Redslo

It is worth noting that Spanish fans are not asking any of these questions because the 8th place club in Spain cannot catch the 7th place club. Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid have both clinched champions league spots. The Copa del Rey final is between Barcelona and Sevilla and Sevilla is in the top 7. In theory a nation could get 9 European spots if both the Champions League winner and the Europa League winner is from that nation and neither qualified for Europe in any other way.

Can't speak for we, but I am. I have read the rules and other relevant documents. The logic is also sound.

Not so strange. Pellegrini didn't know how the away goal rule worked. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/10509964/Manuel-Pellegrinis-blunder-costs-Manchester-City-chance-to-top-Champions-League-group.html Plus, he may have understood the question to refer to Liverpool finishing 8th. Eight slots are only available if Liverpool win and finish 8th or low. We still want Liverpool to win the EL, just not their EPL games. We need to finish ahead of them, or Man U, or West Ham. Preferably two of them.

I think the idea is that no club which qualifies for Europe through domestic competition will be deprived of its place in Europe because another club wins the Europa League or the Champions League. If Liverpool wins the EL and finishes 7th and we finish 8th, we have not qualified for Europe through domestic competition--Liverpool did. (Assuming Man U wins the FA Cup.) Liverpool just gets jumped up to the CL but that doesn't hurt us. I disagree. We want Liverpool to win--aside from issues of personal bias. If Liverpool finishes ahead of us they can take a EL spot from us. If they finish behind us, they will not. However, if they get into the Champions League group stage it will improve Englands coefficient in future years which could help Southampton qualify for Europe in the future. This has already happened. I believe we get into the EL if Man U wins the FA cup and we finish 7th whether or not Liverpool wins the EL. Right.

This is a good point. We should have done that with Clyne. For that matter, the prior management did sign a bunch of players to long term contracts in the second half of 2012-2013 and that came in handy when some of them wanted to leave. Btw, sorry about the multiple posts, I normally would have done one longer post, but the last two times I was working on one, my cat stepped on the keyboard and somehow deleted everything.

Perhaps the reason why we offered out big summer signings five year contracts this past summer.

Both are possibilities if they will not sign new contracts--although players in their positions are not normally as expensive so there is less harm in waiting until the last year. With Forster, the real question is whether his professions of gratitude for the way the club took care of him during his injury are real enough to lead to his signing a new contract. With Bertrand, the question is whether he wants to get paid more at a bigger club to play less or has he been there and done that.

You make it sound like bizarre and otherwise unheard of approach to transfer dealings. It is, in fact, a perfectly normal thing to sell a player with high value when he has two years left on his contract if he will not re-sign. There are, of course, exceptions when the player is absolutely needed for one more year (Clyne and Wanyama) or when he makes enough of a jerk of himself to be sold earlier (Lovren and Lallana) but those situations are suboptimal. This doesn't apply to older or less valuable players who do not have the same kind of leverage.

I spent 20 minutes typing a detailed intelligent response to this (and other) posts. My cat then stepped on the keyboard and somehow deleted it. I am not going to type it again but I mostly disagree with you. We cannot know if the board is doing something wrong because we don't have the necessary inside information. That being said I do think the board made a mistake letting Cork go and made a mistake if they did not try to sign Clyne to a long term contract in summer 2014 before he was the starting English right back.

This is very possibly true. We might have been permanently leapfrogged by Leicester and West Ham this year. Except that I don't believe the relative table positions of clubs will be as static at the top going forward as it was before this year.

Yes we can but it will be difficult because there are at least nine other clubs who can do it too and several of them are more likely to do it than we are. Assuming team chemistry is as important as everyone now thinks it was for Leicester, it does not mean we can run right out and get better team spirit. Putting that together involves some luck as well as skill. The same goes for transfers and staying free of critical injuries. We might very well have made the champions league last season if Forster and Schneiderlin had remained healthy.

IT GOT BETTER TOWARDS THE END. Also, I believe this thread is entirely performance art.

Also they have money to spend. The can increase salaries by 20 million plus their champions league money plus any increase in commercial income plus the increase in ticket sales from being in Europe for next season. To put it another way, they could double what they pay every important player and be within the FFP rules for next year.

The difference is that our owner did not go over the FFP limits in doing so. If I were Bournemouth I would have continued to fight. QPR violated the rules by a much greater amount and will end up paying only slightly more. If they are not going to enforce the rules why bother having them. Of course, in future seasons the Championship's FFP rules are coordinated with the BPL rules and simple rules evasion will probably not work as well.

