, it was the clubs recruiting 5/6 new players in the summer who were regarded as the doomed outliers unsettling their trusted squads. Maybe you have a more subtle point, but at the moment it just sounds like you're saying Wolves did well because they limited themselves to only recruiting 10 players, while Fulham were fools for recruiting 15, and so it proved at the end of the season. Thanks for that piercing insight, Captain Hindsight.

Either way, Wolves bought 91% of a new first XI and did very well with it. For a long time, received wisdom has been that anything more than 2-3 signings is proof of a team in turmoil who are bound for the drop. Wolves' example proves it means nothing of the sort. Well run teams recruit well and do well, regardless of how many players they sign. Poorly run teams recruit badly and do badly, whether they're buying 1 player or 10. All this really means for Saints is that a number of supporters believe we need more than 2 signings, and would quite like the club to transition from being poorly run to being well run. It's really not that unreasonable a hope.

I suspect the PFA is slightly more aggressive in pursuing contract breaches than you are. The union always seems to win in these disputes, hence why you almost never see clubs trying to short change players.

It's perfectly possible to have players on the books who aren't included in the official 25 man squad. Obviously a total waste of money, but football clubs are hardly 100% efficient businesses at the best of times.

True, though it helps that if you play any of the US's three main sports, their leagues are really the only game in town. So only around 20 team owners need to collude to minimize player power. To achieve the same shift back to the owners in world football you'd need a much greater degree of cooperation, otherwise the best players would simply decamp to a competing league at the first sniff of a wage cap or other contractual shennanigans.

I wonder if clubs would be happy for players to move to an at-will model of employment?

He seems to be convinced that employees have a moral obligation to their employer but not the other way round. First against the wall when the workers finally revolt.

My point is that all clubs recruit unsuccessfully, and I don't see any reason why our list of 'players with no future' (many of whom were matchday squad regulars last season) is any more of a burden than it is on other clubs of similar means who are able to outspend us.

Since our total wage bill is about £113m, that means about 28% of wages are going on players who 'have no future at the club' (though I'd suggest from that list, McCarthy, Lemina, Cedric and Austin would probably make most match day squads if present and fit, so you can remove them from the waste equation - if they're still here, they'll play significant parts). We have a large-ish squad, in which not all players are in contention for the first team. We don't appear to pay above the average PL wage, and at £80k, our highest earner earns around the same as the highest earners at Watford, Newcastle and less than the highest earner at Wolves (source https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbymcmahon/2019/04/26/premier-league-wages-are-a-disgrace-except-when-your-teams-winning/#3b10f8433938). So my point is simply that our situation seems no different to any other club of our stature. As a % of turnover, we spend around the same as Palace, Bournemouth and Leicester on wages - we aren't a special case and the club has no excuse to plead poverty on this account.

No, we just haven't been very good for a few seasons. If we were still hovering around 8th in the league, the wealth, attitudes and social media activity of our players would be exactly the same, but no one would care aside from the usual morally dubious suspects.

Almost all of them have been here a couple of seasons now - presumably their book value would have been marked down over the percentage of their contract already.

So only the first four in that list earn over the average premier league wage (£57.6k per week). Worth bearing in mind when discussing the apparent parlousness of our financial situation.

How do you know whether FF wants to play or not? Besides, at the most basic level, footballers are paid to train and be available to play if called upon - they aren't hired contingent on whether they are in or out of the first XI.

Losing money on him with 3 years left on his contract would be idiotic. Moreover, to all the people claiming he has a bad attitude and spends too much time on instagram, it's funny that it's only ever the likes of Pogba, Sterling and Lemina who get criticised for this, when pretty much every professional footballer under the age of 30 has more or less the same flashy, hedonistic lifestyle. Wonder what the common factor is between them?

Out of interest, how successful do you think clubs are at forcing out high wage earners with cast-iron contracts? There's a very long list of overpaid players who've collected millions while seeing out contracts despite never being picked, yet I'm struggling to think of someone who was on a massive wage who ended up leaving to their obvious financial detriment.

Don't Leeds want £30m+ for Phillips? Pretty sure that puts him out of our price range regardless of what we get for Lemina. And even if we could afford it, £30m spent on a good CB would be more transformative to the team than upgrading Lemina.

Honestly, unless Djenepo and Adams suddenly tear up the league, I feel we'd be roughly in the same place we were last season, albeit with perhaps a marginally less squeaky last week or two. It's a team with almost no spine, crying out for more strength at CB and DM.

Hopefully just trying to give other clubs the impression that he isn't totally surplus to requirements, boosting his desirability in the market.