the_eristic

Aw geez, this thread too?

Laursen for teaching them how to smash the ball away. Mellberg for teaching them how to smash Freddie Ljungberg. Carew for teaching them how to smash strippers and models. Sorted.

I think he's been signed as a utility man, we'll see him tossed in whenever/wherever needed, might nail down a position if he excels in it. If he can become even average by Premier League standards at any of the positions he can play, his value will have tripled at a minimum, and Lambert must see something in him to believe he can make the step up. No risk in this one for me, lots of potential benefit.

Don't think he will get ahead of Johnson though, for some bizarre reason managers are always enamoured by Glen **** Johnson. Its mainly to do with the club he plays for though in fairness to Joihnson he was one of England better players at Euro 2012 Not just England, Johnson has been preferred at club level by 4 consecutive Liverpool managers now. There must be something about him I'm missing... He's the English Cafu! Or, perhaps more accurately, since our very own Alan Hutton is the Scottish Cafu, he's really just the English Hutton?

He's a "resolute" personality, "level-headed" in media handling, and was very happy to have joined, so I don't know where this outburst came from! Ozil, for ~18m. Big wages, but short contract. Shirt sales like mad already. Offers more consistency and physicality than Canales with a mostly similar but better skill set. Wound up spending the bulk of the Ganso/Gotze money on an absolutely incredible 18-year-old newgen central defender at Atalanta, so it worked out well. A few other managers dislike me for "buying success" now, lol!

Yeah, seems like he can place 'em or lace 'em with minimal backlift. We're shaping up to be a real shooting side this year!

Just had a player "concerned" over being subbed. His legs were shot and he wasn't doing much, but now he's properly pissed because I told him I would make changes as necessary and is "considering his options". He's only arrived two weeks ago and has played three games, 90 minutes in two of them, where's he think he's going to go?!

I agree. Well, if by doesn't, you mean does. Often. Splitting hairs, I know.

Well, scratch Ganso, his agent is "unfriendly" towards me for some reason, won't even open talks.

I play a narrow front 3 with two poachers playing off a 6'3"+ target man, with one or two CAMs behind them. If I'm just using one, I'll go for the playmaker; two, one playmaker, one dribbler. Ganso would mainly be in competition with/replacing Sergio Canales, who is a bit of a hybrid of the two styles, but too inconsistent to start every match and is completely lacking in physical presence. As far as I can tell, Ganso has the highest creative/mental skills in the game without being hilariously expensive, on insane wages, or >30 years old. My facilities and physios are world class, don't have too much injury trouble, but you never know. Also, I just want to buy a real-life big name player for once, and CAM is the only spot where there are players I like who represent proper upgrades. The most well-known player I've purchased previously is Lacina Traore; Canales was released from Madrid, got him on a free. Gotze would be best overall (though he seems to be injured fairly often, too), but he'd cost probably my entire budget and would demand over 100k/week wages vs 50m and probably 65k/week for Ganso. Of the other "big" AMs with stats I like, I could get Mesut Ozil for absolute peanuts, but he doesn't look quite as good, or Jovetic for somewhere between Ganso and Gotze, but he's already on 130k/week at Liverpool. Chelsea had Hazard valued at 300m on 176k/week and I don't think Bayern would sell Toni Kroos to me due to our rivalry.

I have 75 million in the bank and absolutely nothing worthwhile left to spend it on. Should I blow it all trying to get Ganso or Gotze just for the hell of it? I'm not one to make marquee signings nor sign older players (they're 27 and 25, respectively) and am not short on good AMs, but both are substantially better than what I have (in terms of their current ability, anyway), we're silly rich from success and selling players to City, Madrid, et cetera for stupid money, and with a few more great seasons should make it #1 in the world. I owe it to myself and our fans to splurge a little, right?

No modern Gibson is worth that kind of money, especially when you can buy one of the banjo world's holy grails for that, an original 1939 Style 12 Mastertone: http://www.gruhn.com/photo/JA6138.jpg The quality just isn't there on their new stuff. Yet another indication of their business model, preferring to be "lifestyle" products over accessible high quality instruments. Honestly, much better off buying a Nechville or Deering.

