Redslo

Just to be clear: is it the signing that is a no-brainer or Austin himself?

Traveling and living off the land. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/lobo/meandyouandadognamedboo.html

Football Manager's database is licensed to many profession football clubs via the Prozone Football Scouting software package. http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2014/08/am-i-crazy-part-three-apparently-not.html

Makes sense. Our finances are comparable. The level we can reasonably be expected to play at (in the medium term) is comparable. And our need to add players for next season is comparable. Football Manager rates him as a CA 129 PA 161 which amounts to not quite being good enough for the premier league right now but with the potential to be great. The consider him to be fast and agile, but not extraordinarily so, with very good technique. My scouting screen excluded him because his concentration skill was only 11 and I had to draw a line somewhere and I picked 12. FM does not consider him to have good defensive skills at all, but that is normal for a striker in FM.

Does Southampton have better weather? I honestly do not know but I am curious.

I just posted "I Transcribed Ralph Krueger’s interview with @bigadamsport"

I transcribed this and posted it on my blog. http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/ http://redsloscf.blogspot.co.uk/

Isn't this forum real life?

I think we can still turn this around. Everyone should go about and post or tweet or whatever that Mane is definitely not leaving Southampton this summer. If we can all do that as a group it will become not true again.

Lets do an experiment and try to start another rumor that way. People should make suggestions and then you should tweet the best one.

It is pretty much the same, just more ridiculous.

That is correct. it was also true this year.

Except that it will probably only cost the salary of one employ so it will be profitable.

Didn't Johnny Depp play him in the movie?

I just posted "My Summer 2015 Scouting Report (Striker Edition)" Warning it is fairly long.

You have no ambition. Surely there is an offshore betting company that is also a tax dodging multinational. And aren't most banks really just tax dodging multinational loan sharks. Surely we can pick up one of them to give us lots of money--maybe even tax free offshore money.

I would like to be supporting a club which goes from where qualifying for the CL would be a huge achievement to one where it is just par for the year.

This is one reason lots of people were surprised that Beane let the author inside to write the book. Baseball is/was peculiarly susceptible to a money ball philosophy. It had an establish old guard that was in control rejecting the new ideas. It had a vibrant community of fans generating the new ideas so that immediate advantage could be taken by someone like Beane who was willing to listen. It is a game that can easily be broken down into discrete units for detailed analysis. It had a database of historical information that could be analyzed going back more than a century. Each team plays in excess of 150 games a season so there is a massive amount of data and chances to experiment. The administrative rules of baseball (and most American sports) are designed to give underperforming teams the opportunity to catch up in the off season with better draft picks and such. The teams have control over players in a way that can no longer happen in football. There is no relegation so the downside of failure is greatly reduced. Under such circumstances, it is no surprise that football lags behind baseball in this kind of analysis. I think that FSG was probably surprised that they could not more easily and quickly develop this kind of knowledge. That being said, Manchester City released their data in 2012. Is it still being released? If not, it might mean they have found something.

Which would make sense because they need him to be learning Spanish not English.

This is "journalism"?

That sounds like useful information to me.

In my opinion, that would be a good idea, in my opinion.

I think they have tried the Money Ball approach but it has failed them because the knowledge base is not there to make it work yet. Frankly, given what I know about who is working on what Man City is more likely to achieve a break through that Liverpool. But FSG does believe in the approach and will keep trying. Their purchase of Liverpool was based upon a belief that the combination of FFP and their special talent for running a sports franchise rationally would allow them to compete with the four richer clubs. And it could work for them, but they have yet to hire the right people to do it. If they took Les Reed from us, for example, that might change.

Unless he has changed, I cannot see Cortese working with FSG. They are never going to give him the control and independence he enjoyed at Southampton. Also, they are big on metrics and the money ball approach. That doesn't seem like a combination that will work well with him.

I think it would fit our pay structure if we can get rid of Osvaldo or Ramirez without having to eat much of their future salary. Doesn't mean we should do it though. Depends on whether our management thinks he is good enough.