shurlock

Thought he was having a medical which is a euphemism for done and dusted.

Left winger for their youth team.

Loans are the new marquee signings FACT

Maybe he's a better fullback than a CB where positioning and reading of the game are less important. Of course, we seem to be looking at him as a CB.

Exactly which is an even stronger refutation of Whitey's point (given Professor's original post)

Of course, there is - loans don't give you the upside that the player/asset will appreciate in value.

No evidence whatsoever of a release clause for Chambers - so what if Arsenal were tracking him? Lots of our players are tracked. The mongboard myth is that release clauses are prevalent in the English game when in fact they are few and far between, as noted by the sports lawyer Ian Lynam . Where they exist, they are generally reported by the media. Ultimately, Chambers wanted to go -at some point, we came to the conclusion rightly or wrongly that the costs of keeping a wantaway player outweighed the benefits "an insane risk" in RK's words- and it was sanctioned by Koeman who didn't feel he was a sufficiently important player to justify going to war over. It's as simple as that.

maybe they dont want him.

Rojo and JoFo at CB?

Of course, I understand, you plum. But there isn't a shred of evidence that Koeman viewed Lallana as a squad player (cf. Chambers). Heigh ho we'll leave it at benign speculation, though. Never mind that the whole tenor of Nick G's post was to attempt and justify why, in his view, we've made progress.

As I don't know anyone who is direly predicting relegation (other than a small, irrelevant handful), I didn't appreciate the gold standard was the class of 2012/13 that secured survival with the second from last game of the season. But whatever works for you and the confused point you're attempting to make. Now if you want to work with what many people actually said - that the team, as currently assembled, would struggle -which is not the same thing as predicting they will go down (to make things simpler for you), the bar has to be set much higher. How high is anyone's guess, though as last season showed (perhaps uncharacteristically), unless you were consistently in the top 10 -say doing a Stoke- there was always a risk of getting sucked into a dogfight. Nobody would have said that Palace (11th) had an easy ride.

This post is barely comprehensible - why do you jump inconsistently and tortuously between last season and the season before last? Why isn't last season's squad the benchmark to assess where our squad is at? The season before last is a footnote for fools. Why is Lallana suddenly nothing more than squad player or Luke Shaw inexperienced, even though he has more prem experience than Bertrand? We might get stronger -wait and see- but at the moment our squad is significantly weaker than last season's. To claim otherwise is revisionist tosh.

Pal- the space biscuits a little on the strong side tonight?

An absolutely ridiculous analogy.

We're probably well within the limits - the alarming figures thrown around refer to overall club wages, not player wages which are considerably lower -and FFP wage restrictions apply only to them. If we're looking to boost our baseline, its arguably a very inefficient, risky and redundant strategy.

Pleat got Morgan's old club wrong - a trifling error. But otherwise was spot on. His knowledge of the current academy output was particularly impressive.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/manchester-city-fined-49m-for-breaching-uefas-financial-fair-play-rules-9388532.html Will look into it further.

Pleat spot on again.

Pleat's comments were fair enough.

Whats your view of Schelotto?

If so, it would be a good opportunity to ask about the rest of our midfield -whether Cork will still be here come September 1.

Stand at ease. Its on the Taider/Osvaldo thread for a reason

Some clues into the composition of our total wage bill i.e. player vs. nonplayer wages were given by Gareth Rogers in the following interview (around the 3m mark) https://audioboo.fm/boos/2033417-exclusive-saintsfc-financial-results-ceo-gareth-rogers-and-director-hans-hofstetter-talk-to-bigadamsport#t=0m4s As I explained, something unprecedented would have had to happen to be anywhere near the wage ceiling, though I agree paying Big Four level wages for the likes of Shaw would create challenges. Note bonuses are not included in calculations of wage restrictions, so technically we could offer wantaway players heavily weighted performance-based contracts and still be OK. Whether they would be willing to bear that kind of risk is another matter.

This simply says that clubs must have such personnel in place to operate; not that overall club -rather than player- wages are used in calculations of restrictions. The press has been ambiguous on this point - at times, simply referring to players wages (which is the formula used for the championship).