Amps? I don't know the UK market as well (other than the fact that US stuff tends to be insanely marked up over there), but what's your budget and what do you really need? Since pics are being posted, here's a few of the amps in my general vicinity: The Carr is my go-to for the typical work I do (displacing a Goodsell Super 17, which is still in close competition), but I've always been the type that prefers different tools for different jobs. There's another 9-10 strategically positioned (id est, carried in and set down wherever I could find before dropping dead for the night) around the house.

You know, people on football forums love to accuse other posters of living in Football Manager land, but that is EXACTLY how to become rich and successful quickly in FM. Lambo must've been playing one day when it hit him: "I've gone from the Conference all the way to winning the European Champions' Cup seven years in a row with little more than a hodge-podge 132 African and Eastern European teenagers and Ethan Moore. This... can work."

Have we signed anyone ye... wait, we have? What witchery is this?!

What those videos show me is that we should be signing Montpellier's left side to come with him!

We've supposedly been interested in him since Lambert took the reins. Wonder if it's just lazy journalism, if we're actually still interested, or if the price will have shot up too much due to his excellent season.

Maybe he thinks it'll come with some of that Chinese baby milk. It comes in powdered form, right?

Well its not really their game. I used to work in the states and played alot of football when i was there. One thing i noticed was that in general the girls technically were alot better than the boys when we played. That's surprising. Why is that? I think its because the girls all play soccer when they are able to walk and they play all through school. Guys have baseball, basketball and american football to name a few. Soccer is way down the pecking order. American football I can understand but I don't see why girls wouldn't pick baseball and basketball over the other sports. Many do pick basketball and baseball (well, softball, usually) and volleyball.They are comparatively free to choose what they want to play, and many, having played soccer since childhood, and there having been strong role models in the women's game for some time now, stay with the sport. Boys, on the other hand, very rarely get to choose. Their sporting activities are on the whole taken MUCH more seriously by the adults around them, so the instant they show some kind of athletic inclination, they're quite literally dragged out of whatever sport they might be playing and thrown into whichever of the school's programs is the money/prestige-maker, which is essentially never soccer. They will often face pretty significant social repercussions if they do stick with soccer (or other non-mainstream sport), especially if they're seen as talented. Coaching tends to be abysmal-to-non-existent, too. "Hey, the PE Teacher's assistant isn't busy Saturday, get him to handle it." It's pretty stupid.

Guardian has just posted some clearly "let's pull names and numbers out of a hat and put them into another hat with some glue and pull them back out and publish them however they've stuck" top 50 Summer transfer targets, in which our dear Christian is said to want a move away and is "valued" at a mere 10.5M. It would be funny, were it not for the inevitability of a noteworthy percentage of the brainless masses (and brainless pundits and managers, too) taking it as gospel, declaring our valuation too high and using it to publicly try to beat us down when we hold out, at which point I will just remind them that we got 20M for Stewart Downing.

I'm assuming you're talking about the US. I can't figure why we can produce such great keepers and very determined, aggressive (if typically lacking technical ability and craft) players elsewhere on the pitch, but consistently produce central defenders with the attention span and decision making of a fruit fly. For as long as I can remember, even our very best defenders have always been full of stupid self-inflicted and completely avoidable mistakes.

He'd be sent off in Spain every other week. Don't think he would suit their football terribly well, either, unless Diego is planning on making some changes.

Regardless of how well he actually plays (that is, assuming he most likely won't go and score 40 goals in his first season), I get the feeling that the insurmountable hype and the inescapable comparisons to Messi will lead to him being considered a bit of a flop, at which point he'll be sold/traded to the likes of Milan or Juve in some incredibly convoluted deal, will do rather well for them, then be brought back to Spain by Madrid.

I'm born'd and bred 'mmuuuurkin and I wanted the Dutch to win. Spain was and is soooooo freaking dull to watch. It says a lot about that final that the best and most exciting chances were Dutch counterattacks that Robben flubbed and/or Casillas thwarted. Also, people spouting off about how the Dutch approached that game (anit-football, etc) is somewhat bemusing, given how on the occasions Chelsea has played Barcelona over the past few seasons (especially away), they've employed a physical stifle-and-counter game, same as the Dutch used v. Spain, only to be lauded as tactically brilliant. "That's how you beat teams that can keep the ball better than you, you tackle hard, stop them from playing, catch 'em on the break" ad infinitum from pundit and punter alike