Gemmill

https://archive.ph/HjnAO New interview.

Only if we're happy to accept points deductions. That's the short term fix discussion though.

DCL for free, and on sensible wages that recognise his injury record and status as second string, would be fine as a backup. If it's true he's demanding £150k a week, he's an idiot. He's not a lad that's refused to extend contracts and gone on a free as some sort of hot property. He's free cos even Everton didn't want him. That's not the sort of free transfer where you name your price on wages.

There's been no lack of effort to strengthen this summer though. You (and DK) said that the PSR rules will stop us getting there in the long run, and that's what I was contradicting. If there is will from the ownership, and if they install the correct people at the club, we can absolutely bridge the gap given time. We do need to see some of the above from the ownership though, I agree. It'll be them, rather than the rules, to blame if we can't even get there in the long run.

This isn't true. We can match their revenues in the long term if the will is there from the owners. But yeah there's gonna be a lot to be said for trying to accept our situation and enjoy the journey, because otherwise we're gonna he spending the next 10 years moaning about how unfair it is.

I mean there's literally nothing that can stop us doing it over an extended period of time. The rules curtail teams from making massive progression in a short period of time, but not over the longer term.

That's not a PSR issue though, it's a relative success problem. They've won everything in the last 30 years, we've won one thing in the last 55. It's all very well us going "yeah but no CL and they finished in the bottom half last season", but we were getting relegated on the semi-reg not that long ago. It's gonna take AGES to flip that script.

There's space for everyone on here man. No one needs to leave unless they really want to. We just need the season to start and the frustration of this window to fuck off.

We can get there but it's gonna take a long time and it's gonna require patience. Ideally we continue to pick up the odd Carabao or FA Cup along the way. They can't stop us getting there, but they can stop us getting there quickly. But the problem of them beating us to our targets will likely still happen even when we can match them for wages. Until we can prove that we can regularly beat them to league titles etc. Which at the minute feels daft to even talk about, but 5 or 10 years from now, if somebody starts running the club properly, it's doable.

That's definitely the best approach to minimise our chance of signing the player.

I think the reality is that we will always be second choice when one of these "legacy clubs", as Simon Jordan calls them, comes in. You're right that it flushes them out, but we'll just be made to wait with a bid accepted while the player hopes and prays Man United can match our bid. I don't know why we would do that (as much as I would like this to be over by us pricing them out of the race). There's no great urgency to bid now, cos we've got Isak.

If we think Man United need to sell before they can buy, but that the player would prefer to go to Man United, then that's why we aren't making a bid. Cos he's not gonna come here until they rule themselves out, and we risk looking like cunts again if we show our hand now. So I think we're waiting to see how that plays out. Cos the same goes for Man United. If they've got the money now and the player has said he wants to go there, why haven't they put a bid in. I suspect it's because they haven't got the money now. If they can't get the money, then at some point they'll have to walk away. At which point we can put a bid in with some certainty of getting the player.

Well supposedly we don't have a problem with that.

That Ben Jacobs lad reckons that Man United have been quoted £64m by Leipzig for Sesko, which is at the limit of what they can afford, and if we came in with £70m it puts them in a tough spot, and potentially knocks them out of the race. And how do I know this? Because I'm working at the coalface of transfer window YouTube for ALL OF YOU, and this is a conversation that Mark fucking Goldbridge is reporting that he had with Ben Jacobs.

Aye. Hojlund by all accounts is now just considered a makeweight in other deals. It's instant success or you're fucked there, but I doubt the penny will ever drop cos the next lads will always just think "well I'll be the one that's an instant success".

The patter was that Mbeumo was demanding £250k, but who knows.

It's almost impossible to be sure where to apportion blame for this window. Mitchell undoubtedly fucked us when he announced he was leaving a month before it opened, and we fucked ourselves by allowing him to leave without working his notice*. But the people remaining haven't exactly covered themselves in glory. And one of them (Nickson?) was said to be auditioning for the big job by some, so that's audition failed. *the only way that decision made sense is if he was still in a probationary period and so had a reduced notice. Someone at his level should be on 6 months+ notice ordinarily though, so if we've let him go early, we're fucking idiots.

And Man United are right, but it still doesn't make it a good decision. It was impossible for us, but it would have been a similarly bad decision had we been willing/able to meet that demand to sign Mbeumo. He's a non-elite player who now commands an elite wage for the next 3 to 5 years or whatever the contract was for. Similarly, Ekitike.... Who knows if he'll be able to do it in the PL, but Liverpool are gonna pay him 250k to 300k a week to find out. There doesn't seem to be a lot of thought given to whether they SHOULD give these lads insane pay rises. And I know that those are the rules of the game we're playing and we'll be doing it eventually (hopefully), but it's crackers.

Aye, that's a club that needed a total reset on its bloated, overpaid squad situation. Instead, it's ploughed forward with more of the same. Ratcliffe is cutting the £20k per year jobs that help run the club and replacing them with £250k per year jobs for lads that don't merit that level of pay. It's also absolutely criminal that they are allowed to operate uninhibited by PSR despite having eye-watering levels of debt. Just another example of PSR being structured so as not to interfere with the PL establishment.

A bit more about him than Xhaka...

Bryan Mbeumo and Cunha are absolutely not worth £250k per week btw. Man United have had their pants pulled down there. Those lads probably nigh on trebled their wage with that move.

Brailsford sorting Man United out with some of those sweet, sweet marginal gains.

The stuff about the dereliction of duty is right, but it's a shame it was all built on the notion that buying Ramsdale was an act of futility *because omg we've already got so many keepers* when the reality is that we've got two usable keepers, and one of them is rapidly approaching the end of that utility, as he'll turn 37 during the season. I really hope we're gonna get an announcement on CEO and DOF very soon, and that the pair will prove to be a) competent, and b) will actually stay in the job long enough for us to witness the fruits of their labour.

@Dr Gloomhow you getting on in Japan? Everything alright?

Don't be the opposite of a fanny magnet, Wykiki! It'll be a lesson to us all in the patience we're gonna need to see this club get ANYWHERE NEAR challenging for the league, given these fresh headwinds.