They need to clear out the dead wood, and bring in some living wood which will itself be dead by this time next year.
They need to clear out the dead wood, and bring in some living wood which will itself be dead by this time next year.
A new name seemingly on THE SHORTLIST is Khephren Thuram. Sure to wet Tazs' whistle and is the 22 year old son of Lilian, which has made me feel ancient.
I've been wondering whether to write Jadons Ancho off for a few months, and it sounds like the club might have done. Absolute fanny. Nobody should ever buy a Bundesliga winger again.Originally Posted by randomlegend
I'd probably have been inclined to get Sancho next season too but given he's one of the highest paid players and ten Hag has invested a lot in him this season without any immediately obviously material gains I get why he might want to try and sell him while there's a bit left on his contract before it runs down and he becomes worth even less.
Who's buying him? Don't say Chelsea, my doctor's fully booked for the next month.
Nobody for what United paid but I guess they'd test the market and see what people are prepared to pay.
Or yeah, just storm into Boehley's office and shriek WE'RE NOT SELLING SANCHO FOR LESS THAN £300m!!!!! and wait for him to bid 400.
Is Sancho a LWF? Mate, Garnacho’s got that position on lockdown for the foreseeable, surely.
I'm a twit
I watch as little of United as humanly possible whilst generally following THE FOOTBALL but has Sancho been any worse than Antony this season? He'll be on mental wages as well, which pretty much rules out him going anywhere other than Newcastle.
Remember when Rashford-Greenwood-Sancho was going to be England's front three for the next 10 years? Good times.
If you start a serious chaff clearance at United what are you left with? About 4 players?
Nobody is worse than Antony.
Antony is more likely to improve, which is to say have the stupid things kicked out of him and made to run around a bit harder, because he is at least right up for it. Jadons Ancho seems a bit weak-willed.
Sancho is complete turd. Antony has been massively more influential all season despite him being new to the league and clearly raw.
Yeah, Antony has been far better than Sancho. Which isn’t saying much but the latter has been abysmal. Just a bit fat
Sounds like Pochettino or Kompany for the Chelsea job after they’ve ruled Enrique and Naglesmann out of the running. Pochettino will just be another Benitez scenario where the fans don’t take to him due to connections of a previous club and Kompany is just Potter all over again and hoping he can actually come good.
Potter with none of the actual managerial CV, would last about 10 minutes until they're 10th after 10 games again due to having a poor squad assembled by an idiot.
They should have just held their nerve with Potter if these mooks are the ones under consideration.
You can blame Boehly for the summer recruitment (which was always going to be a bit of shambles) but January onwards is on the geezers they’ve brought in from Brighton, Leipzig and Monaco for the recruitment.
Sounds like they’re still going all in on this buy young shenanigans. Proper FM stuff. Reportedly after Lavia and Manu Kone for midfield in the summer who are 19 and 21 respectively. Barely going to have a player over 25 starting games at this rate.
Pochettino is clearly a very good manager and has been everywhere he’s been other than PSG (but then who is, Tuchel failed to even win the league there one season) but the connection with Spurs will just have it going sour from day one
Pochettino has been sitting in the bath eating crisps for, what, three years? Avoid.
The sign 'em young and hungry strategy is all well and good if you are Brighton, Leipzig or Monaco, and the end goal is to sell them on. Is that the plan at Chelsea? The strategy is less good if you want to be a serious contender top top club, because younger players are almost inherently less reliable, which you sort of need these days with the ridiculously high standards being set.
Wasn’t the Chelsea plan just to buy them young and indefinitely loan them out?
I don't see Kompany leaving Burnley that quickly. He's better off building his reputation there before becoming City's binman.
Kompany will succeed at the highest level.
I hope not. He looks ridiculous both with and without a hat.
Head like a pint glass.
As far as I can see, and as far as my knowledge of baseball goes, he is literally just trying to run it like a baseball club, i.e. step 1 front office and analytics, step 2 ???, step 3 profit. While certain mostly-online plebs probably enjoy that kind of approach, there are a lot of issues with it, including, but not limited to:
- Chelsea are (or were) already at an elite level, and were already doing advanced analytics.
