On the one hand Brighton fans appreciated Fatboy Slim sponsoring the team's shirts when they were in the doldrums On the other hand they didn't like the obvious response to the team taking to the pitch with SKINT written on their shirts...
Not sure Bayern will learn much from this. Hope the home keeper doesn't do his back in picking the ball up.
The Ibrahimovic in their goalscorers is not related to Zlatan. His parents are both Kosovo Albanian and he's German.
please log in to view this image Whilst I have no desire to defend Chelsea, but this bloke is a cock.
Just seen Fulham are set to break their transfer record for Emile Smith-Rowe. The lad had one good season. How the hell are they consistently able to sell cross for north of £30m whereas we struggle to give players away?
'Consistently'? The only players we've sold for over £30m+ have been Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (2017 to Liverpool), Alex Iwobi (2019 to Everton) and now ESR to Fulham. The only other potential one is Balogun to Monaco (2023), whom we sold for a base fee of £25m that could rise to £33m with add-ons. In any other case, we don't get these sorts of fees too frequently for our players. We're renowned for being poor at selling. There's countless players I can reel off where we've lost them on a free, loaned them out repeatedly or have accepted derisory fees because we had no other option. Also, there has to be sufficient demand. Things such as age, potential and player profile need to be factored in. I know ESR's only had one and a half good seasons for us, but he's a great player when he's fully fit. He loves to play on the half-turn and accelerate with the ball, driving at defenders. He has good technical security and combination play. Dangerous goal threat. Very useful player. If he can get past his injury issues, I honestly don't think he'll be at Fulham for long. Aston Villa, West Ham, Crystal Palace and a couple of teams in Germany have held interest in him over the past couple years. He's always been pretty highly regarded.
If you think you're bad at selling, you should take a look at our performance in that market. In the past 7 years, we've sold a grand total of three players for more than £25m. Two were Kane and Walker. The other was Bergwijn. If you're bad, we have plumbed new depths of awful.
As I said. Kane and Walker account entirely for that. Not much to be celebrated if it meant severely weakening the team and in Walker's case, not recovering from it for at least 7 years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if City aside, the rest of the Big Six have all got similar sales records with players. Most of these clubs are not in the business of selling good players. City have got their niche at present in that due to their success, players that want out generally do so because they want a new challenge after having won multiple trophies and so leave being very high in demand. Whilst there might have been one or two I felt we could’ve gotten a little more for, Hojbjerg being a recent one, my bigger concern is simply just getting rid of unwanted players, it’s felt like we couldn’t even give some away at times, I reckon that also applies to most of those clubs too though.
The general rule is that the more expensive players you buy, the more likely you are to make profitable sales. Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool seem to do better than Man Utd and Arsenal though Liverpool is heavily influenced by a small number of big sales, especially Coutinho.
And if you take out their two biggest sales we still beat them on average. I agree it isn't a good measure but it is a bit odd that Arsenal have not had a single player for many years that the likes of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich or Man City wanted to buy.
I’d say that rule only applies if the expensive players bring you success. Which is what it’s done with City. I’m not sure Liverpool have sold too many for huge fees outside of Coutinho. Chelsea have sold very well from their academy more so than some of their expensive signings.
Suarez and Sterling went for big fees too. By comparison, Arsenal's record sale seems to be Oxlade-Chamberlain. Agree about Chelsea...but I don't understand why they get such good prices....I don't really recall any of their sold academy players being a major success.
All I'm saying is we shouldn't be seen as the benchmark or as a good example of getting good fees consistently for players because our fans routinely moan about our (in)ability to sell. Brighton and Chelsea seem to be the best at selling players, followed by Liverpool and probably Man City after that.
They both go back around 10 years ago though so not sure if we’re including that in CK’s 7 year period, Sterling only cost them a couple of million in tribunal fees too so definitely wasn’t an expensive signing. A year before they sold Suarez we sold Bale.
Why is it odd? We went 6 years without Champions League football, the quality of our squad reduced massively and it's only in the last two years where we've become a top, competitive side across Europe again. You're less likely to have the likes of Bayern or City sniffing around your talent when you're languishing in 8th - unless there's a clear superstar in your side. Which we didn't have. The only player who fit that criteria was Aubameyang, who was sought after by Barcelona, and even then, we had to offer him astronomical wages to keep him at the club in 2020. But since we have become a good team again, we've had some big clubs express interest in some of our players or who have tried to snatch some of our targets. And, to be honest, depending on whether we win any major trophies or not in the next 12-24 months, I anticipate some of these players may look to move away to a Madrid, Munich or PSG in the future.
Not that odd. Until 2 years ago they were a laughingstock. Go back to the early-mid Wenger era and they were a supply line for bigger clubs. Anelka, Overmars, Henry, Toure, Nasri, RVP and Fabregas all left them for bigger clubs or projects.
