Redslo

No, No. The real surprise is that we are behind so many teams who have no good players--like Man City who has nothing but aging has beens.

I am not sure what you mean by referring to 5% of our wage bill. Nothing in FFP or the Salary Cap refers to 5%.

It might be interesting to play Reed and let Schneiderlin go forward more.

I think it helps if the manager is on the same page as the board and the owner, which was clearly not the case during the second half of last season.

The B stands for Barclay's so I am not convinced that USMSL would be comparable to BPL. The network announcers here tend to follow the requirements of sponsorship and refer to the league by its officially sponsored name. I have been trying to change to calling it the Premier League or EPL--at least until Barclays starts paying me money to do otherwise.

At least something good came out of it.

I think he was likening Pompey to the Leeds metaphor of the house gone to ruin rather than the Leeds club itself.

Great metaphors.

Just as a rough rule of thumb, a rich owner can put in about 13 million pounds a year above the pure sustainable target that current management has set for our club. (This is an estimate based upon European FFP rules and a guess as to the costs that are excludable under FFP rules. The number will vary with the exchange rate so it would be be somewhat lower now than it was a few months ago.) Of course, we have not yet hit this sustainability target and Liebherr has put in substantial money over the years. Also, a rich owner could pay for a new stadium, a stadium expansion, or new facilities directly out of pocket with no FFP consequences.

http://www.empireofsoccer.com/record-breaking-attendance-29742/

Some other possibilities: http://www.homeforward.org/ http://blueskyfarmsltd.com/ http://esba.sustainableeastside.org/programs/green-business-challenge http://www.tufco.com/ Overall I think the Sounders are more likely.

I just posted “I Make Predictions (Round 29)” http://redsloscf.blogspot.com http://redsloscf.blogspot.co.uk Also, I updated my “European Qualification Rules for Southampton Fans” post. http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2015/01/european-qualification-rules-for.html

Exactly. To the bolded part I would add "or a hundred million in commercial revenue or a big new stadium that is already paid for ala West Ham."

Actually, the knock off effects of paying one player a very high salary are probably worse in FM than in real life. In FM you can't effectively talk to the other players one to one and explain things.

That used to be true. Next year it changed. The top two English teams in the Europa League enter at the group stage. The third teams still plays two rounds of play offs.

If you think that the people who put together the FM database do not have access to more accurate information than some random poster you are badly mistaken. Football clubs pay big money for access to their database. It doesn't mean that it is completely accurate all the time in all respects and I certainly wouldn't use to it second guess Ronald Koeman's game strategies but it is a perfectly reasonable source for salary information--absent access to the actual player contracts. It is interesting to me that you will only accept a Forbes list entry showing that Katharina is a rich billionaire. While I agree that Forbes is a reasonable source for this kind of information, there is no reason to believe that their billionaire ratings are any more accurate than FM's salary listings. They are both compiled by a group of expert outsiders doing their best to estimate specific numbers from incomplete information. There are certainly several other sources that say that Liebherr is a billionaire and none of us have any idea how much of the money attributed to Willi and Isolde is actually Katharina's. It certainly appears that Markus Lieberr was very rich and Katharina inherited his money. Finally, your gratuitous insult to people who play FM (or by implication) any other video game demonstrates your fundamental bias and ignorance. One might as well say that being a fan of the Southampton football club is an activity for overgrown children than means absolutely nothing. The same description could be applied to any other hobby--except, of course, cleaning windows and posting on this forum.

The point of my post from which you quoted is that we could afford to pay a few players a lot more than we are paying them now. But 120K pounds a week is nearly twice the offer to double Schneiderlin's pay that is supposedly on the table. That would increase our total salary by nearly 4.5 million a year. We could only a afford a couple of those before we would be running out of salary cap space and it would limit our spending to bring in new players. Since FFP limits Liebherr's ability to just throw money at the situation--and, in any case, she supposedly wants the club to pay its own way from now on--it is not practical to pay that much. The problem would be compounded in all players thought they should be given raises because Schneiderlin was getting 120k per week. I assume this would happen.

I think it would be better to just increase the number of teams playing in the Champions League and drop the second competition.

If the seventh place qualifies they must play two rounds of qualifying play offs to make the group phase of the Europa League. The fifth place team and the FA Cup winner both qualify directly for the group phase. If the FA cup winner qualifies for the Champions League, the sixth place team qualifies for the group phase. Here is a link. http://kassiesa.net/uefafiles/2015-18-uefa-access-list-explanations.pdf

It is difficult to tell the delusional posts from the ironic ones on this thread.

Would you like me to calculate the effects of this non-existent point deduction on the number of points needed to avoid relegation this year?

It is true that when playing Southampton in FM 2013, I used Sharp and Lee and got rid of Lambert--at least while using the fall database. But it is just a game and quite plainly did not accurately reflect reality. Obviously, the fan based over estimate of Lee and Sharp was present in the FM data base as well. Your contrary opinion of me notwithstanding, when I use FM in my analyses I am aware of its limitations and do not blindly assume everything about it is correct. Also, what did you do when you got Sheffield United to the premier league in FM08?

I really don't understand this. I feel bad for the players who fought hard to achieve promotion and then never got the chance to play in the Premier League, but I cannot assume they were good enough and unfairly not given a chance. If Sharp, for example, were good enough for the Premier League someone would have taken him on loan from us and played him in the Premier League. Or bought him from us. It didn't happen which means that an awful lot of knowledgeable people thought he was not good enough. The same is true for all the other players discussed above. Contrast this with Puncheon who, when he wasn't getting playing time with us, was in demand by other Premier League teams. Or, for that matter Cork. I am not saying that professional football coaches, managers, and scouts do not make mistake in judging talent. But it seems unlikely that so many made the same mistake over and over again. Moreover, if Sharp were Premier league quality wouldn't he have proved it in the past three years by tearing up the Championship?

But at least that thread was based upon reality.

While I agree it is very unlikely, wouldn't you love to read that headline this summer.