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Reply | When did transfer fees at this level get SO crazy?
at 13:45 14 Aug 2025
think it's a mixture of TV deal, rising transfer fees above the Championship meaning Champ clubs often have transfer revenue to re-invest and... clubs learning how FFP book-keeping works (and that one sale can finance several purchases in the immediate term). |
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Reply | Mark Ashton quietly getting away with it
at 16:44 13 Aug 2025
Mark Ashton is a bit too corpo speak for my taste, but if we're judging his stint at the club in the round, it's far more positive than negative, surely?
Summer 2021: Manage to buy the spine of a team - Hladky, Walton, Edmundson, Burgess, Morsy, Chaplin, Burns - good enough to finish 2nd in the Champ, despite being a League One side at the time.
Nov/Dec 2021: Sack failing inherited manager, bring in excellent new one
Summer 2022: Sign Davis, plus other players that proved useful in L1 and the Champ (Leigh, Harness, Ladapo)
Jan 2023: Sign 4 players all of whom turn out to be absolute ballers who power us to back to back promotions (Hirst, Luongo, Broadhead, Clarke)
Summer 2023: Add a few more useful acquisitions to round out PL squad (Hutchinson, Taylor, Tuanzebe)
Jan 2024: sign four players necessary to get us over the line (Sarmiento, Travis, Moore, Al-Hamadi).
There's a lot that could have gone wrong with all of that, don't think we have to do the whole "what he has done for me lately" thing. We didn't succeed at cracking the Premier League, but there's no real shame in that for me.
Not challenging for autos this season would definitely make me more critical, but it might be worth actually waiting for that to happen first?
[Post edited 13 Aug 16:49]
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Reply | Who would you buy?
at 15:35 13 Aug 2025
Think if we're writing off Ogbene, Philogene and Clarke already then the season's probably beyond salvation! |
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Reply | Why don't fringe squad players take their chance ?
at 15:33 13 Aug 2025
I was one of the travelling supporters (albeit in the Home End) and wouldn't say I felt particularly sorry for myself. Went wanting to see a new ground and a bit of football, but I'm not terribly invested in us progressing in the EFL Cup.
Think it's sort of futile to make judgements about individual players or collective performance in these games. We've been here before and there's no obvious link between playing well/badly against lower league opposition and having a successful season. These games just ask different (largely irrelevant) questions about our squad.
Is Ali Al-Hamadi good enough to score plenty of goals against Bromley standard opposition? Yes, obviously, that's how he got a move to Ipswich. Would that starting eleven win League Two? Yeah, obviously it would. Are either of those questions worth asking? No. |
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Reply | Still though, some on here claim we only need 1 more centre mid…
at 14:37 13 Aug 2025
Possibly just because we've left ourselves too much to do revamping the midfield in one Summer and it would have made things easier just to have some experienced cover, be that Morsy or Luongo.
Sometimes you need steady squad players who know your system inside out and provide a bit of continuity. [Post edited 13 Aug 14:39]
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Reply | Who would you buy?
at 14:21 13 Aug 2025
An increasingly expensive proposition these days. Certainly if you're getting someone identified as having some real promise and with some experience of EFL football on loan. |
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Reply | Sitters called me a Luddite
at 12:12 2 Aug 2025
Luddites are great, with AI making the internet virtually unusable and data centre power consumption threatening to cause electricity shortages in the non too distant future, we could do with a New Luddism.
NO GENERAL BUT LUDD MEANS THE POOR ANY GOOD |
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Reply | Sunderland spending this summer third highest in PL history…
at 11:36 31 Jul 2025
Sort of?
In 2024-25 Sunderland, Leeds and Burnley will all have gone as close as they could to their FFP limit (though Sunderland's limit will have been way less). None of them will have extra budget leeway because they left money unspent last season.
In 2025-26 Leeds and Burnley will have already committed a lot of their PL budget to wages and transfer fees agreed over the past 2/3 seasons. But like us last year Sunderland the money already committed budget on wages and transfer fees will be far far less. |
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Reply | Sarina Wiegman
at 11:27 31 Jul 2025
I don't think it's going to upset anyone to say that women's and men's football are different.
I think the contention here is that there's nothing in the skillset of a manager that requires you to be a man and that all other things being equal, you'd expect as many women as men to have the underlying ability to be good at it. [Post edited 31 Jul 11:29]
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Reply | Sarina Wiegman
at 22:21 30 Jul 2025
Yeah, 100% clubs will value that experience less. I suppose the general thing I'd say is that football club managerial appointments have a very low success rate anyway. The risk in appointing a woman is that they might not work out and you'll have to sack them, a thing that most football clubs seem to do every season anyway!
On the other hand the potential upside is that you've found a pool of talent that's largely untapped in men's football. |
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Reply | Sunderland spending this summer third highest in PL history…
at 22:01 30 Jul 2025
One thing about not being a returning parachute club - your wage bill and lack of previous big transfers is going to leave you with a huge amount of headroom for PSR. Downside of course is that you have to replace 90% of your starting eleven with it |
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Reply | Sarina Wiegman
at 21:58 30 Jul 2025
The median tenure of a manager in the top 4 divisions is currently 243 days, so fair to say quite a lot of appointments are "punts" that end in failure.
Think we're long past the idea that you need to have played the game to a very high standard to be a great manager, aren't we?
None of the skills that a good manager nowadays seems to require nowadays - good people management skills, a brain that understands tactics, an eye for identifying talent, a decent understanding of football data, good media skills - seem particularly gendered either. |
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