stevegrant

I don't think there's anything in Krueger's resume that would really make him the go-to guy to find a buyer for a £100-200m football club. I appreciate that it doesn't suggest he's a football club chairman either, but he's got a non-executive role, which makes it rather different to the traditional chairman role who carries out the negotiations and signs the cheques. If KL was looking to sell, she'd employ the services of someone with experience of corporate takeovers, and it would be as an outside consultancy rather than somebody already at the club. Edit: to clarify, I think Krueger's role at the World Economic Forum is from a motivational and management side of things rather than any in-depth corporate takeover experience.

Every football club is for sale for the right price, we're no different.

There are bits in all of it, really. Section by section: Cortese's departure - multiple reasons (some of which can't be specified as I'd get in all sorts of ****), although it's fairly well known that he put up resistance to ANY control of spending from KL. A suicide mission if ever there was one. Finances - correct with the exception of NC not leaking stuff to the press. He was all over both the Mail (Neil Ashton) and BBC (Ben Smith). Possible sale of club - it's feasible, but the method makes no sense. If there are no buyers at whatever asking price has been set, you either drop the asking price or make the product MORE attractive for the price, not less! Selling the top players arguably drops the value of the club by more than the fees received because of the perception that the club has momentum in the wrong direction. Lallana - feasible, but it's almost the complete opposite of what I'd heard, with the exception of the Man United stuff. He'd wanted out for months, Clattenburg was essentially right - having been away on international duty in November, he believed he'd "made it" and deserved to be at a club that elevated him to the same status as the England regulars. He wasn't entirely thrilled with being subbed off relatively early every game either. Players - NC had lined up a deal with West Ham to sell Rickie Lambert for £7m in January. That deal was hastily pulled as soon as NC walked. Overall lack of communication - certainly true, but for most players, what "communication" are they expecting from the board? Daily briefings with an update of how many shirts with their name on have been sold? Over the summer, players are rightly left to enjoy their own time and not be pestered by club employees (I'd be pretty ****ed off if my boss was phoning me with updates while I was on holiday - the clue's in the name). The only ones who should have expected to have heard something are those who would expect new contract offers in the pipeline - Fonte and Cork being the two prime examples - but I don't see what the fuss was about over Fonte supposedly having received his in writing. I'd want any contract offer I was going to sign in writing before committing to anything. The noise from Alan Cork on Twitter suggests Cork hasn't received an offer at all, let alone an offer that was then withdrawn. I can't say I was ever particularly surprised by that towards the end of last season, it always appeared to me as though Pochettino was never quite convinced with JC, and as he had long since decided he was leaving, why would he care about putting it to the board himself? Pochettino - he'd decided he was off around Christmas. As mental as it sounds, NC was going to sack him in December around the time we had that bad run of injuries and results which tempered our great start to the season. He was talked out of it by a number of senior players, but MP felt he didn't have the trust of NC any longer, so decided he was off, and as the rest of the season wore on, made it very clear what his plan was to many of the players, despite NC's departure in the meantime. He basically advised them all to move on as they may not get another opportunity, so naturally they all got onto their agents and now we have the carnage we see before us today. MP was offered a new deal, and it had been on the table for 2-3 months before he went to Spurs - coincidentally it was offering exactly the same salary as he is now earning at White Hart Lane. Koeman - from people who know him, he will not tolerate players who don't want to play for him. If anyone doesn't want to play for him, they can do one, and he'll bring in replacements who DO want to do so. Given his track record and status in the game, we shouldn't be short of players come the start of the season. Summary - clearly the business has been done the wrong way around, replacements should have been signed before the others were let go, and that falls on the board to carry the can, and KL will have to accept that we'll be spending more for most of our signings than we anticipated as a result. Some of that may turn out to be inaccurate, but those are the corrections to your War and Peace effort as I see them.

Some of what you post makes sense, other bits I know to be untrue. I suggest your source has his/her "angle" and is embellishing a few details to make the story fit.

It doesn't, but it would certainly make sense for transfer revenue to be included when boosting the wage bill above the threshold.

I did qualify that with "for the most part", tbf

The big clubs do seem reluctant to sign anyone but the absolute top names without some PL experience (Sky have done a terrific job of making it seem as though it's better or harder to play in than any other big league in Europe - the only tough thing is the number of games, not the technical quality), so a couple of years with a club of our size who are more willing to take that sort of "risk" and then a step up to the top wouldn't be entirely unheard of. You could argue that's what Dejan Lovren did. He had Champions League football with Lyon, believed that was his level but none of the top 4 in England were willing to take a chance on him, so came to us, showed what he can do and is now getting that step up.