- Literally everyone else is also doing advanced analytics.
- Yer Brightons, who have the best analytics, only bother ploughing so much resource into them because there is way more leverage from such things at a mid-table/Championship level than there is at an elite level. Do we think Brighton are going to ride this all the way to world domination? I don't think so, they're probably close to maxing out now, maybe scraping a CL appearance being the high watermark they can aspire to. I don't know what Tony Bloom's motivations for owning Brighton are - fun, or making money, or what - but if he was a pure investor, I reckon he'd sell soonish.
- Baseball has a 162 game season and if you lose 20 games in a run of 30 most fanbases are shrugging or at least only mildly concerned. If you lose 2 football matches in 3, as an 'elite' team, football fans are howling for blood.
- These 8 year contracts - or 'Team-Friendly' contracts as they're known in baseball - do not actually tally up with the economics of football at all. In baseball they tend to come about when the player is mid-career in order to secure their last x years of top-level play in exchange for confirmed financial security. In football people are signing them at the age of 23 to run until they're 31, or worse still, 20 to run until they're 28. What is the incentive to get better if you're sitting on such a contract? If they turn shit, how will the club be able to offload them? It's insanity.
- Baseball is a closed league and although it's not as draft-dependent as the NFL or NBA, the draft, and, more to the point, the limited number of teams, still plays a reasonable part.
- The LA Dodgers would have been relegated in 1992, if baseball had such things
- Young players in football are very overrated as a means of winning anything (nod to Alan Hansen here). The World Cup was dominated by 35 year old Messi. Recent CLs have been shat on by 37yo Modric and 35yo Benzema, among others. Chelsea's own best player is 38yo Thiago Silva. Elite performance (nod to Jake Humphrey here) is about the combination of excellent players and an excellent organisation, both of which elude Boehly's Chelsea.
- He's a loudmouth American with David Mellor hair. There isn't a long track record of such people being successful English football club owners.
I would forecast us next season to be, at very best under the best possible manager we could hire, something like upper mid-table (7th/8th), still struggling to score goals and with several of the players signed this year disappearing into Bogarde-style wilderness years. At worst, I think it's a genuine possibility that this year's malaise could continue where it's going to leave off, and we could be involved in the bottom six survival battle.
It really all did fall apart around that Lukaku signing. Pure insanity that one.
I think they got sucked into some kind of 'he guarantees goals!' wormhole and that was it, compounding the error by replacing him with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
I wonder whether these things get so lost in all the DATA and ANALYTICS that nobody ever stops and goes 'Yeah, but Serie A is shit' or 'Did you see him at United?', like every United fan on here did.
The thing that people don't factor in to the whole 'Why don't the big clubs just sign the players Brighton do' is that if they did then the price would triple and so would the wages. So Brighton can take punts knowing that for every 3 that don't come off, the inevitable sale of the 1 that does pays for the others. Meanwhile if the big team punt does come off, you don't want to sell him so you either give them a contract that over values them and hope they continue to perform to that level or lose them on a free.
IIRC that was a Peter Chech transfer.
The Lukaku in Timberlands and jeans meme really is one of the greats.
Runs in his blood [ie his dad was a director or something] and you know, boyhood fan and all that. Not sure Brighton's analytics are all that [or anyones' are really] but as you say, they are perfectly positioned to Dortmund/Benfica the fuck out of things as a semi-stable Premier League club who can never really aspire to the big time. Buy low, sell high, make players look 'better' than they are etc. Maybe they can be Atalanta for a few seasons and get in with the big boys, but the Premier League is on another planet in terms of financial competition so that would be a minor miracle given their resources. In terms of return on investment, yeah, Bloom would be laughing if he sold Brighton now [although who to I have no idea].
The biggest issue is to see the 'returns' on a young player getting better you actually have to play them to find out if they are any good, and most big clubs have no interest in doing that. Every club was sniffing around Caicedo when he went to Brighton. Think Brighton only got him as there were some unusualities surrounding his ownership/agent structure [or something like that] which put the heavy hitters off.
