kingysilvers

One thing that I’d like to challenge in this thread, hopefully without raining on too many bonfires is the Football Manager type logic that is being applied to each name that is linked with us. It seems everybody is rated based on the “net worth” figure on their wikipedia page, as if that is the number they see when they hit “check balance” on a cash machine, let us keep in mind that this is a figure based on their assets, not their cash. That said, even if it was their cash, it doesn’t mean they’re going to withdraw £200m to buy the club, and do the same again to fill the transfer kitty. Whoever comes in is going to be working some kind of finance deal to fund the investment, this is business, not philanthropy. All that said, while the net worth numbers themselves are misleading, having a big number against your name does not mean you will make a successful football club owner. Let’s have a look at a few examples: Shahid Khan - Net Worth: $3.8 billion - History of sports team ownership in the U.S. On paper he looks like exactly the kind of person people on here are crying out for, except he’s the owner of Fulham, a team who will be playing Championship football next season. Alarmingly it wouldn’t be too difficult to draw parallels between ourselves and Fulham, and his money wasn’t enough to overcome a shit squad and mismanagement. Lakshmi Mittal - Net Worth: $16.7 billion Now that is a net worth figure, one of the richest men in the world, yet we all know what has happened at QPR, we’ve all seen the wage bill, we’ve all laughed at Redknapp. This is a club who may yet spend another year in the Championship if the play off final follows the form book. Peter Coates - Net Worth: £750 million Stoke may not be the most glamorous club in the Premier League but I don’t think anybody can argue with them being well run. Coates is somebody who clearly cares about the club and runs it like a sensible business, not a billionaires plaything. I know I would certainly have swapped our season for theirs. Now I know everybody can point at Chelsea and City as examples of where super rich owners have managed to purchase success but these are the exception rather than the rule. Let us not forget that these (as well pointed out by Matthew Syed) have agendas far beyond football. What we need to hope for is somebody who knows how to run a club well, rather than appearing to have the deepest pockets on paper and then squandering what money is allocated to the club through naive decisions (see: Randy Lerner).

This chap. He was also on 5live where they asked him "will there be a quick sale?", after a long pause he just began talking in very general terms so there wasn't really any juicy information.

Due to being a bit of a master procrastinator I decided to do a season review based on an unusual statistical source, VT “Ratings and Reactions” threads. This method has a fair few flaws (hello to all of you doing the ironic Tonev votes) but I figured that football fans generally have short memories so to get ratings from across the season based on information from people who had just watched the matches might be interesting. I dropped all the ratings into a spreadsheet and this is what it resulted in: Best Players 1) Fabian Delph (27.03 votes per match) 2) Marc Albrighton (20.47) 3) Ron Vlaar (14.61) 4) Gabriel Agbonlahor (14.00) 5) Leandro Bacuna (11.00) 6) Brad Guzan (10.39) 7) Christian Benteke (8.62) 8) Ashley Westwood (6.56) 9) Jordan Bowery (5.33) 10) Grant Holt (4.70) Worst Players 1) Yacouba Sylla (0.82) 2) Matthew Lowton (1.55) 3) Nathan Baker (1.72) 4) Antonio Luna (1.94) 5) Aleksandar Tonev (3.39) 6) Karim El Ahmadi (3.39) 7) Joe Bennett (3.40) 8) Ryan Bertrand (3.44) 9) Andreas Weimann (3.75) 10) Libor Kozak (4.07) MotM Awards 1) Fabian Delph (12) 2) Gabriel Agbonlahor (6) 3) Marc Albrighton (5) 4) Ron Vlaar, Leandro Bacuna, Ashley Westwood (3) 5) Brad Guzan (2) 6) Jack Grealish, Christian Benteke, Grant Holt, Libor Kozak, Andreas Weimann (1) It should be noted that I didn’t included players with less than 5 appearances in the Best/Worst lists as they didn’t work very well for the averages. If you want to have a look at the spreadsheet it’s available here, to sort the data select the column and go to “Data” -> “Sort Sheet…”. Please let me know if you spot any glaring errors.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/27372342

...because constructive dismissal (or anything that can be construed as that) has worked so well for us in the past.

