If it's big names you want, we need to get Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink out of retirement and put in a bid for Lazaros Christodoulopoulos at Olympiakos.
All on this form would be over the moon if the four of them clicked and performed beyond current expectation. Hopefully this time next year we will all be sh!tless with the £40+ bids we are getting on each of the aforementioned fantastic four, desperately hoping that the deadline passes without any bids being accepted.
The main plus of us not signing him would be me not getting this song stuck in my head all the time from whenever I see his name That's cos Muff are our rivals. He doesn't want to be accused of being a traitor now does he?!
Maybe we might still get Paco in the loan window which is still open ? Oh wait the loan window has been scrapped ,oh bugger!
An embarrassing day all round for our recruitment team. Not sure if this is true or not but it appears that the player agreed to join us on the 2 year loan with compulsory purchase at the end. However, we pulled out as Barca would not pay some of his 80k a week wages. And can you blame them. It is like me going into a Rolls-Royce showroom, signing the HP agreement and then expecting subsidised monthly repayments. The best story was Harry Arter on the M4 travelling to Cardiff for his medical. He gets a call saying Watford were making a last minute bid. Does he turn around! Nah...carried on driving and signed for the Bluebirds. As I said previously not getting another striker in could make us vulnerable if Deeney or Gray get injured or can't deliver.
Loads of clubs agree to pay half wages or whatever in loan deals tbf.. Even for some permanent transfers! I suspect Harry Arter wanted to be playing every week which he wouldn't do here.
I don't believe the wage issue,he probably expects a bigger Spanish club (Valencia?!) to come a calling. I suspect the reason After,Livermore etc didn't come is that they know they would be regulars and were stop gaps. Who knows? Let's get behind the team we have. If players do read this forum I'm not sure they'll be feeling the love at present!
Called it on page 4. You're welcome. Hopefully a little mix and match from Andre and Troy will soften the blow.
I can certainly see why the club voted against moving the deadline to today. It hasn’t really worked for quite a few teams. This should only have been brought in when i) The rest of Europe were doing the same and ii) Not having the inception in a World Cup year. Was don’t with good intentions but the terms weren’t correct to do it this summer IMO. I suspect had it been kept at its usual date, we may well have ended up with Alcacér and a CB of note. It’s just been a perfect storm of various things that have meant we haven’t quite done the business that we should have done. Some have been the clubs fault IMO and same have been out of their control.
Just wait until a club loses an important player to a European club abd can’t replace them. Then the complaints will REALLY start.
Hazard to Real Madrid. Or someone gets an serious injury and they cannot replace them. (Probably be us..)
Why did we bring it in in the first place and what’s the reasoning? Simply having it **** before he season starts?
So teams squads would be in place from the start of the season and not disrupted 4/5 games in by losing players etc. But I think it’s short-sighted now I’ve seen it in practice. The benefits are minimal.
Hey guess what a Barca insider journo is reporting we went to them with an offer for Alcacer on deadline day, and it was derisory enough not to be considered appropriate to send to the player. Good times. https://twitter.com/gerardromero/status/1027670903784726529
Well, the majority of PL clubs (not us) voted for the change. They will only have themselves to blame. As I said when the proposal was being discussed, it only made sense to me if all of Europe did the same.
ahhh yes because everything that someone posts on the internet is true. do you not think that some journo is just trying to get retweets? we havnt been able to get this deal over the line for whatever reason, but I suspect the club has a reasonably good relationship with Barcelona at the end of the day. i find it highly unlikely that they would do anything like this.
To be fair to Chumlax, the ‘journo’ who tweeted that also reports on the official Barcelona podcast, various Catalan sports radio shows and writes a guest column for Sport newspaper. I’d say he’s pretty well connected... As much rubbish is on twitter because it has no filter for fake ITK’s, it’s also the main source for genuine early transfer news too so not everything is garbage.
I don't accept the early deadline as an excuse for our poor window. The date was always known so the preparatory work should have been done. Other clubs who compete against us in the same echelon of the league have fared better. Wolves and Fulham are not glamour clubs so it's not pulling power that's failed us. It's simply that the market has moved on and our owners are stuck with the mindset of being a 2016 club owner. We can laugh all we want at the fees and wages being splashed about, but they are being splashed by everyone, so it's the rule and we are the exception. If the Pozzos are such clever player traders then how are they so slow to adapt to this market shift?
