benjii

And before that he played in the Copa America. Seems a bit mental, really! I guess Brazil care about the Olympic football.

Selfish cunt, can save humanity, but only for a grand!

If anyone makes a realistic bid and he wants to go then I've no doubt we will sell him.

As someone who never really saw Shilton play club football it's odd how highly rated he seems to be because I've only really seen him on highlights from '86 World Cup, and from watching Italia 90, but my prevailing view was that he was embarrassingly bad in both. I guess he was past it by '86 and for some reason was still getting picked by England in 1990? Getting out jumped by a 5 foot 2 midget in '86, barely getting near any penalties and falling on his arse against the Germans. Rank. He must have gone downhill quickly after his first couple of seasons at Saints?

OK, put it this way: our "right price " is generally market value for anyone decent, so a buying club just has to make a fair offer. Whereas - to take an extreme example - Man City aren't going to accept a "fair" offer from Man U for their best player, it would have to be an outrageous offer. We have zero clout because everyone knows we actively want/need to sell at least one of our best players every summer.

All of our players are for sale if we get the right offer. That's the reality of having a disinterested and/or financially impotent ownership. It's just how it is for Saints at the moment. We don't make money without profit on player sales and we have a large loan we need to pay off or refinance on the books now as well. We will plan to sell a couple of players each summer to raise money. This summer, I expect we plan to sell Vest and if Ings wouldn't sign a new deal then selling him was the right thing to do. I doubt we actively plan to sell JWP this summer because his value should continue to rise if he has another good season, and now we've already sold a player for a good amount, plus got rid of some deadwood, but if someone comes in with 50/60/70 million etc. then I've no doubt we will let him speak to them.

If we don't make a sizeable profit on player sales over the next few years then we're fucked when our loan falls due or we enter a perpetual cycle of refinancing debt against an ever worsening position. We were always going to look to sell a player for a big fee this summer. Clearly Villa were willing to overpay him on wages as it's a completely pointless move from a footballing perspective for him. I guess he didn't want to risk another injury disrupted season leaving him in a worse position next summer and his agent is probably confident that none of the top clubs were coming in for him. Wouldn't be surprised to see Vest leave too. Can't see anyone willing to pay enough for JWP and he's on a longer contract so I am sure we would rather keep him in line for sale in a year or two.

You seem to be a bit confused between different species and different shades of human, no? An Orangutan isn't a ginger gorilla.

Yogi Hera would be insane!

No, it's not based on that. It's based on us having the same GK and CBs as last season and employing a team shape that leaves us outnumbered in central midfield and lacking recovery pace in CM. So, basically, it's based on us having more or less the same defence as the one that was gash last season.

Do they actually only have 12 first team players? If so..... lolz.

Looks like the forwards and midfielders are playing well and with confidence but, as others have said, defence and GK is still a concern, plus the drop off to mid-table Champ is quite high so can't read too much into this. We've got tricky fixtures at the start of the season and we still definitely need to add strength at the back.

For the third goal, I wonder if Adams' sleeve would have been offside if that was a Prem match with VAR? Seriously! He needs to stop pointing in front, if they are going to carry on with their retarded use of VAR. Let's hope that the officials learnt something from the Euros.

I would probably watch less women's gymnastics if they wore more clothes, but I can totally understand why they prefer not to parade their gusset. Re Gao: I am not saying he should have a master plan and should be actively engaged in day to day affairs, or that we should have some kind of unique selling point. I just take issue with the idea that "self sustaining" is a strategy because running at 80% wages to turnover and borrowing 80m quid is not sustainable so, even if it is a strategy ' it's not going to lead anywhere in the long run. And that's fine, I guess. Lots of clubs come and go, and we go through ups and downs. Personally, though, if I was going to acquire a business, I would make sure I could actually bring something useful to the table. I guess I see it as a question of integrity, largely. He saw Saints as a convenient place to dump some cash outside China. That's all we are to him. And I don't respect that.

But "self sufficient" isn't a strategy, it's simply a statement that there won't be any external investment. In the absence of external investment, you spend less than you generate, or you go bust. That's hardly a clever strategy. The strategy would be mapping out how to be self sufficient and competitive because, on that front, we are failing and will likely continue to do so. We don't do anything particularly special, we don't have any sort of "USP" and most other Prem clubs are well established and have comparable facilities and more money. So, if you want to be charitable and call "self-sufficiency" a "strategy" (which it obviously isnt), it's not a very good one. Gao's investment in SFC has been a disaster for him personally and is potentially a disaster for the club. He has no plan, no vision, no clue and has brought nothing. Gao has issued one public statement in his several years in charge, which was about fives lines long, and given a couple of snippets to one or two journalists. Let's not pretend there is a strategy, because there clearly isn't. As I've said several times on here, it's good that he isn't a mentalist doing weird things. But, similarly, he doesn't bring anything positive whatsoever. He has taken over ownership and shown himself incapable of adding any value. That's the fact. Why shouldn't fans want an owner who has something to add? The sad reality is, though, that Premier League football is fucked. It is unsustainable unless you have an ultra-rich owner or are Man U or Liverpool, with a big enough brand.

Two lesbians. Sisters, probably.

Nice to see the taking a knee will be carried on this season.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. - Jonathan Swift

Image rights payments are made but they're not the bulk of the salary for the vast majority of players - HMRC clamped down on this. Paul Pogba, Harry Kane, de Bruyne etc. sure, they earn loads of image rights and those will be paid as royalties to a service company, not as PAYE. Jack Stephens, Alex McCarthy, Nathan Redmond.... they aren't earning the bulk of their salary as image rights, however.

What's your source for this? Sounds like an urban myth. How would the net figure be known with any certainty? And you can work out average salary from club accounts reporting on salary mass, and it's not 40%+ higher than it should be (which it would be if all football wages noted were net of tax). And what if the tax rate changes? The club has to gross up the salary to deliver the quoted net figure? Nah, that's bull. So I reckon you're wrong, mush.

You often see these statements on here but it's complete bullshit. Loads of people perform badly in jobs for decades without being sacked. It's very rare for someone to be managed out for bad performance "in the real world". Anyway, this thread has been quite entertaining latterly, thanks mostly to your posts and this sort of 1960s pub-bore character you're running, so cheers for that.

If they can pull this off, why can't anyone sell a home printer that fucking works properly?

My point was precisely that we did have one player - Vest - that we over relied on and that others need to do more, in particular our midfielders. Not that we get one midfielder in to do all our passing. So I think you actually agree with me.

I know what you're saying but, perversely, Vestergaard's ability on the ball meant we were over reliant on him IMO. Initiating moves should be what the central midfielders do. The best team on the ball, by far, in the Euros was Spain. Their centre backs play simple balls to Busquets and he knits play together. You don't need your centre backs to be taking people on and threading balls through the eye of a needle, you just need them to have a decent first touch and find a simple pass to someone better than them. That's where you need someone like JWP to step up and show some responsibility for creating things, rather than just playing the first 10 yard easy pass that he sees (usually back to the centre back). Romeu can knit things together but our other midfielders will need to do more. Being reliant on a centre back to be your play maker makes you easy to defend against, as our abysmal second half season form showed. So, Vest out, this lad in cheaply and spend the money on someone willing to put their foot on the ball in midfield is a good strategy for me.

I've been working on a reasonably chunky commercial arrangement with a very high profile English football club over the last couple of months and they've been a pain in the arse to deal with. Stupid, unrealistic contractual positions, and constantly changing their position on key commercial terms, as well as being quite slow. That's without having to deal with some greedy, dodgy player agents as well. So it's made me appreciate what a pain it must be trying to sort certain transfers out.