CanadaSaint

He coached the Edmonton Oilers of the National Hockey League (before being fired - many think unwisely - at the start of this season), and he was particularly successful coaching the Swiss national hockey team. He's a smart and thoughtful cookie, a very strong communicator, a hockey theoretician and a good motivational speaker, and he's well thought of in hockey as a new age kind of thinker. Really nice guy. He's especially good with young players and I can see some of his skills being valuable at academy level but AFAIK he has no football in his pedigree.

That's why I mentioned him - because he doesn't fit the cost/depreciated value method but is a player who can only be valued using a current market value approach. You can't just not recognize an asset of his value.

I think that suggests that they do indeed hold value and are therefore assets - albeit depreciating assets based on the declining balance of their contract. In the case of a Luke Shaw, for example, he has a contract and a (debatable) market value and is therefore an asset. Part of the complexity of negotiating the purchase of a football club revolves around the challenge of agreeing what such an asset value is.

I think the player contracts count as assets because they have a realizable value.

Indeed. I went to school with him and he was pretty good at Subbuteo. Not sure what that means.

Perhaps the present (or new) owner will ban him from the ground.

I can't disagree with much that you've said because none of us knows what's really going on back there. However, perhaps I didn't articulate my point about Katharina well enough. When I say that Katharina opted "to inject herself into the situation", I meant it in the personal context. Certainly I can understand why she felt that she needed to act and - yes - I can appreciate that her hand may well have been forced. What I can't understand is why she would choose to become involved personally and publicly when she has always shied away from any kind of public involvement, and when she can afford to hire the world's very best to do all of that high profile (and often unpleasant) stuff for her. The only explanation I can come up with - when so many signals are pointing towards a sale - is that she doesn't intend to sell and is anxious to see her father's wishes honoured. Time will tell, and we'll be able to read things a little better when we see what kind of person is hired to replace Cortese.

You could be right but I don't think the two potential explanations are mutually exclusive. The choices for the Liebherrs back in the Summer could have been 1) maintaining the status quo (carrying on owning the club with an unfettered Cortese in control), 2) selling the club - with an unfettered Cortese at the helm of it, and 3) confronting the Cortese situation and retaining the club. Back then they might have opted for 2) because grasping the Cortese nettle (amidst an inevitable public furor) didn't appeal to them. For whatever reason (perhaps a concern that her father's wishes would be lost in a sale), they switched to option 3). Yes - it's possible that they felt that Cortese had to either go or be "reined in" in order to make the club more salable, but I don't think so, because the key question for me is why the intensely private Katharina would now opt to inject herself into the situation when she could have paid people to do that if she just wanted to sell the club.

No, I don't think so. It's just that we lost his oversight/restraining influence over Cortese when he died and it was never replaced. The scene was then set for "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" - not in a dishonesty context but a personality context.

The current situation is fascinating from a number of perspectives, notwithstanding Duncan's particular angles and Hypo's "amateur psychologist" input - and yet, in some ways, adding a little credence to both of them. And I've been (and still am) a big Cortese supporter, while always recognizing that he seems to have some troubling flaws. This leaves me with three interesting questions. 1) If the relationship between Katharina and Cortese had (supposedly) broken down "irretrievably", why did she (on her side's own admission) make him "very generous" offers to stay? My hunch FWIW is that she has a very high regard for his strengths but was no longer willing to tolerate his weaknesses; she made those very generous offers to "sweeten the pill" of reduced total control. The fact that Cortese chose to walk suggests that he finds anything less than 100% control unacceptable, which - in and of itself - both confirms the widely-held perception that Cortese is a rather arrogant "control freak" and justifies the Liebherr decision to bring this to a head. 2) Why would Cortese turn down those offers? I'd suggest that he either cannot accept the diminished control or thinks he can engineer his "perfect world" under another owner. No other owner - in their right business mind - would allow him unfettered control with a very big chunk of their money, so I'm inclined to think that he chose to reject the offer and walk away because his ego got the better of him. I can't imagine that he could fund the purchase himself. 3) If Katharine really wants to sell the Club, why would a very private woman with little knowledge of football decide to become personally involved in its operation - even if just from a high-level oversight position? After all, she can afford to hire the best talent in the world to oversee a sale which would respect her father's wishes for the club to have a bright future, and yet still be very distant from all the prying, media interest that would inevitably entail. My hunch, again FWIW, is that she has a lot of respect for her father's wishes and plans to keep the club for the foreseeable future and continue building towards his dream. I can't think of any other reason why this private woman would throw herself into the teeth of a very public issue when she could have hired people to do that - and all the associated "dirty work". So far, Katharina has IMO conducted herself extremely well.

Yep. Pitiful, isn't it?

Agree with St Marco above. Regardless of where this supposed "meltdown" is taking us, I do know one thing. We are now a far, far more attractive proposition for prospective owners, top executives, managers and playing staff than we were even a year ago. Sure, I'm concerned about the imminent period of instability, but I'm also optimistic that we'll still end up on an exciting upward trajectory in the longer term.

