Verbal

You are Marvin the paranoid android and I claim my five pounds.

Learn. More. Slang.

You might want to think about taking Guardiola out of that list.

What does it say about the culture of a club that this could happen in the first place? You could imagine one idiot mouthing off, but three of them suggests there's more than a 'bad apple' problem.

I doubt there's anything in his contract that requires him to stop balls going into the net. 'Best endeavours' is the legal lingo, standing in this case for 'you look tall - I wonder if you'll ever stop a daisy cutter dribbling past your far-distant ankles.' It's also difficult to write legalese for 'FFS come off your line for crosses sometimes.'

It's something that's been pioneered by a few clubs like Brighton. Bring in an experienced pro in their mid-30s with the promise only that they'd play a few games but will get the chance to earn coaching badges, get coaching experience etc. As a player he then essentially mentors on the pitch. Brighton and others claim it speeds up young player development.

In general, fixed-term contracts can have notice periods too but that's not the case with professional football contracts. Rules of mitigation can theoretically still apply though. So if a player is released early from his contract and is fully paid up, then finds another club immediately a balance of the pay-off (depending on whether he's been able to secure the same, worse or better wages) is repaid. These rules, however, are usually negotiated away - say, with a pay-off that isn't the full amount of the contract that's outstanding.

I've said this before (but got no likes for it, you utter bastards) - Armstrong's performance last season was pretty extraordinary. He scored 28 goals in a faltering team (Blackburn finished 15th) - which was more than half of all Blackburn's goals. Despite their poor season, Blackburn finished with a goal difference of plus 11 (better than Barnsley who finished 5th) and scored almost as many goals as Swansea who finished 4th. He seems worth a punt.

Look at this objectively. Would you rather read the post of a pedant who's more often right than wrong, or the post, quite common on here, sent from the rocky shores of Lake Despond?

It's too long to do that unfortunately. Smith's starting point is that Giorgos Giakoumakis came out of nowhere but was top scorer in the Dutch league last season - for a failing club. Before that - practically nothing. So was Giakoumakis a product of an easy league, or pure blind luck, or is he with a team that played to his strengths and hid his weaknesses? Smith broadly comes down on the third option but his analysis is a bit more nuanced than that. If the Giakoumakis rumour turns out to be true, it does beg the question of whether Ralph can work out how to perform the same trick in a much tougher league.

If so, this, from the excellent Rory smith, is well worth a read. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/sports/soccer/when-the-goals-come-out-of-nowhere.html

It's only 'insulting black men' to a racist who sees the colour of their skin first - oh look, that's you. To others the joke is that they missed.

Only for the next five years though.

So the people who defaced the Rashford mural were from Singapore? Or the people in England shirts who aggressively abused a South Asian wedding party I was at in central London were Russian trolls?

Bang on the money - and well called out.

I suspect the memory will be 'well there's a player whose release has come back to bite us.'

Please tell me you're not one of those balloons who own a TV, claim you religiously refuse to watch any BBC stuff EVER, then go fuming and gasket-blowing on football forums about having to pay the TV licence.

And yet password-sharing outside your household is IP theft (AKA piracy) which is a criminal offence.

Not sure wafer-thin mints are flammable.

Plus cultural Marxists always whip Scandi revisionist lapdogs.

Agreed. There are some ugly posts that regularly target MLG in a deeply personal way. It appears to be encouraged on here.

Not sure if serious. Do you write like this for some sort of comedic effect?

Well here's something to remind you, you unpatriotic remoaner. Courtesy of Great Gavin Williamson of Great British Education, here's 'Brexit Belongs to Me!' Get on your feet NOW!! (Saluting optional) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KAWylrnlvA

It really is.

Quite - which means KL's investment will be repaid by whoever buys the club or her portion of it - the money does not come out of the club's coffers. This isn't to say that whoever buys might not force the club to pay it at a later date by converting that equity back into debt.