stevegrant

On the flip side, the Premier League have ramped up their efforts to stop Saturday 3pm broadcasts in the UK, which means that pubs remain vulnerable despite the Skate landlady's supposed "win" in the courts.

Worth bearing in mind that Wigan was a "Bronze" category game, so only £30 in most areas last season, whereas I think Sunderland yesterday was a "Silver" game at £37. Add in, of course, that people have seen Sunderland play in the last six months or so and they're an absolutely soul-destroying team to watch

Wigan brought around 500 last year, Sunderland had just shy of 1900.

No, just the worst view in the ground as you have the goal obscuring your view.

"Dangerous Albert"'s ticket has already gone

I'll have it for a friend of mine, can you email me at subscriptions@saintsweb.co.uk and I'll arrange payment and delivery/handover?

Surely I can't be the only one who thought that Adams should have opened with one of the youngsters rather than sending them both out to face the new ball?

Griezmann's scored a rather decent goal for Real Sociedad in Lyon

Not especially lucky considering they're in a completely different section of the competition and couldn't draw them at this stage.

More than £18,000 saved.

I don't really see what relevance away attendance has to the subject of "irresponsible spending" or a broadcasting contract that may or may not increase or may or may not decrease in nearly three years' time. From Saints' perspective, our away attendances have improved dramatically in recent years - funny how a bit of success motivates people all of a sudden - and as a result, the club will have seen a marginal benefit from the booking fees they've charged, and I believe away clubs generally get a small percentage of the ticket revenue for away sales (around 5%), so there's that benefit. Most, if not all, clubs will take the view that if away clubs don't bring many fans and they can sell those extra tickets to their own supporters then that's a bonus for them. The trend of attendance figures suggest that, despite a supposed 10% reduction in away followings, more and more people are still pouring through the turnstiles in the top flight, so why would the clubs actually give a toss one way or the other? Scudamore came out with those comments and what has been done since? Nothing.

Your dislike of Pardew is hilarious. Definitely a **** manager, despite being voted LMA Manager of the Year and Premier League Manager of the Year by his fellow managers having got relatively unfancied Newcastle to 5th place above the team who would go on to be crowned European Champions, and despite winning promotion with both Reading and West Ham (and getting the latter to the FA Cup final and Europe the following season), and winning the only trophy a significant proportion of Saints fans have ever seen the club lift. Yes, definitely a **** manager.

This is simply not true, Phil. Average attendances over the last 4 PL seasons: 2009/10 34,142 2010/11 35,191 (+3.07%) 2011/12 34,598 (-1.69%, largely as a result of QPR and Swansea getting promoted in place of West Ham and Birmingham) 2012/13 35,857 (+3.64%) This season is likely to see another improvement. Cardiff's attendances will be about the same as Reading's (24k), while Palace (26k) and Hull (25k) will get bigger crowds than both QPR (17k) and Wigan (18k).

Worth noting the stat about this weekend seeing the lowest number of English-qualified players starting games isn't quite true. 75 of 220 starters were English this weekend, while there apparently has been a weekend in the past where there were only 62. A pretty sad state of affairs whichever way you look at it, mind you.

Murphy's alright, thought he was a massive improvement on Lawrenson on MOTD, not that that's necessarily saying much, admittedly.

That 8-year contract was for show. It's almost certainly got a fixed payoff written into it, regardless of when it's terminated or who by.

Presumably because all of the county's (i.e. Bransgrove's) money is tied up in the various expansion projects despite the county appearing to have to offer all sorts of discounts to get anywhere near a sell-out for the handful of international games we get given.

That's the amount that had been converted to equity at the time of the last set of accounts.

While I expected him to score on Saturday, the margins are becoming much finer the longer he persists in putting all of his penalties in the same direction. I'm surprised he's not varied which side he puts the ball a bit more, to keep the opposition goalkeeper guessing.

Ah, an old-school Rick-rolling... excellent I've seen 2:30pm mentioned by a few journalists on Twitter. The club's YouTube channel is here, so I assume it'll appear there when the live stream begins.

According to the online booking system, there's around 3200 tickets still available in home areas. Sunderland have not taken the full allocation, meaning that the whole of block 43 is on sale to home fans.

Nailed it, tbf

Always worth showing caution in these circumstances, and spending the sort of money we did at the start of *last* season having not yet banked any of the lucrative Premier League cash was mildly terrifying, but having got through last season unscathed, with the wage bill appearing to be under pretty good control and with the massive increase in guaranteed revenue this season, I'm satisfied we're in very good shape financially. I'm sure that'll be of relief to everyone Seriously, absolutely no issue asking questions - it's when questions aren't asked by anyone that problems start arising. Just look down the road, they're getting excited about beating Morecambe and one of the reasons for that is that nobody started asking questions about sustainability until it was too late. Our situations are, of course, massively different - we've got our own assets for a start, we've signed players on what appear to be affordable wages and we've benefited from the new broadcasting deal to facilitate a lot of the spending.

It'll be good if either of you could reach that stage at some point soon, tbh.

The rule that says you can only increase the wage bill by £4m per year over the next 3 years (i.e. the duration of the current broadcasting contract) only applies to clubs whose wage bill is £52m or above. Ours doesn't even come close to that yet. There are various ways of getting around it anyway, with sponsorship deals etc. For someone who has owned/run football clubs for many years, Gold doesn't seem to actually know much about the financial side of things. A surprise when you look at the utter cluster**** both of the clubs he's owned have been during his tenure...