‘doing Business Properly…’

…again.

 

Hopefully just Twitter rumour but always seems to be us.

 

Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

 

E-I-E-I-E-I-O back off to Fifa Player Status Committee panel we go

 

Can't really blame them for not wanting to cough up for calamity Ken to be fair.

 

I imagine the admin person there is on first name and Christmas card terms with their Watford counterpart.

 

Is that fraud? If true it seems as though we haven't paid the bill. Not good but not fraud either. As a goodwill gesture can we give him back to them

 

Would imagine the actual detail is more of a tangled web than suggested in this one initial tweet, and the process of them not managing to pay for a player they bought about four years ago would be where the fraud comes in. I see no reason why your suggested response should not be implemented, though.

 

Lol

 

If I had to guess it would be some sort of artificial inflation of a fee received for accounting/tax purposes. Ostersunds would appear to be serial offenders but we shouldn’t be playing along.

Who was it who came up with the “doing business properly” thing? FTRE?

In isolation, turning a blind eye to Bayat’s corruption, or trying to weasel out of the Zuniga payment, or being a counter party in this Ostersunds stuff etc could be misfortune or error or coincidence, but in combination the trend is hard to ignore. (Others might think of Pape Gueye but it doesn’t seem like we actually did much wrong with that one). Pretty clear that the club seems to intentionally skate close to/past the edge. Some will have issues with this for ethical reasons and some will only be bothered to the degree that it exposes us to penalties down the road but either way, not great. Definitely coming round to your view more on this @Burnsy

That said, these things smell worse when the club is performing badly on the pitch too. Much harder to swallow/justify as price worth paying. A price worth paying for what? Relegation from the PL? Uninspiring football?

 

Indeed - it was the FTRE Twitter account in an amusingly ill-advised interjection to a tweet by none other than Mr Ucko himself, on one of this season's hot button topics:

 

Lol.

Love it.


It's never boring is it?

 

Legendary comedy. Up there with Del Boy falling through a bar, Ethel The Frog and Four Candles.

 

Wow the context makes it even worse. Is selling Hughes, our best midfielder, to a direct rival l for under £10m indicative of proper business. It’s perhaps better than losing him on a free (though that isn’t clear) but doing business properly would be not lowballing him.

 

And on top of that, we've now asked PL permission to add Dan Gosling, who was left out the squad January 1st, back into the squad March 1st.

 

The thing is, and it’s rehashing an old argument, but the contract running out thing lacks consistency. Holebas left after his contract, Gray will, Foster will. That to me made it feel like it was personal. Maybe Hughes was a bad egg and had to go.

However, and this is important, the usuals defence to the sale was that he HAD to go as it was the final year and that he wasn’t good enough. Utter nonsense. In a worst case scenario, he stays and helps us stay up and he leaves with our thanks for all the millions we’ll still have.

Best case, cooler heads prevail, he helps us stay up and signs a new deal and we all live happily ever after.

 

Quality player. Always gives his all. Point to prove. Like having two Cleverleys.

 

The sycophancy of some of our fans is great.

 

I think to be fair Foster and Holebas (and in a different way Gray) are players of a different profile so their value depreciates in a different way. Had we sold Foster or Holebas with a year left we wouldn’t have been able to get even half as much as we got for Hughes so allowing the contract to run down leaves less money on the table.

Still should have kept him. And better yet offer him the appropriate raise.

 

Or indeed give him an extension when he had 3 years left when we mindlessly decided to extend Cathcart’s deal when he had similar time left.

 

No he would have downed tools. Or poisoned the well.

Instead we sign Kucka and Tufan, for whatever loan fees and then they are worthless anyway.

 

Shouldnt they be paying the Pozzos for taking Sema off their hands?

 

Unless, of course, we did & Hughes/his agent said 'no thanks, we'll leave it a couple of years to see what's best at the time.' And what they decided was best at the time was not to extend his contract at all.

I can't quite get past the feeling that something else was at play within the club to lead us to effectively jettison Hughes & Chalobah for next-to-nothing at the same time.

 

Don’t really get how Chalobah is mentioned in the same breath here. He’s not good enough from the PL and played maybe 6 good games for us last season. I know Fulham have a good squad but he hasn’t played much there this season either. I for one don’t rue his departure in the way I do Hughes’ (though I do rue his injury/career trajectory given how excited I was when he joined/entered the side initially).

 

Yeah I'd actually forgotten all about Chalobah. Championship is definitely his level and probably mid-table at best. He looked terrible at times last season but then his game suddenly improved once he was alongside Hughes and the excellent Zinckernagel.

 

Just give them £300k plus Sema back.

Problem solved.

 

I was not equating Chalobah with Hughes ability-wise, I was simply pointing out it seemed strange we were extremely willing simultaneously to offload them for way below what we could have possibly got. All because Kucka, Gosling, Cleverley are 'the business'? I think Chalobah could have been as effective as any of those 3, whilst I think it's obvious Hughes would have been more so.

Maybe something else was going on behind the scenes.

 

I agree that the reported structure of the Chalobah deal seemed pretty odd, yes.

 

This squad though is desperately short of leaders. Chalobah showed himself to be a good one.

He’s a far better player than Gosling and Cleverley. Certainly wouldn't have offered less than Tufan or Kucka. And there’s nothing in Kayembe’s career to say he’s better either…

Then you remember Chalobah is also homegrown and was literally given away.

Braindead business even if it is deemed he is only Championship class.

 

I agree that Chalobah was hugely frustrating for large parts of last season, generally seems to be quite a disappointing character in the end (from attending Gray's lockdown party and not even bothering to apologise for it, to that hilarious/childish/silly message to 'keyboard warriors' on promotion, to now jumping firmly on the NFT-shilling bandwagon), and has never proven himself Premier League quality.

All that being said, he was also integral to the end-of-season run that saw us overhaul the rest to gain automatic promotion, has incredible 'pedigree', and has shown at least glimpses of top-level quality. As Burnsy has said, there's no way it would have been worse to have him in the dressing room and, at times, indeed, on the pitch this season than Tufan (a saga I already find myself having to remind that very same self that it actually happened), Kucka, or Cleverley. The mere fact that his legs haven't gone puts him above two of those, and if he can still control a football he's two leagues above Clevs right there.

Whatever happened in the summer and why, it makes us look stupid in pretty much every way, because it was a stupid thing to do/allow/have happen to us/sleepwalk into.

 

I know you rate Chalobah. Personally, setting aside the sentiment, I think it’s clear he isn’t up to it and his time at Fulham has only confirmed that. I don’t think he’s any better than Kucka or Cleverley but that’s all opinion.

I have no issues with his departure, aside from the fact that it appears to be for free or for a nominal amount which is genuinely baffling. The fact that his replacements are also crap seems to me to be a different grievance but I suppose it is all indicative of a lack of joined up thinking from the club.

I don’t think we’d have more points if Chalobah was in the squad over Kucka or Tufan. I’d be interested to know if you and @Chumlax do (although of course this is a speculative question) but that’s a key question for me.

 

I think there were times under Ranieri where the back 4, although utterly hopeless, got zero protection from anyone in front of them. I think Chalobah would have offered that a little so it’s likely in my opinion we would potentially have a few more points. It’s a role he played well in the second half of last season.

 

I think that was a function of Ranieri’s tactics not personnel and that Kucka, for his many flaws, is a far better ballwinner than Chalobah.

Chalobah was also injured for much of that period.