verlaine1979

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.

As someone said on another thread, we should be looking to bid for someone like Tomori from Chelsea. When we played Derby in the cup he already looked better than what we've got. Moreover, the club's PR should really start hammering on RH's similarities to Klopp in terms of style of play, enthusiasm etc. Klopp's stock is so high at the moment that it could give us a slight edge in recruitment, particularly with younger British players who might see us as a fast track to playing at that level and in that style.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, the idea that a renewed contract for an already proven player is anything other than a mechanism for protecting their transfer value is insane.

You're kidding yourself. He'll be 28 at the end of this season, which would be the end of the 2 years you're talking about. No way was he going to stay and play mid-table football for the peak years of his 20s. As you say, he was probably the best defender in the world - it's just absurd to think we could have kept him. And besides, that's not really what contracts are for these days (in addition to protecting the transfer value of the player, the higher the transfer fee, the lower the signing bonus, so the extra wages are also a compensation for that aspect of any future transaction). If anyone good comes to Saints and shows their potential consistently, bigger clubs will want them and they'll probably want to leave after two season. It's exactly what happened with Mane, and it really should've been what happened with VVD. Take as much money as possible and move on. Le Tiss was an unusual figure even back then, and such behaviour has only become less likely with the money and celebrity on offer. Of course, if Gao finds a few billion down the back of his sofa and wants to bankroll us that way, then fine, our behaviour can change. But if the club has to be run as a business in order to survive, then run it like a business and leave the vanity and ego out of it.

It probably also gives young players who are weighing up whether to come to us something to put in the negatives column. So many players share agents, and so many agents are on retainers with clubs that the idea that you can maintain a chinese wall around players to prevent them finding out that other clubs want them is simply preposterous. We should manage the club in light of the reality we find ourselves in, not some fantasy. Liverpool got VVD, are fighting for the league and are in the CL final for the second year in a row. All we got in return for our stubbornness was a season of uncertainty over our CB positions and some ropey subsequent recruitment. Who knows, perhaps if we hadn't been such drama queens over VVD we might have been able to attract someone slightly better than Vestergaard?

Eh, new contracts are as much about the club protecting resale value as it is a 'reward' to the player for doing well (leaving to one side the spurious notion that pay in return for work is ever a reward). Our mistake was going down the 'not for sale at any price' route. That immediately broke the covenant between the club and players, which had quite obviously been based on the idea that if you do well here, it's a stepping stone to bigger things. At a club our size with our business model, a player should never be 'not for sale'. Instead once there is concrete interest from bigger clubs, we should make it clear that they can leave, but only at their appropriate valuation. This would encourage want-away players (and fans) to put as much pressure on their suitors to get a deal done as on us to sell. The whole refusal to negotiate for VVD once it became obvious he wanted to leave was idiotic grandstanding, and did us no good at all.

If RH doesn't get the funds to build a team in his image this summer, I doubt we'll get more than another season out of him. He's just too overwhelmingly employable (young-ish, affable, passionate with the fans, coaches a modern game) for someone else not to take a punt on him.

We can't afford top players. We can either afford a small number of league-proven mediocre players on high wages, or we can afford a larger pool of young players from other leagues on lower wages, some of whom will at least have the potential to transcend mediocrity.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese govt policy towards foreign sporting acquisitions had already changed before the deal went through. Gao pushed ahead anyway, using loan financing from HK rather than his mainland assets, which were restricted by the govt change of heart. To me, this cements the idea that it was less about trying to fit in with regime policy, and more about trying to transfer wealth out of China and into a more secure European regulatory environment. Nothing that's happened to Lander or Gao since the takeover (massive crash in stock value & net worth, effective takeover by state controlled funds) suggests much reason for optimism. The club may not be milked for debt payback yet (perhaps because our PL status has been so precarious since the takeover) but that doesn't mean we don't have that to look forward to, just like almost every other debt-acquired club in Europe.

To state the obvious, on our budget it isn't - it's our record fee.

Thing is, to sustain the self-financing model, you have to be extremely strict, and always sell two years before a contract is up, no matter how much of a fan favorite they are (unless they aren't worth much and selling wouldn't yield the funds to buy a suitable younger replacement). Les Reed/the club hierarchy screwed up when he started to act like he believed we were different - if you declare that you're going to run the club as a self-sustaining business, then you can't get distracted by sentiment or nebulous ideas like image or legacy.