verlaine1979

Presumably you're also fine with players trying every dirty trick in the book to force a move when they feel the club they are currently contracted to doesn't meet their ambitions?

4-2-2-2 with our current squad is still tricky. As I understand it, basically all of the 2s need to be pretty mobile, as they regularly switch from central to wide positions depending on where the press is happening etc. As such, I wonder whether either of our obvious deep 2 (Rom and Hoj) actually have the mobility to cover the necessary ground. Playing Lemina as part of the deep 2 would certainly give us more mobility there, but you'd think a spine of Hoj/Lemina - Djenepo/Redmond - Ings/Adams would get picked off pretty easily. Wonder if we might end up defaulting to 4-3-3 just to make the most of who we've got, with Rom sitting, Hoj and Lemina ahead of him, and then a front three of Redmond, Djenepo and Adams.

Fits the profile at least. Wonder if there's any chance we could be looking to move Ings on to one of the promoted clubs at cost or a small loss? I remember reading a few months ago how Dortmund have a policy of selling pretty much anyone in midfield/attack aged over 25/26 as their data suggested capacity to run and press drops sharply from that point onward. Leipzig have a similar recruitment policy, so I wonder if Ralph wants us to adopt a similar approach here?

Yeah, I wouldn't look too deeply into the reasons why certain players are labelled by certain fans as lazy or unreliable.

Agreed on the Austin front - his lack of mobility is just too big an impediment these days. As for whether Long played into form or luck, 20% of his season goal tally was down to Kaspar Schmeichel diverting a shot bound for the corner flag into his own net, so I'm sticking with luck.

Long is more suited to moving about than Austin, and that's about the sum of it. As for his goals towards the end of the season, he ran into a vein of luck, not a vein of form. If you want Long to be a significant component of our attack next season, you're inviting another year of frustration. Hopefully with Adams starting and Ings resting on the bench, Long's league appearances next season wont make it into double figures.

Eh, maybe it's just a coincidence, but the number of scuffed/bobbling goals last season does suggest that he doesn't strike the ball particularly well. It's not always a big impediment to a successful striker (Inzaghi never seemed to make a great connection and it never did him any harm) and of course, his first touch and passing could be exquisite, as all I've seen are the goals.

Doesn't look to be the cleanest striker of a ball, so I hope his other attributes compensate for the technical shortcomings.

You wouldn't sell Lemina unless the rest of our transfer activity depended on it. But as he probably commands the highest fee of anyone in our squad, and is among the most likely to find buyers around Europe, I guess it makes economic sense if there's no money in the kitty. £25m for Lemina + £14m for Targett + £15m for the assorted rabble probably keeps us net neutral again.

Agreed - would much rather take a huge haircut on Elyounoussi's fee, as we know he can't run and RH's style requires runners. Boufal at least has the control and acceleration to carry the ball and go past people.

Maybe we can use the money to lure Davis back from Scotland to provide a much needed boost to our creativity.

To be clear, I mean 'changed the game' in a way that none of our current squad would've been capable of doing (with the jury obviously a long way out on Djenepo). Maybe RH has already decided he's surplus to requirements, but he's got ability that's otherwise completely missing from our squad, so personally I hope he does well and comes back eager to be a part of what RH is trying to build here.

Not the greatest opposition, but changed the game when he came on.

Wasn't Vestergaard more like £16-18m? Considering he can't run and can't head the ball more than about five yards, you'd hope he wasn't our record signing (not that the other contender is any more impressive).

My point is that you seem to think that the owner investing money inevitably carries an unacceptable risk, unlikely to lead to a positive return. I'm saying that's obviously not the case, because if you recruit well, you can make a lot of money. Saying Gao shouldn't spend his own money because Wesley Hoedt is a bust would be like arguing that Apple shouldn't have bothered developing the iPad because the Newton was a failure. That, to borrow your beloved phrase, isn't how business works.

Eh, as so many people are happy to blather on about the club being a business (though I dispute this definition - it's merely a convenient simplification for owners who would prefer not to imagine they have a duty of care over an important community asset), investing to grow is always inherently risky, but businesses do it all the sodding time.