Those players were all elite for a decade or two before that, the fact that there is the occasional outlier who can carry on into their dotage doesn't really prove anything. Look at Liverpool turning to shit once half the team got the wrong side of thirty. There's an age curve, it's obvious why, on average, you'd want to buy players before they hit their peak.
I think Brighton not buying a striker for two or three seasons when every football ramble listener was shouting at them to do so sums them up. While I'm sure every other club in the league has an "analytics department" (probably one guy on half the wages of their third goalkeeper working 80 hours weeks), I don't think anyone has buy-in like Brighton (/Brentford) do. Good luck convincing the PFMs not to buy Lukaku if there's no structure to allow that to happen.
Brighton have bought [or had] loads of 'strikers'.
They've just all been dreadful for the most part.
Locadia and Andone in the early days, yeah, but I think pocket change on Undav is the only other purchase? Point is not splurging on some negative ev shite because of NARRATIVE.
Transfers in general have a much lower hit rate than people expect them to. I think it's just fair to assume that every bit of business that Brighton do is "good process" (the aforementioned twosome were just bad beats!!). It'll be interesting to see what they get up to this summer with a higher profile and an obvious need to expand the squad.
The sort of patience and coaching that the likes of Mac Allister and Caicedo received they wouldn't be getting at the top clubs. The former was more pointless than Jahanbakhsh for years before turning into an influential world cup winner.
Is their record with signings even that great? I swear most of it turns to shit.
Gross was their greatest moneyball signing as that was upon promotion I think but beside the recent Mitoma, Estupinan and Ferguson finds, it's just a load of mediocre shite being coached the life out of. Brentford is much the same, both have realised coaching gets you everything and you don't need to run clubs like some FM game.
There were a load of expensive failures between '17 and '19 but it's all offset by Gross, Bissouma and Mac Allister and you had loads of low key great business with Gyokeres, Ostigaard, Burn, Dreyer even if they didn't all work out. From then on there's barely a misstep, scary stuff.
I did forget Maupay in my previous post tbf but you can't blame Brighton for blindly trusting the Brentford pipeline.
Ssshhh, I don’t think you’re allowed to mention Ferguson on here.
Those first two are just straight trolling.
I see Liverpool are looking to loan Carvalho out next season. There's a decent example of what happens when a big club signs an aspiring talent. The allure of getting him cheap before he becomes a £50m player on the back of one good season is obviously great, but in doing so you stop him ever becoming that player by not playing him. Should have stayed at Fulham.
The most important recruitment decision is always getting the right manager, which Brighton have probably led the field in this season in terms of getting it right.
Football is also an incredibly short termist thing. Everyone wetting their pants about 'the Brighton model' now forget that little over a year ago they were coming off six league defeats in a row, into a 0-0 draw at home with [a dreadful] Norwich, also marking a fifth game in a row where Brighton had failed to score [maybe the execs at Chelsea should have remembered this]. Then they gave Caicedo his league debut against Arsenal and it's been a wild ride since. Which is mad to think considering he is now seen as some sort of £80m+ player. League debut 9th April 2022.
Yeah, what I meant was when you're at elite level (i.e. wanting to challenge for the English and European titles), it should be clear who the elite players are, and having a series of punts on young players is not the way to stay where you are.
Another thing about this Brighton stuff. Weren't people saying exactly the same thing about Southampton 5 years ago?
Milner linked to Brighton/Burnley. Goodnight my sweet severely technically limited monotonous bastion of gammon professionalism.
The dualism of their signings being either South American regens or over the hill England internationals is quite funny.
Milner's just another manager on the pitch type player [like Lallana]. Would have thought he'd be more likely to stay oop north but I guess Brighton is a pretty exciting place to be [until they sell all their good players in the summer].
That Joao Pedro will cook though.
Someone who watches Sporting talk to me about Manuel Ugarte.
Liverpool links have popped up and it sounds like it might be in the £40-60m range.
The stat boys absolutely rave about him and have him as the next best thing.
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