Yeah, it’s been total sh1t the last six years. We’ll never compete with the plastics on the world merchandising stage thank god.
Still an FA Cup final and turning most of the so called big teams over including Liverpool and Chels several times has been a total waste of time.

Wow and you call my post naive. If it’s that easy to pick up the points that put us mid table at the end of the season then why aren’t all the other teams in the bottom half doing it? I don’t go for this flip flop thing, there is too much money at stake in the modern game to give away points. Maybe last game of the season if there is nothing on it but £1.6m per place in the league is a good incentive to accumulate points.

As for players not wanting to join us, there are 3 leagues below us full of players who would kill to have a chance of playing in the EPL. There are players there who could step up a level but we just do not appear capable of finding them either in this country or another.

As for how you interpret that I don’t understand what happens at the end of contracts from my post is beyond me, but if that’s what you feel like posting then it’s your prerogative.

It’s £1.9 mil per place.

Teams do wind down. It’s that psychological factor that’s tough to break.

You said on Luka... ‘If Luka thinks he is worth £100k a week then lets see if someone will pay it on top of a transfer fee. He is good, he is our captain, but he is replaceable.’

Fvckin ‘ell, we think Dougie Freedman is bad. You’d have us playing League 2 football within 4 years.

You’d just let Luka run his contract down because you think he won’t get £100k without a transfer fee? Jesus. You do realise that no transfer fee means less costs at buying club that they’re willing to pay more wages per week over the length of the contract? And you want to play a 6-9 month game of poker to see who blinks first? Ha ha ha, hilarious if it wasn’t so damaging. He’s an asset worth £20-30 million and you’d be okay with losing that.

Yes there are players in levels below who’d die for the opportunity but they are calculated risks because you will sign some failures. We’ve gone for the more costly guaranteed because in the past it avoided the risk of those failures stuck in our squad on higher wages than we could offload them to their correct level for. We’ve also attempted to save money in August but inevitably spent more time on experienced in January to guarantee more our Prem safety. We’re now suffering from it because the money has run dry or we haven’t sold many players at all.

The prime example of a club at our league level recruiting promising players is Bournemouth, but look at how much money the club has been losing, operating beyond FFP levels and being fined for it, even if the Russian owner couldn’t care less.

I should’ve just ignored your post when you posted we should let Luka run his contract down (‘see if he can get £100k elsewhere ‘).

He either signs or we sell. Hopefully he signs in 2 weeks after being content that we’re not self destructing.

Edited by Rudi Hedman (22 Jul 2019 9.30am)

COYP

Your jumping the gun a bit there, we haven't bought in any players yet except a No3 goalie

Now you’re definitely jumping the gun

Edited by monkey (22 Jul 2019 10.45am)

One of the reasons that we have financial constraints is that we have overspent in the last few years both in terms of fees paid for players and the wages we have paid them. we did not have the income to buy £30 million players and pay wages in excess of 100k pw particularly when at least one of our high earners is not earning his wages with his performances. I accept that TV revenue has gone up considerably but because of these past expenses we still can not spend recklessly

The result of this was we had to sell AWB to have some financial freedom. The fact we have sold him now means we do not have to sell wilf unless we get the right offer.

I think if a buyer came in offering a fair price for Benteke or Sakho we would look at taking it. Obviously they would have to want to move.

We need to stregthen the squad overall but also need to balance the books. We have cut our wage bill with the release of some fringe players however until we see who arrives and their wages the amount of spare money is unknown. I suspect Luka's contract extension has been discussed and an offer probably made. He may have accepted we do not know remember Jimmy Mac last year.

The expansion of the ground will probably happen at some point and if it does we would get more income and obviously that will help. However SP was more interested in creating a singing section than sorting out the ground planing application