You're taking the piss ladOriginally Posted by randomlegend
You're taking the piss lad
Welcome (back) to Manchester
Kroenke has bought the entirety of Arsenals stadium debt. Weirdly, it seems to be a way of them putting in money to the club without bolloxing FFP.
FFP, like all financial reporting mechanisms, is a load of on-paper-only bullshit.
Yeah, its been annoying being one of the only clubs that seemingly pay attention to it.
Whole thing should have been ripped up the moment that Pjanic - Arthur transfer happened.
Or that 'keeper swap they did with Valencia, or whatever Bayern and Juve have been up to for the past god knows how long swapping players about (Barca are in on it too - the Arturo Vidal merry-go-round). It all stinks to high heaven.
City's CAS ruling must be due soon.
13th I think.
If they don't get a serious punishment then FFP is done.
I suspect City will have their ban rescinded, given that UEFA broke their own rules whilst investigating them. CAS won't like that.
Sancho offer going to be around £80m base + around £20m easy add-ons + another £20m silly add-ons (win the Balon d'Or etc).
Alexis Sanchez will go permanently to Inter, loan with obligation to buy.
Get the swap deal done immediately.
The post above this may be calling for a swap deal while acknowledging that the last 2 swap deals we've been involved in were absolute toilet for the club.
Mykhitaryan on 200k a week and William Gallas being made captain for Ashley Cole...
One of the only clubs who pay attention to it. That's why you're shit. Roger.
It's not the only reason but I have heard some decent takes on how when we had 'the best bank balance in the league' we were done over a bit because it turns out investing in players was better than saving money due to the way the transfer market never stopped expanding: you could double your money on an average player within 18 months at points, making our fiscally responsible approach redundant in the long run.
But yeah there have been terrible decisions and mismanagement all round from the club regardless. Supposedly our record fee received for a player is still £29.5m for Fabregas.
Cheaper than Perez and Carroll. What a time to be alive.
Coutinho being touted on loan to Arsenal. No prizes for guessing who his agent is.
That Gallas/Cole swap was absolutely mental, looking back. I can't remember if Cole was playing up, but Gallas was threatening to score own goals in order to force the move and somehow from being saddled with him we ended up acquiring the best player in his position in the world by miles for £5 million.
EDIT: Now I remember, 'Cashley' Cole swerving off the road because he was offered 50 grand a week. lol.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 14-07-2020 at 01:41 PM.
Mention of mental transfers had me look up the Eto'o / Ibrahimovic one and it turns out I'd forgotten Eto'o's post-Inter career entirely. Chelsea, Everton and then a load of other shit until only retiring last year.
I'll be fucked if I'm bothering to watch Barca/Bayern league games but there is absolutely no way on Earth a 28 year old Coutinho is failing to tear EPL up given another chance. You don't lose that technique and agility.
You may be able to forget. I’ve not. Actually, I think for us it was more the meeting with Mou and whoever was the Director of Chelsea at the time (Martin Edwards?) that was caught on camera before the move, and for which we accused Chelsea of tapping up. In 2005 these things weren’t going on quite as explicitly as nowadays, and we’d just won a 3rd league title in 6 years as the first unbeaten team, and the Emirates was on its way to being built. It felt therefore far more of a case of a cash grabbing, grubby bit of a business.
You had us over a barrel on it, and Gallas seemed the right man to replace Big Sol. Then he was a big part of us fucking up the league title in 08 when we should have won it at a canter, and goes down in history at the Arsenal as perhaps our least revered captain.
Saying that, after over a decade I am now able to acknowledge he’s the best left back I’ve seen play the game and celebrate what he did here, somewhat.
Oddly, we still got the better deal out of the last one. Miki had a decent 12 months before dropping off a cliff. Sanchez was already shite for us before he moved and proceeded to have two decent games for United IIRC. Have they stopped paying him yet?
The best left back until he ran into Tony V and his one move, anyway.
In fairness, he’s probably what we need but I can see the deal being outrageously expensive (25m for a year I think it was with Bayern?) and given Szobzalai is being touted at 15m, It seems disingenuous to look for a quick fix at that kind of money when we’re already so far behind the pack in so many areas of the side. I’d probably rather we spunked that on someone like Tierney, who cost 25m on account of being from a minor league. There’s got to be a few more of those deals around.
I think it was definitely a case of the old football clashing with the new - Cole, king of the wag scene (this was right around the time of Baden Baden) and swerving off the road at the thought of 50 grand a week, must have really offended the clean-living old school types that still patrolled the Marble Halls and who were so well personified in Wenger. In many ways, Arsenal never recovered from that and have never adapted to the bling-flashing realities of modern football since, so much so that Gazidis, hiring and then firing the Dortmund guy, and now this strange Kia Joorabchian setup all feel a bit 'how do you do, fellow kids'.
Coutinho's a bit of a sad case really. Got all the medals to look at now, but he's really had little of note to do with any of them, and now doomed to play out his career at some middle tier shitshow or be the modern day Robinho for whichever new money side emerges next (Newcastle?). Still, dream move and all.
Would love him back, Rush style, everyone makes mistakes and there's no harm in ambition, but I can't see it happening. Feels like Klopp was laying a marker down with him and letting him back would undermine that.