You keep banging on about business, but you miss some really obvious stuff. For a start, who says that a higher investment in players wouldn't yield an even greater return? It's not as if good quality young players go down in value once they prove themselves in the league. Anyway, as you say, it's getting repetitive. You think everything's fine, and I think we've got a dud owner and that it's unfortunate for the club and supporters that we're likely to be outspent by just about everyone in the league if we really do stick to our self-sustaining model. One of us is going to be right, and I honestly hope it's you.

Whether a business is 'self-sustaining' or not depends on the competitive context in which it finds itself. I'm not sure why you struggle so much to comprehend that incredibly simple idea. If a self-sustaining club is relegated because all the clubs around it spent more money and recruited better players, what exactly has been sustained? And as for my estimate of his net worth - I suppose it's possible he's squirrelled away a vast fortune and it was just an momentary political inconvenience that prevented him from buying the club in cash. However, I'd suggest that if Jack Ma had wanted to buy Saints, he probably wouldn't have had to cobble together a loan from Hong Kong to do so. I like your optimism, and I hope you're right and that he's loaded and that he won't have to take a penny out of the club ever, and that we'll be able to compete in the league regardless of whether the clubs around us in our mini-league continue to outspend us by tens of millions every window. I'm just pretty sure that you're wrong.

Eh, since £600m is more than the entire share value of Lander, it's an improbable figure that I mentioned only because using the Forbes list, it represents a theoretical upper limit for how much money he's got. The real figure is probably no more than £200-300m, most of which is locked up in Lander, and as such, that makes him pretty poverty-stricken for a PL club owner.

As pointed out elsewhere on the thread, he's not in the Forbes China wealth list, which bottoms out at about $850m, which puts an upper limit on estimates of his wealth at around £650m. Feel free to disagree, but unless you've got a better yardstick for estimating what he's worth than going by the market cap of the only meaningful business he's ever been involved with, then by all means, bring it to the party. As for the rest, not sure if you're just being hyperbolic, but nowhere have I suggested that removing money from the club would be a crime. It would just be sh** for us fans.

What we know of Gao is that he was a bureaucrat who struck out into the private sector during the liberalisation of the Chinese economy. As such, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that his net worth is directly linked to the value of the company he founded, which has been in a slump for several years and is now valued at only about half a billion. I don't know of many entrepreneurs whose wealth exceeds the market cap of the (listed) company they founded, so I'd guess based on that, that he's worth around £200-300m on paper, a fair amount of which will be illiquid, in which case, interest payments of around £10m a year on top of the loan principal would put a pretty substantial dent in his cash flow if it was just being funded from his personal wealth. If smarter financial minds have arguments for why he might be worth a lot more than that, or where else he might be sourcing payments of that magnitude, my mind will be put at rest - but at the moment, looking at the profile of the man, I just can't see how he won't eventually have to start dipping into the kitty, even if he hasn't started right away.

Saints are a business entity owned outright by an individual. As such, there's nothing the club could do to stop Gao if he decided that part of being 'self-sustaining' was that the club start paying off the debt he incurred to acquire us. There are several ways he could set up such an arrangement, the various tax implications of which I couldn't speculate on, but to pretend that there is a chinese wall (fnar) between the club's finances and Gao's is, I would suggest, either naive or ignorant. If we were owned by a multi-billionaire who'd taken on debt as some form of financial trickery, that would be one thing. However, the entire market cap of Lander is only about £500m, and I see no reason to believe that Gao's other resources set him up to pay what I'd guess is a high-single figures interest rate on almost £200m of borrowing. That money will have to come from somewhere over the duration of his ownership, and using Man U as an example, I don't see why it's scaremongering to hypothesise that the owner might see the club's sizeable and entirely predictable revenue as a convenient source of funding.

The existential fear is that he'll have to start using club revenue to service the loans he used to buy us. All of this debate and speculation is really about trying to figure out how likely that scenario actually is.

Blimey, getting in early doors with a shout for least-accurate-take of the season? Romeu is slow and Bednarek has a decent knack for goal-line clearances, but Vestergaard is both glacially slow and rubbish in the air. Impressively, he was pretty much the exact opposite in every respect of the player we actually needed when we signed him.

Do you have reason to believe that the loan described by Bloomberg (and widely reported elsewhere at the time) doesn't exist?