blandy

Wellington Paranormal is a NZ comedy that I like. As people have mentioned wwdits and FotC

Wordle 1,043 5/6*

Pardon?

Fair enough. You’re quite possibly correct in your suspicion. Me, I’m not disagreeing, just looking at it from a different angle. In essence that the Man City attendance was not the number in the programme and was much, much more likely to be that reported by the Premier league and the media (BBC etc). It’s only this season that we’ve had this ludicrous situation of someone up on high having a thing about concealing or exaggerating or tweaking attendance numbers. They used to knock them down when I were a lad, for tax reasons, but terraces are long gone.

Well, yes. But… Before the season starts and before someone with control freakery or whatever starts getting his knickers in a twist, it’s a reasonably safe assumption to accept the declared capacity to the League by the club, as the actual operating capacity. Safety certificates and so on are based on the number of people permitted to attend. It’s true that in-season changes could theoretically occur- the opening of a new stand, for example, but in our case that’s not happened.

For what it’s worth I use the Premier league handbook which they produce each season, which contains all the rules, clauses, and minutiae for each member club. This year’s reports 42,530 as VP capacity for PL games. They get those figures from the clubs. A pdf is available here https://resources.premierleague.com/premierleague/document/2024/03/04/0910e1b3-f94a-41a5-9818-6e1b5c961a9a/PL_Handbook_2023-24_DIGITAL_26.02.24-v3.pdf

They can say what they want, I guess, but I don’t think they go to those lengths of double counting tickets sold

It wasn’t 42,789, like you say the club public reporting of attendances is bobbins. But that’s more than the capacity of the ground. The 41,421 was what I believe was released to the media. Premier League rules require that clubs must report actual number of people attending to them within a specified timescale. The programme also sometimes misprints attendances, though it’s been years and years since I bought one. Anyway, it’s just talking about precise numbers. The demand is there from people. The club just need to match demand with affordability issues.

41,421 was reported by all the media outlets for that game. I think there are two things, unrelated also to take into account - the number of seats in the ground is the 42,765 (or whatever), but some are not used because they have almost no view of the pitch (Witton lane corner of the lower Holte) or are cordoned off for segregation. The other thing is there are two sets of attendances - the "announced" attendance, though as you say we seem to have stopped announcing them, and the actual attendance which has to be reported to the Premier League (or FA or EFL for cup games). Announced figures are normally tickets sold so include season tickets and match day tickets which are not taken up on the day, because people can't make it or whatever.

As told to me by an Italian called Claudio, with his own wine and a corking machine (hand operated) in his cellar - Corks are usually sealed with a metal or plastic shrink wrapper over the top to stop air sneaking past the cork. Ageing occurs from the air already in the cork and /or bottle itself and from contact with the cork. His wine was terrific, but natural cork tree bark corks can spoil or taint the wine. Screw tops and those plastic corks are airtight, but obviously don't contain any air at all and have become more commonplace because of cost and because of consistency. But cork forests, mostly in Portugal are an absolute wildlife heaven. If they're lost there's a lot of diversity going to disappear.

Yes. However, as it was reported at the time, it was basically sold for a reported 18 million, with two clauses saying "if they stay up, then we have an option to buy him back for a bigger sum than he was sold for" and also "if they go down, we have an obligation to buy him back for a figure less than we sold him for". What we don't know is what the actual figures are, or what further clauses and so on there might be that will not be actioned because they're going down, not staying up - for example it's common for "if he gets capped for England" or "if he scores 20 goals in a season" or whatever. Add ons, basically. Anyway, it seems certain he's coming back here at the end of the season. What happens after then, who knows. Unai clearly wanted to keep him under our control, though, so maybe he'll be part of next season's squad.

I suspect not. Selling clubs tend to release a price that says “look at all this money we got” and buying clubs tend towards “look at how little we paid”. One will include the add ons and one won’t. If the clauses are never triggered, no payment is made and the audited accounts eventually reveal the picture.

It kind of was at the time, but now it’s just the actual real news

Alternatively: They signed him for 9 million plus add ons which never materialised, on a (say) 3 year deal. They sell him back to us for the same 9 million and so make a 3 million profit on his (now) amortised 6 million value. They incur the 3 million amortisation cost, plus whatever in wages. We booked 9 million in income from his sale, last year and incur 9 million in costs when we buy him back. isn’t that the theory?

Is Surrey a hotbed of Scottish nationalism? I had the impression it was more of a hate the French, cyclists and teachers kinda place?