Among the many things that are confusing about today's events, I find myself wondering about this: Why, if Cortese really was working his notice period and expecting to leave, did he bother to pick a very public fight with the referees' association and the Premier League? Could it be that he still expected things between he and Katharina to be resolved? But could the eventual loss of public face associated with the Clattenburg exercise have convinced the Liebherr side even more that Cortese needed at least some supervision?

Ohio, I think the Nelson's still there, not sure about the Old Mill, but I sh*t you not about the Croft. I headed there for a pint and came out with a chocolate bar and a lottery ticket. This stuff makes the loss of The Empire pale into insignificance. Best not to think about it if you grew up there.

Sure, the save was great in a reactions kind of way, but getting a hand on that last-minute cross (which neither Kelvin nor Gazza would have got near) may have been just as decisive.

That's you, me and (I think) Hamilton who grew up in Hythe and ended up in Canada. Clearly, we knew that 'progress' would see Hythe High Street being closed to vehicular traffic and The Croft ending up as a Tesco Express.

What drives me nuts about the rule is not just the fact that different referees interpret it in different ways, but that the same referee interprets it differently from game to game. Even if there's an inherent unfairness in the interpretation ("Ref, I was just protecting my face/nuts"), I could deal with it as long as there's consistency. With all the referees' meetings and the supposed assessment & feedback mechanics, it's infuriating that they're no closer to consistency than they were five years ago.

Not much point in the "Who we miss most" debate. We lost a lot of key players at and around the same time, and that hurt us in a lot of ways. I don't think Schneiderlin has been the same player since we lost Wanyama, which means the protection (and cover) for our back four fell away badly even though Cork has played competently in his absence. And we haven't pressed anything like as effectively as we did a few months back. We need that early season group reunited in a big way.

I've felt for some time that MP wasn't as pleased as he claimed to be about Rickie's England call up and instant success; MP wants a more mobile front, and the England thing made it much harder for him to move the club (and the fans) on from a Rickie focus. It's also been fairly clear in recent weeks that Rickie's body language paints a picture of a player who isn't as happy here as he once was. His inability to forge a partnership with Osvaldo hasn't helped his case with the club brass because they really need Osvaldo to succeed here, given how much we paid for him. Any suggestion that he could double his wages and enjoy a more focal role at West Ham, in the twilight of his career, could make for an unhappy player if the club holds onto him against his wishes. But West Ham won't pay us anything like what we (the fan base) think he's worth because they know his career horizon isn't long. They'll throw the money at the wages side of the deal rather than the fee side, and I can see the club's hand being forced on this one. Much as I'd hate to see him go, I think he probably will.

Nonsense is what comes out when someone gets an urban dictionary for Christmas. I do watch each game closely and I think there's been little or no sign of the prima donna syndrome with him since his England selection. In fact he dives far less now than he ever did.

No he wasn't spot on. I haven't seen any noticeable change in Lallana's on field behaviour since his England selection. But, regardless of that, it was a potentially inflammatory comment that Clattenburg had no business making. At what point should we decide to stop taking the crap that Clattenburg has continually thrown in our direction with dubious, potentially match-deciding penalties and now insulting personal remarks? With hindsight, as I said earlier, I would have preferred that the Club voiced concerns about Clattenburg based on a number of incidents - and done it in a less public way. To keep taking his crap without a whimper is the non-option for me.

My broader concern on this front is the lacking ability of our goalkeeping coaches to address known weaknesses in our keepers. Boruc continues to exhibit an over-confidence that can border on criminal casualness and can cost us goals, Davis remains vulnerable at the near post and less than convincing on crosses, and Gazzaniga has actually regressed quite significantly since his early days. Granted, the first two are seasoned professionals who could fit into a "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" category, but their weaknesses are addressable, given focused training. Gazza's regression in areas such as reading the game is a larger indictment of our goalkeeper coaching.

Absolutely. Regardless of the outcome of our complaint, A) we have made it clear that we view Clattenburg as someone with an axe to grind against us/certain of our players, so appointing him to any more of our games might not be a prudent move, and B) we have registered another strike against someone who has had problems of this kind in the past. Regardless of how trivial the comment was, he has no business making inflammatory remarks like that in the heat of a game. Given what's come to light about "the (supposed) comment", I would have preferred it if we'd included the Lallana incident as part of a package of concerns about Clattenburg's officiating of our games - a culminating incident rather than a standalone one.

Always a possibility with that kind of stick-together fraternity, but my hunch is that it will work more for us than against us. I couldn't stand Dermot Gallagher as a referee but I have a much higher regard for him since he moved to a TV role, and it's actually quite comforting to have him there because he is willing to call them out when he thinks they're wrong.

Hopefully, the least we get out of this is that Clattenburg is appointed to a lot less of our games, ideally none. It's not that the rest of them are buzzing hives of refereeing efficiency but that Clattenburg does seem to make regular attempts to decide the result of our matches, and not in our favour (Norwich, Arsenal, Everton). Just as hopefully, the other referees will no longer see us as a team willing to take bad decisions in the nuts without a whimper.