If they could walk straight into a top club side, why haven't they been signed by such a club already? Sporting Lisbon don't *really* count these days. Big name, but haven't achieved anything of note for decades.

I guess there are a few angles. Firstly, Ronald gets his medals out Secondly, even though we're not a big fish in this league, the league itself is a big draw. The sums of money involved mean that even a club of our size can compete financially with much bigger clubs in Europe. Ultimately, we're going to have to accept (if we haven't done so already) that many players will see us as a stepping stone to bigger clubs, but if players want to make that jump to the top, they're going to have to turn in performances for us first, and they're certainly not going to be struggling to pay the bills in the process. Thirdly, it's a decent part of the world to live in, for the most part. For players with families, that can be a pretty big consideration as well.

The £52m limit and associated restriction on increased wage spending is only applicable if all other club revenues remain the same (i.e. it's only connected with the broadcasting revenue). If the club's commercial revenue increases (which it will do, significantly), all of that can also be put towards the wage bill.

So two (relatively) unknown players being signed from clubs he has been associated with in Holland can't be attributed to him, and it was purely a coincidence that we signed them? Really??

Agreed, just because the focus of the media and fans is (rightly) on the first team squad, that doesn't mean that the rest of the club stops what it's doing. It's often said that if you stand still in football you'll actually be going backwards because other clubs will overtake you rings true at all levels of the game - if we don't make sure we're doing everything we can to recruit the best talent, you can bet your house that another club will get in there ahead of us.

We won away at Notts on our way to winning the whole thing two years ago, no reason we can't do so again.

I would expect that, with the new EPPP stuff, as a Category 1 Academy we can more or less do what we want.

If they are doing their accounting properly ( ), the season ticket money for the forthcoming season won't have been included in the profit/loss calculations for last season, regardless of when the money was received. Or at least that's what my Accounting A-Level told me 14 years ago.

They managed to lose to a team worse than the side that Newcastle pumped 4-0 as well. An impressive start to Fat Sam's "Operation Aesthetically Pleasing"

I meant all of the media leaks referring specifically to him moving to Liverpool. I would guess that the Chelsea stuff came from us to perhaps force a bit of a bidding war, although it's conceivable that it came from Lovren's agent to get Liverpool to pull their finger out and get it done. After all, no deal = no commission for him.

As far as I'm aware, there's still been no bid accepted. All of the media leaks have been from Lovren's people (with authorisation from Liverpool) with the intention of forcing the move through as quickly as possible. All this talk of "the expectation is that he'll be a Liverpool player by the weekend" only holds any water if they actually submit an acceptable bid - I repeat, that still hasn't happened yet, and the original bid wasn't as much as the reported £20m. Because of Lovren's attitude, the balance of power has probably been shifted to us. Koeman won't pick him for friendlies while he's got that attitude, so he's getting no match fitness in preparation for the new season which is now just over three weeks away. Liverpool obviously want him to join up with their tour of the US as soon as possible so he can start playing some games, but that obviously can't happen until we accept an offer, so both Liverpool and Lovren's people will start getting more and more twitchy about the situation and I suspect it'll end with Liverpool eventually giving us what we want. As far as I'm aware, Chelsea aren't in the running at all.

He genuinely won't give a flying **** that a handful of gobby teenagers on Twitter and Instagram have been giving him a bit of stick. He's getting what I assume will be a tidy pay rise and a move to a team playing in the Champions League where he can be found out again, the opinion of a few fans of a club he's barely been at five minutes isn't going to bother him in the slightest.

That's the name of the game these days, though. As soon as any bid is received and the selling club knows they're probably going to have to accept a bid at some point, they'll be leaking the story left, right and centre to encourage a bidding war. Can you imagine us sneaking through a deal like we did with Keegan back in the 80s in the modern era? It would be impossible.

Don't know for sure, but I'd like to think he'll be back here for a bit. Would probably do him good to play one of the two friendlies coming up.

Correct.

Highly unlikely. Kenya haven't even qualified for the qualifying group stage yet, they're 1-0 down after the first leg in Lesotho. If they were to overturn it early next month, they'll then go into a qualifying group with Burkina Faso, Angola and Gabon, all of whom are ranked higher than Kenya. Edit: As DuncanRG managed much quicker than I above!

They've expanded it since that photo was taken. The corners are filled in all the way around now, and the stand opposite the main stand has an upper tier, I think.

Not sure our poor conversion rate is particularly recent, we missed a hell of a lot of good chances last season.