Swap him for Lallana.
I'm a twit
Speaking of mad swaps, Talksport are saying Skriniar (or however it's spelled) plus cash for Martial.
Pass.
I have no idea how good that Skriniar guy is, but if he's as good as he's cracked up to be (in terms of media valuation) then that would probably be a good deal (depending on the 'cash'). A rock solid defence is more important than an extremely ephemeral French forward, especially with Greenwood emerging and Sancho apparently on the way. Actually, no, United get cash as well as the defender? No brainer. Martial is a world beater about 25% of the time and does piss all for the other 75%.
Swap him for Lovren.
I'm a twit
I talked about this with my best mate recently, he’s a big Chelsea man. There’s a direct correlation between Chelsea and Mourinho forging their modern identity and Wenger and Arsenal slipping into ours as the soft nearly men. Wenger was previously perceived, with good reason, as an adaptable and visionary coach, but become a stubborn, dogmatic figure seemingly fixated with being the antithesis of Mou’s Chelsea.
He was never careful with money on his arrival - we did get some great bargains, but we also spent a good deal of money (for the time) on a few filler players like Jeffers and Wright. We always had aggressive, athletic players - I only really recall Ljungberg and Cole being ‘smaller’ guys in those early Wenger teams, and suddenly that changed to us fielding a whole team full of midgets with dodgy ankles week in, week out. He were direct and efficient, ruthlessly so at our best, but became a side constantly trying to out-Barca Barca, always attempting the perfect goal.
All of that in stark contrast to Abramovich’s spending, Mou’s pragmatism, and the big strong athletes of Chelsea that bullied us in the way we used to bully teams (ironically, this was normally very evident vs Chelsea).
When Mou said Wenger was a voyeur, he was right. I love him, but he seemed almost scarred by the emergence of Chelsea and what he perceived as foul play, to the extent that his purist, dogmatic tendencies totally took over and him and the club moved backwards for years. I was too loyal to see it at the time and bought into it wholesale... But in retrospect it’s frightening. He turned into football’s Harvey Dent.
Alternatively, he was just past it by about 2006, and then he got by on Arsenal being the third/fourth best draw in the competition and a big enough cultural figure to keep everybody happy. He was his own binman.
Look at what Arsenal have become since he left town.
I love him, and he didn’t become awful.
But, there is a narrative there that seems all too obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It’s not definitive, but it is compelling.
Alternatively, there is a middle ground where you are both kind of right. Wenger applied his knowledge of real economics to football and bet the farm on Arsenal's model working, failing to account for the bubble never bursting. This combined with his distaste for 'financial doping' and actual doping, and the fact he had become the unwavering power at the club in charge of everything to do with the football meant that any misjudgements he made were compounded as he tried to play 'the correct way' and achieve some kind of moral victory, as if Bobby Pires didn't secure the invincibles season with Olympian dives.
Skriniar got donned senseless by Tahith Chong in our preseason friendly against Inter.
He came in to a solid side with his bags of pasta, nailed a few excellent foreign transfers when a) signing from abroad was literally pot luck; and b) their non-United rivals were wasting their money on domestic bollocks (and United themselves could be complacent), and it all worked out for a few years. Their transfer business was pretty bollocks even from about 2002, so stadium or not was he capable of sustaining it? Apart from the obvious exception every great manager has run out of steam somewhere, it's just that Bayern, Juventus, Liverpool, etc. have tended to sack them rather than coast along. It's all well and good blaming the board and the stadium, but he could have gone and managed Real Madrid at the time of his choosing, so it obviously suited him to sit in his comfort zone. I don't think he was sticking around to prove a point to Chelsea.
United not pushing Patrick Vieira to force a move in 2001 is the great counterfactual. It would have all fallen to pieces if they had.
He waan't sticking around to prove a point to Chelsea, he was sticking around to prove a point to everyone by winning on last major trophy his way, but it never happened. It should have happened the Leicester year but the side was made in his own image. It's easy to say 'he should've left' etc but I think he genuinely cared about the club more than any other and he was basically doing a one club FM save by the end. The new methods and scouting were always going to provide a temporary edge because everyone quickly imitated them. Especially scouting, nowadays even a second tier team in a minor european league can scout far and wide.
Window to open in England on the 27th July and close on October 5th.
An EFL only window will then open until the 16th October.
What on earth are Real Madrid doing letting Hakimi leave for €40m? The guy is quality, certainly better than Dani Carvajal. Strange.
Apparently we're about to airdrop £30 million into Trabzonspor for some goalkeeper. What could possibly go wrong.
One of the redtops were saying you were ready to complete a ninety million deal for Oblak.
I imagine some skinny Turk with fifty games under his belt will be just as good though.
The Turkish have a very cool and calm temperament which is why they have a proud tradition of producing top class keepers, wouldn't worry
Lock up your daughters.
[Insert favourite Arsenal FanTV character seething here]
Phonics rn.
BILD suggesting Sancho is off the table if United don't make the top four. @randomlegend
Where?
Not a chance.
Look at the poor lad's dreams be crushed. You hate to see it.
He's not going to City.
Mahow is definitely a wolf.
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