Historically, player wages has been the most reliable indicator of success. We have generally outperformed that indicator in recent years. Leicester certainly did so this year. Perhaps that indicator will not work as well in the EPL anymore with all the new TV money coming in.

The board appears to be careful not to spend money we don't have. This coming year we will have more money. I expect they will spend more. Of course, West Ham will have more money too as will Tottenham and Leicester. Chelsea and at least one of Arsenal, Man U, or Man City will have less, but they can still way out spend us. That being said, there is no reason not to trust the board.

That does bring me back to my early days here. Fortunately, I didn't let it color my feelings about the club and instead I just decided to be a good neighbor. This has allowed me to enjoy nearly two years of interesting dialog instead of viewing it all as verbal diarrhea. In fact, I suggest that we should all move beyond passing judgment over each other on such minour issues like spelling. I certainly shall endeavor to do so.

Risk adverse accountant is one of the most peculiar insults I have seen in a while. It is so peculiar I have trouble visualizing what one of them would be doing in the context of being a Southampton FC fan. And I can usually visualize really strange things. That being said, I don't think there is any way to replicate what Leicester did this year, but I do think there is reason to believe that the big money clubs will no longer be able to reliably guarantee themselves a top four finish year after year. Or perhaps, a better way of looking at it is that there will be 8 to 12 big money clubs in the league from now on. But yes we should feel free to dream of titles and trophies for Southampton FC. But you might want to improve you chances by spreading your loyalties around a bit. I have had recent success with the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors. Your mileage may vary. We should also be quite happy every season when we mathematically clinch relegation avoidance. Dreams are good. Nightmares are bad.

I have no idea who you are but there is no anti-new guy bias and the other biases are pretty much individual things. When I started posting here 22 months ago, some people disagreed with me while others thought my posts (and blog) were worthwhile. Some people assumed I was an employee of the club posting under a poorly disguised pseudonym. Some people insulted me because I was American. Some welcomed me. Some thought my opinions were stupid or wrong for various reasons. If I recall right, I felt sorry enough for myself to post about it once. (I'm sure someone will dig up the posts if I posted more than once just to prove me wrong.) Generally people have been nice. There is intelligent discussion of Southampton FC if you are willing to put a little effort into finding it and even less effort into ignoring what bothers you. If you can't handle that, there are several other Southampton boards you could go to and, perhaps, find one where people's biases are more acceptable to you. But really, what is there to worry about. It is just an internet board where people discuss their love for and interest in the Southampton football club. The fact that some people show that in different ways is not big deal. Alpine Saint panics too easily. Enjoy it for the entertainment value and, quite probably, he will some day be right. The9 generally posts intelligent, fact filled posts which I read with pleasure. If you don't like facts you can skip over his posts (or move to the USA and become a Trump supporter). I am not sure how to characterize Dalek2003, Batman, and CBFry but I can ignore their posts when I don't find them entertaining. You can do something similar and ignore the stuff that bothers you and enjoy the rest. Or if you are a troll who used to post under a different name--good job with this thread, but it might be time to pick a new different name. I would go with Montana Yellow. I like it.

Well sure, it means you lack the ambition and confidence to try to win the title.

Should the club's goal be to win the 8th place trophy every year and, thereby, cleverly avoid the burden of the Europa League? (Kind of like a poor man's Arsenal.) Or is progress year over year something to strive for?

I would rather follow up last season's fourth place finish with something similar.

If we are going to express our retroactive disappointment, I vote for the January 2015 transfer window. Despite the obvious fact that both Wanyama and Schneiderlin were going to get enough yellow cards to miss two games each, we sold their strongest backup Cork--just to save three million pounds when a couple places in the League and the Europa Group stage would have brought much more than that. And, of course, Schneiderlin got injured making the decision even worse. Despite the obvious fact that we needed a decent back up goal keeper, we didn't get one and Forster got injured effectively ending our ability to play at a top four (or even top half) level. Those two decision probably cost us 10 points and the Champions League. They certainly cost us 2 points and the Europa Group stage. While the injuries were bad luck, they were a foreseeable bad luck risk at two important positions at which we lacked adequate depth. These decisions made no sense to me at the time and they still don't.

Give it a shot.

Have I been around long enough to be usual??