Sleeping Dave

They can only loan three. So… One would hope no more than three. Caleb Wiley is a ridiculous signing. Surely he must be a Strasbourg player for the foreseeable.

Who will also command one of the loan spots available. So we are down to five now. Santos and Wiley to Strasbourg. That’s three left. Lots of players will be left at Cobham playing U21 football. Great planning for increasing the value of those players huh! After a season in the U21s we are apparently guaranteed to make a profit on them 😂😂😂

The whole recruitment policy reeks of poor planning or no planning at all. GK: we are about to buy our fourth keeper under this lot. All in similar age brackets and not a lot between them. Defenders: we are stockpiling CBs. Disasi, Badiashile, Fofana, Adarabioyo, Koulibaly. Now seemingly buying Anselmino. None so far has managed to stake a clear claim for CB1 and CB2. Instead we’ve seen Colwill and Chalobah being the best performing CBs out of this lot. Chalobah about to be sold for no reason other than “paper profits”. Midfielders: how many young CMs can a club acquire? Casadei, Santos, Ugochukwu, Chukwuemeka, Kellyman, Dewsbury-Hall, Veiga, Caicedo, Lavia, Fernandez. That’s 10 CMs in 3 windows. Attackers: Guiu, Nkunku, Mudryk, Palmer, Jackson, Washington, Angelo, Morerira, Fofana, Sterling, Madueke, Aubameyang It’s a scatter gun approach. Now we are seemingly looking to sell Casadei and Fofana. Presumably because we are buying a whole host of new players who need a loan (Wiley, Anselmino and still quite a few of our purchased “prospects” will have to accept U21 football this season. I don’t mind us buying young prospects. Take Paez and Estevao. Those makes sense. But buying second or third tier youngsters and have them replace our academy players makes no sense at all. Burning money for the sake of burning money. Someone is making a lot of money off the back of our strategy. I think there is something that smells here. Wouldn’t be surprised if something untowards popped up soon. Edit: oh, and we are apparently trying to sign Samu Omorodion for €70m (!!!). Top class striker you may think? Nope. 35 senior games in La Liga. 8 goals. Another average player at a world class fee. We aren’t even doing a Brighton. We are doing something no one has ever done. A classic Chelsea. Buy crap high, sell quality low. Then pretend you are doing something innovative. Biggest shams in modern football.

That’s true. But they decided to buy three keepers who are no better than Kepa. Now seemingly on to their fourth. It’s almost impossible to achieve. But they did.

Three GK2s and two GK3s for £138m is really good going. Even for this lot. They’ve outdone themselves again.

And none of the them fit for purpose. If I was this bad at my job I’d be fired for gross misconduct.

Sure, largely I don’t disagree with this. As long as we all agree that it is your subjective opinion that we are only second to City in terms of squad quality. By any other metric we are not.

But Martin, you are talking about “paper profits”. No accounting principle can turn a bad deal in real life into a good one on paper and then magically turn it into a good deal in the real world. The money we pay and receive are still real and a loss is still a loss. Just because you amortise the cost over 7 years doesn’t mean the amortisation costs can be neglected. They have still been on our books. Like the poster above states, you can do this short term with a low number of players to balance the books from one year to another. But at this scale, for so many years? It’s like sweeping all the shit in your house under the rug. It’s still there.

Quite, happy to see that someone gets this. Amortisation costs are real. It’s not just a paper exercise. It is a burden and it impacts our ability to strengthen the club with real quality. What scares me is that this is a burden we will live with for a long time. Well into the 2030’s actually. Regarding your last point, yep. That’s already a practice and we will piss away real talent from the academy just so we can gamble on overrated foreign imports. Just genius! No really, they are so smart that they have outsmarted the whole world of football. The winners here are the clubs we are buying from. They are laughing all the way to the bank. €1.2bn spent on new players since they took over. It’s really hard to believe, but true nonetheless.

My bad, I wasn’t aware that my view on how we fare this season was a debate. You asked for my reasons, I gave them.

Isn’t it better to compare how the squads are able to perform? Isn’t that how you reach top four? To get more points than 16 other squads? Otherwise it’s highly subjective.

Given how the season played out, at no point during the season were we close to finish top four. We managed to make up ground over the last few games but by then we were already out of it. Did we at any time occupy a top four place for a number of weeks? I can’t remember, but I don’t think we were.

Ok I’ll bite. Name a top European club with owners that are worse than ours. Preferably with some sort of argument attached to your viewpoint.

What about the other 6 remaining players? Also, it is so cute that you thinking we are guaranteed to make profit on players who can’t even lit up the Ligue 1. Who is going to pay more than we did and also pay them wages that are on par with what we are offering them? Certainly no French club. Certainly no Spanish club. Certainly no English club since they can’t lit up a league that are worse. Santos back to Brazil? Sure, at a pittance of what we paid. Anyhow, this is getting old. We will have to wait until the losses are realised. Given the length of their contracts that will most likely be a while. Casadei can be sold back to Italy for a loss sooner though. He probably has some stock over there still.

It’s been an unmitigated disaster from the day they took over. Hiring those two clowns aren’t the biggest mistake. It’s just another bad call among a sea of bad calls.