I'm not normally too fond of Strats but that is really smart. What year is it? Also, while on MIJ stuff here's my mid-80s Squier Tele:

While I do care about England, I hope we fail to qualify for the World Cup. Firstly just to see a few people reap what they sow, the FA in appointing Hodgson as well as Hodgson himself for being the kind of conservative dullard who thinks clinging on to a 0-0 draw against Ukraine is some kind of epic achievement. I don't think failing to qualify will cause some massive cultural change where we won't see the likes of Hodgson appointed again but it will at least save the cracks being papered over before a humiliating World Cup performance. Which brings me nicely onto my second, much more selfish reason. I love the World Cup, it's great fun to watch and I don't want my impression of the whole tournament dragged down by the embarrassment of the national team and subsequent navel gazing while the media spend the summer pointing out the bleeding obvious.

There was a time when the same thing could have been said for RVP.

I did hear this on my drive into work this morning and I'm sure he mentioned it was a London club involved. Hopefully it's not this deal he was talking about anyway as it was relying on certain other loan signings etc. falling into place first, it all sounded far from 100% likely to happen.

Not to get in the way of the VT civil war that's breaking out but I, for one, welcome our new Czech overlord striker.

Surely if Gabby has access to that account it would have been shut down the second the club got wind of it? He's not going to get himself in further potential trouble with the club/gaffer just so he can argue with strangers on Twitter.

There isn't anywhere near that amount of money available! ......unfortunately! Why on earth not? Where's the new TV money? We've been prudent so far this window as it is, and we know that Lambert adds value to the club with almost all of his transfer deals. You would think if he'd identified the right man the board would trust him; unlike other managers, he's proved himself. Not saying that we'd get Sigurdsson though. For a start he'd cost more than £8m and his wages would be out of line with what we are putting players on at the moment. I'm fine with that, but we should be able to sign SOMEONE. I echo these thoughts. The thing is an £8m transfer isn't just pay £8m and that's it. You've got to factor in the agent's fees and additional little sweeteners in the deal for the player. Then you're obligating yourself to the wages too, say £40,000 a week for a good player, that's over £2m a year and you're agreeing to repeat that over a 3 or 4 year basis. It all stacks up and when you think about all the money we've got committed to the deadwood in the squad with no guarantee that they won't see out their contracts here then £8m gets swallowed up pretty quick. The crazy thing about modern football is that we as fans now see millions of pounds as a trivial amount of money when they're not and however much we want exciting signings we still have to live within our means so we don't dig another hole that we need more years of turmoil/"transition" to get ourselves out of.

Today is just getting better and better for Arsenal:

Or Rodney Dangerfield.

I'm happy enough to read bullshit twitter rumours to be honest. 'Tis better than nothing in my mind. There's the thrill of knowing there's even the smallest chance that it may be true. The latest Twitter bullshit is Viktor Fischer, I'm sure that the smallest chance with that one though is so small it doesn't actually exist.

Well it doesn't need to be the day before, it wouldn't be hard to set a date that is before the European leagues kick off.

Sky Italia reporting that Real and Spurs have agreed a £93m deal for Bale. Also Martinez has come out and said the window should close at the start of the season rather than once games have started to be played which seems like a fair point, if you're going to draw an arbitrary line for when these things can or can't happen then the start of the season seems like a more logical place to do that.

From The Guardian transfer blog, it sounds like a real life game of FM going on at Arsenal right now.

While it is very cynical I don't understand the shock at the bid Utd have made, Moyes is hoping Baines and Fellaini have had a good read of that Gobby Savage article on the beeb site this week and make things uncomfortable for Everton knowing there's interest and I'm guessing the £28m figure was one carefully selected by a man who has in depth knowledge of that club's finances. Sure it makes Moyes a hypocrite but his job is now doing what's best for Utd, not doing good by his former employer.

I think the tempo was just a bit too quick to be introducing too many of the new players today, especially in defence.

Holy thread revival, Batman! The band that I make noises with have a new album out today so if anybody takes a listen it will be much appreciated. For those who have somehow managed to avoid my spam in the past we're an instrumental/post-rock kind of band from Brum. You can get your mitts on it (for whatever you're willing to pay, including nothing) at: http://arborlights.bandcamp.com/

Greg Middleton ‏@FootballAgent31 22 Jun PSG have bid accepted for Grant Holt. #itk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgf4vBGgTs **** yeah.