verlaine1979

Nope. Clubs can 'lose' up to £105m over three seasons as long as the owner is prepared to foot the bill by injecting equity into the club (i.e. paying off the debt). No need to dice around with dubious sponsorship deals - Gao could hand over an additional £35m per season in new cash (or the whole £105m in one season if he fancies it) without incurring any penalty at all from the Premier League. But as someone said above, neither is this likely to be a way of removing money from the club - as the majority shareholder, it's not like Gao needs elaborate schemes to do that. Mostly they just seem tin pot, and unlikely to be around for very long.

Last accounts had total staff wages at £96m (including directors and 130 or so non-footballing staff). Adding up to about £110m when additional costs like social security and pensions are factored in. Sky money for the period was £117m.

Strikes the ball extremely well, but comically one-footed. Looks almost allergic to touching the ball with his right boot.

Eh, whoever plays up front for Benfica seems to get about 30 goals a season, year in year out. One purple patch at 27 after multiple seasons only registering 2/3 goals a year does not a £50m player make.

Hope not, he's always looked absolute gash when I've seen him during international competitions.

Personally, I wouldn't even say it's anything as complicated that. I'm mostly concerned that if such a dubious sponsor is a) the best we could do & b) managed to get through our due diligence process with such glaring issues, it doesn't make me very optimistic about the running of the club and our future prospects.

'Move some of his investments' is a funny way to describe taking on £200m in high-interest debt.

Augustin looks a little more polished than either of them (and a cleaner striker of the ball) but if Everton and Leicester are after him, I think we can forget that one, even with the RH connection. Adams doesn't seem to strike the ball that cleanly, but from his goals last season, he does have a knack for finding the corner. Looked at a few clips of Aye playing and impossible to tell how good he is - the standard of defending is about as bad as I've seen in a decade or so of looking at YouTube clips of potential signings.

Aren't both Lookman and Adams pretty short? Maybe Adams is built like a bricky privy, but 5'9 doesn't really scream physical presence. That said, I think either of them would strengthen our attack. Clear out as much deadwood as possible and get both? I could live with a summer window in which we got Adams, Lookman and a decent CB. In particular, I think a young, English front three of Lookman, Adams and Redmond would probably start to get us a bit more favorable coverage, which always helps turning around a toxic atmosphere like the one we've had the past few seasons.

The estimated cost of Belt and Road is counted in trillions of dollars, but you believe that a key stepping stone in the plan was sending a small time chinese businessman to buy Saints with money he struggled to get out of the country? Did the Chinese government also tank the financial performance of Lander over the past couple of years to give Gao a plausible reason to focus on his foreign asset? I know it would be lovely to imagine that we're at the centre of global economic machinations that'll suddenly see us wielding the financial might of the Chinese state to infuse the club with quality, but that's not what this is. The reason everything looks weird and f*cked up is that we were bought by a chancer, and our new sponsors are likely just another bunch of chancers of his acquaintance. It doesn't need any more explanation than that.

You sound like you saw a headline in the Economist a few years ago and got carried away.

You'd have a point if billionaires were fighting among themselves for the right to redevelop grubby parts of Southampton, but I hate to break it to you, they aren't. Pumping money into the town would require no conspiratorial groundwork - just the same due diligence and permissions as any other provincial redevelopment project.

This is complete guff. Any of the UK's many financially moribund provincial regional/city councils will dance to the tune of whoever promises significant investment. They aren't sniffily playing hardball by pretending to be deaf until you buy the local football team.

I think the concern is not about being evasive over who your sources are, but over what you think is actually going to happen? Obviously moot if the information you have could only come from one source, but if its as widely spread as you suggest, you could presumably just be candid about how you think things are going to pan out. I don't think many people care about the wider political/economic machinations (if they exist) except as far as they fundamentally alter the ownership of the club, or its financial position re: investment or (thinking the worst) long-term survival. So, is Gao leaving? And if so, is the person that replaces him richer or poorer, better or worse?

The port of Southampton isn't owned by anyone in Southampton. It's owned by a consortium that includes the Kuwait government and a Canadian pension fund, so buying the local football club is unlikely to be part of any sensible acquisition strategy.

How far off being in contention for the first team would you say he is? 18/19 would be very young for a PL CB, but the likes of Gomez and Stones started at that age, so not impossible if he's an exceptional talent. That said, you pretty much only have to be mobile and semi-conscious to qualify as the most talented central defender at Saints at the moment.

You shouldn't be allowed to talk about FFP on this forum unless you know more about it than a vague sense that it's about stopping owners 'buying the league'.

Eh, healthy disrespect towards the club owner is one of the great traditions of football. For a start, the vast majority of them deserve no better.

Spot on. None of our CBs are really good enough, but I have little faith that we'll be able to do much about it. If RH wants to play 4-2-2-2 and we can only make one CB signing, it'll need to be someone quick, with great leadership qualities, who also never, ever gets injured.

Bearing in mind the whispers from the club about our financial situation, I'm really hoping RH has made enough of an impression already to be a deciding factor with the kind of players we're allegedly going to bring in. God knows the current squad look a million miles away from being able to play the kind of high energy, quick passing, quick pressing game he was known for before he came here.

Eh, the fact that only 5 teams in the league have scored fewer goals than us would suggest otherwise?

With the way agents are integrated into the game these days, the idea that you could keep interest in a player from a new club a secret is just naive. The situation with Liverpool was almost comical in how far beyond the tapping up rules they went, but do you really believe it was the one-to-one meetings that made all the difference, and that VVD's agent having a quiet word to explain that Klopp wants to build a team around him wouldn't have been 99% as effective in selling the move?

One day a club is going to be stupid enough to try this, and the resulting legal challenge will probably destroy the way the transfer system works for good. Footballing contracts are already an exception to the law regarding free movement of labour in the EU, and I suspect the reason this grey area is allowed to persist is that nobody really rocks the boat too much - players might get denied their move for a season at absolute most, but they're always allowed to leave in the end, even when their departure leaves the selling club manifestly weaker. The key is obviously that the player can't breach the terms of their contract. Another poster has alleged several times that VVD went on strike, but as far as we can tell from any public statements made at the time, that's not true (and probably libellous). Apparently all that happened was he was asked whether he was in the right frame of mind to play, and he said he was distracted by the situation - it was then the manager's decision not to play him. If under those circumstances (i.e. a player upset but basically willing to play) the club decided to punitively restrict him to training with the kids, potentially for the remainder of his long contract, the players' union would be rubbing their hands at the opportunity to go to court and challenge the status quo.

It's irrelevant - by virtue of being the best defender in the world he's automatically an edge case to which average behaviour doesn't apply. After all, how many players do we offer six year contracts to at the end of their first season? We were quite clearly trying to protect ourselves as best we could with a player we knew would soon be in very high demand. Really, I can't imagine why anyone would believe that the six year contract was anything other than a move to boost his transfer value. As if he was ever going to stay here until his thirties! Behind closed doors I'm sure the club and VVD's representatives were all quite clear at the time on the reality of the situation, that he would leave as soon as a club of suitable stature came forward with a sensible bid. Then the club got embarrassed by the tapping up stories, and rather than shrugging them off as the part of the nature of the modern game, they decided to double down on an intransigent position that offered us no winning outcome (I suppose other than the lunatics who think five years rotting in the reserves is the answer to anything other than their own unexplored inner rage). As I said before, the fact that he's about to start his second CL final, while we're scrubbing around trying to put together a back line consisting of Yoshida and whoever else hasn't made a dreadful blunder recently says it all about the wisdom of our approach.