The 'Pozzo model' stuff drives me up the wall too. So does the implication from some on here that Gino is engaged in some kind of football sorcery that no one else can even begin to imagine or their head will explode. There's definitely as much incompetence at our club as anywhere. But come on...Wolves and Fulham have billionaire owners. Fulham in particular appear to have been seen coming from several miles off. Yeah, they've picked up some exciting looking players but at a huge premium. They can't possibly keep them all happy or all in the team and Joka has one hell of a job coming up. Wolves are also a special case this summer. It's unusual to see two clubs with that financial firepower coming up at once and it has clearly warped the market. It would be very dangerous for us to go chasing off after it.
I agree. We can't match their expenditure, for us it would be suicide. But surely some strengthening could have been done ? c£15m for Dawson ? c£20m for a striker ? Given what we'd brought in from the sale of Richie. We have taken a big risk over our future in this league and, given the size of the clubs in the championship now, there would be guarantees of bouncing back. That would make a bigger dent in club finances than splashing c£35m on a couple of players now would have done.
Very patronising of you to assume I hadn't assessed the source of the tweet at all. Had you when you made the comment? There's no reason to suspect he's 'just trying to get retweets', in part because he doesn't need to. Obviously, some journalists are more reputable than others, and in this context, Romero is very reputable. Desperately screeching 'HE HAS TO BE MAKING IT UP IT CAN'T BE ANYTHING ELSE HE'S JUST LOOKING FOR ATTENTION' sounds a little more like burying your head in the sand, to be honest. What information do you have to counter his reporting?
In fairness, his reporting didn't say it was 'derisory'. It said it was 'not viable', which could easily be for many reasons beyond the amount offered.
Italy's window closes next week, a day before their season starts so we weren't the only country to change it; however most other leagues have left it until 31st August.
Fairplay, I'll hold my hands up that he did indeed not use the term derisory; that was editorialising from me based on accounts of earlier approaches such as those at West Brom. Whatever the offer, though, something was wrong enough with it (according to Romero) to mean it wasn't considered appropriate enough to even present to the player, which surely can't be considered intelligent dealing.
.....particularly at the very last minute. The whole approach thios window seems to have been very amateurish.
Not sure that's the right word, as we did a lot of solid business very early on. If you read articles and the insider stuff from years gone by about transfer windows and how deals are really done, it's clear negotiations around football transfers never really work in a logical progression. Whole chains of transfers get held up because some big fish at the top of the pile is dithering over image rights or the lighting on their social media reveal video. Or a player says they're interested one minute, then goes off flirting with another club, only to then come back to the table right at the end. And we'd been after a midfielder on loan for a couple of days according to Adam Leventhal, so probably a bit longer in reality. Lots of clubs don't free up fringe players for loan moves until they're absolutely satisfied their own dealings are done. You're rarely going to canter in in July and do those sorts of deals. By it's nature it's going to be last minute. I've no idea if we only went in for Alpaca at the last minute. There's been so much noise around it for a couple of weeks now I suspect that's not the whole story. And don't forget Barcelona did some very nice business with Everton yesterday in shifting Mina and Gomes. That will have brought in loads of cash, thereby settling their FFP concerns, and consequently weakened our negotiating position. It's very possible a deal Barcelona were suggesting they were broadly content with a week ago suddenly became a non-starter by lunchtime yesterday.
We made most of our seven signings within a week or so of the window opening. None of them at inflated prices, and one of which could be described as batting above our weight. I think what we have seen is that Gino did understand the need to act quickly, and evidently did. I think that we have also seen that where he is having trouble, though not exclusively, is in signing the better players at prices we can afford. Chalobah, Deulefeo and Hughes for under £20 million seems like good business to me, even though the injuries indicate the risks involved. The fees are not being paid by everyone. I look forward to your one or two word answer, and warn you that whatever you say will be taken into account when considering what gloves I will use next time you feel my foetid breath on your neck.
Does anyone honestly believe that the Pozzos are so naive and such greenhorns that they got taken by surprise at the transfer window closing? These people deal in tens of millions of pounds. They've done it for decades. I think it's a rather fanciful accusation meself.
Should we start with the on off nature of the whole bloody transfer? According to various reliable sources this transfer was on and off more times than a lightbulb. I don’t believe a word of it, reputable journalists my ****. These so called reputable journalists also had us down for about 15 other players over the last two days. **** the lot of em!
