Rayvin

That is so in character

We might be waiting for the executive appointment now. Doubt anything significant can be signed off this close.

Wonder if part of the thinking is that there's an urgent need to reforge relationships within the club. Good opportunity to do that. This is good news tbh, probably the best possible news we could have at this point.

German friend of mine says he's the business. Can dribble, shoot, and is massive. I'm actually pretty happy if that's the replacement, at 22 we have time to work on him.

Don't think he should be embarrassed at all tbh. It's more than £30m a year, tax free. 3 years of that and he's set for life, as are his family for several generations.

I was thinking £200m plus they loan him back to us for a year with full wage contributions, plus a 50% sell on.

We'd get fined by UEFA right? Just factor that into the fee.

That fee would be staggering. Maybe the gloves coming off?

Don't agree with the idea that PIF have lost interest either. They are shareholders - they get updates from the club in the form of some sort of regular board meeting and will otherwise leave the executive to run the day to day, which is what they're employed to do. They may well have a series of concerns about how the club is being run presently, but they won't have access to the day to day information and operations unless they're specifically requesting it. I think a fairer picture of their view of the club isn't that they've lost interest, but that they've never intended for us to be a nuclear blast in the middle of football in the first place - instead, simply an ongoing concern that they hope to see grow and develop. I think they're doing fine overall, and they're likely pretty happy with things given the successes last season, but they're not going to be as in the weeds as we are about things that are happening on a daily basis. I also think we're being a bit hard on Eales in a way - my issue with him isn't that I think he's incompetent, it's that it feels like he's hamstrung by the reality that a lot of these big decisions about the future of the club with respect of stadiums and training grounds will not be things it makes sense for him to sign off on this close to having a new CEO come into the picture. Eales can likely make short term decisions that affect the day to day of the club, but not anything strategic and long term - because the new guy will have his own philosophy and goals. The issue isn't that Eales is a poor CEO, it's that it isn't appropriate for him to make some of these calls. We urgently need his successor in place to get things moving again. Just my view of course.

I'm wondering if the person we have negotiating these is being paid a bonus based on how much money they manage to save the club versus our valuation of the players or something, it's been that bad.

This honestly feels like Winter is trying to help NUFC run themselves - I agree with everything he's said, maybe they should bring him in as a temporary consultant or something.

Yes, works for me. Mental that we need this though.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/24/resident-doctors-bma-strike-nhs-wes-streeting Streeting goes to war with doctors. I really fucking hate this guy so will avoid passing judgement on it as I'm simply too biased - other than for him to say that 'a majority of doctors didn't vote for these strikes' is the same as me saying 'a majority of people didn't vote for Labour'. He is this government's Matt Hancock IMO.

Hard to be critical of him with that all set out. We are fucking this up at the board level.

Any way to see that which doesn't include subbing to the Heil? Nvm

It's a good article tbf.

Why? It would be mine. You don't need to disband either, you just need to be tactical about how you apply yourself and force the bigger party to have to negotiate with you for power, ideally. That's likely the best they could hope for. Realistically I think this could be a really interesting moment to see just how friendless the centre really is in this country. It cannot keep taking people for granted. I feel vindicated at least that I'm not alone in feeling like Starmer is just taking people like me for granted. What is more dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose? Apparently, a country full of them.

Indeed as I was trying to suggest earlier, this appears to be the only way anyone can get Starmer's attention. Set up a populist party for him to pander to.

Then Centrist parties need to start making things better instead of managing the decline. We do not have to keep doing things the same way we've always done them. And while I agree that Europe has challenges too, it's hard to argue that they're not better off for still having control over infrastructure and energy. Immigration exists because birth rates are declining, birth rates are declining because having children isn't sustainable anymore in an economic sense, people are barely managing to move out of their parent's houses. If we want that to change, we need to stop fucking the young. That actually does mean sacrifice. For people who already have things. That's what it means. Or we continue to do nothing and let Farage take over because he's the only one brave enough to offer an alternative, even if it's total horseshit.

We can't keep looking at the cure and saying 'it's too much'. Eventually we actually have to just accept that the longer we leave it to fix this country properly from decades of Neoliberal mismanagement, the worse the medicine will taste. Each successive generation is being thrown to the wolves in greater numbers to sustain the shitheap that we have. Can we not just start doing this like the rest of Europe and abandon our Thatcherite nonsense already? But either way, you know damn well that Corbyn isn't going to win man. That's not the point of this at all. It's to force Labour to engage with a threat in the same way they're engaging with Reform.

We also know that the current gradual decline is slow boiling the frog and causing extremism and rampant social discontent. I actually don't think there are too many big solutions needed here tbh. Banning land banking would do wonders to the housing market for one thing - nationalising house-building might have to come with it. Do that, and a lot of this starts to look better for a lot of people, it relieves the pressure for more sustainable long term thinking. Nationalise energy. Nationalise trains, though Labour are at least doing that. Take infrastructure wholly out of the hands of the private sector, which has been one massive profiteering fuck up. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else is really needed other than that wealth tax. Ideally some sort of global push for a standardised corporation tax like Biden was going for, but agree that UK can't go it alone there.

Corbyn is essentially setting himself up as the anti-Farage IMO. He's not there to win. The fact that Farage somehow might is down to the Tories completely imploding.

I think we'd need to understand his policies and positions before making any sort of claim like that, surely? There is no way out of this that doesn't involve spending though.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/24/jeremy-corbyn-and-zarah-sultana-agree-to-launch-leftwing-party So there it is, Corbyn 2.0. I haven't joined yet, not convinced by it so far, but I have seen a lot of other lefties hurl themselves at it. Corbyn can't possibly expect that he's ever going to win, but I do wonder if this might be how he expects to make Starmer fucking listen.

A week is a long time in football...