I was about to say “there was a reason Chelsea signed him”. But that doesn’t always mean that much as they pinched one of our goalkeepers who will never play a game. I’m not sure he’ll ever even play at championship level
Oh? You mean basically his camp telling other European clubs not to bother? If that’s the case then he’s not going to be back anytime soon unless he has an insane season and one of the big Spanish teams want him. But we’d benefit from a sell on and would never have got that kind of season out of him anyway
It’s not a great deal but if this going through allows us to go ahead on a different deal we’re waiting on, and it was this or nothing then you can understand it even if you don’t like it
The problem is Martin’s "style" of football will only work in the Prem with top top players. City can do it because they can spend £80 million on one player. Our bid to emulate City won't work because we're shopping in ****ing Primark. It's all very well playing a 1000 passes if you've not got a single player who can split a PL defence. Now if SR can't or won't back Martin with several 30-40 million pound players then they're not backing him. Irrelevant selling Charly because £15 million quid is going to get us a decent players left sock. People don't want to admit it because of their loyalty to RM (which is commendable) but keeping Charly would have a better chance of keeping us in the Prem than Martin will. We have 0 creative midfielders now. Mega
If we are looking at cheap options up front. Elijah Adebayo 26 yrs old, 6ft 4" scored 10 Premier league goals in 27 games. On transfermarkt, they have him valued at €13M. I would rather we go for someone like him, who has played in the Premier League, than some unknown Brazilian, who may not even settle in the uk.
I completely agree about Martin, the club clearly don’t though so that’s why they are selling Alcaraz regardless of trying to hold out for whatever the fans seem to think he’s worth. SRs biggest mistake in the relegation season was hiring managers who played such opposite football. Meant we had a squad with a load of mis matched players to the manager at that time. I think they have learnt from that mistake and are trying to build a Martin style squad. The fact that I don’t think that style has a chance in hell of surviving is my opinion, the club clearly think differently. So you can see the logic behind what they are doing, even if you don’t agree with it
To those people telling us that Charly isn't as good as we think he is I have to say you are guilty of that sin in believing Russell Martin is better than he actually is.
100% can see what they're trying to do. The problem is even Stevie ****ing Wonder can see it wont work! It's beyond frustrating to see them rectifying previous mistakes by making a huge new one. You don't pass your way to victory as a newly promoted club, you have to dig in and win dirty. Every club is going to be looking at the fixture list and licking their lips, we're going to be the easiest game they get all season because RM and the club is totally all in, balls deep into this nonsense
He stood out to me when I was looking through potential options (hint: there weren’t many that I could find based on pure numbers in known league - hence obscure options based on scouting). Thing about transfermarkt values is you tend to have to at least double them if the selling club doesn’t want to sell. Especially if there are multiple years left on the contract and it’s between English clubs. So you are likely to be looking at at least £20m and not in a loan with option / obligation format either
Funny you say this just after what I posted. You can actually do what Poch taught us and survive. But that was all about bursting at pace. Something we really don’t do. Pace is all important in the PL, which is why we’re a bit screwed, particularly in midfield.
The comment was about RM’s style and not Poch’s ? Not saying I agree with it. Especially not the suggestion that we have a better chance of surviving with sacking Martin (presumably now) and keeping Alcaraz than selling Alcaraz and keeping Martin. The new Martin contract suggests he’d have to be extremely bad to get sacked. This part is a mistake in my opinion but it is done now
I think the other issue which anyone can see is we just didnt have many PL quality players when we got promoted, and we weren’t going to rectify that in one window. My suspicion is that they have decided to stick with Martin no matter what this year, thinking that if we do go down he has shown he can get us back up. When/if we come back we hopefully will have a better squad than this time round and can give survival a better go, also the first relegation season will be off the books from a PSR perspective so we could be a bit freer financially. A lot of guesswork from me, but I do get the feeling that it would take a lot for Martin to get fired this year. Like Derby bad type season
I realise that. I’m saying that you can survive as a passing team in the PL when you’ve just been promoted. As we did (and Brighton did).
I wonder how our accounts will look if we do get relegated. How many players we’d have to sell? There might not be many who could fetch big fees anyway From a wages perspective the loans disappear and the drops are factors. We potentially might not be forced to sell anyone and only sell people who really want to go and we can get a good offer for (otherwise a loan) But I really don’t know how the financial rules work across divisions
Yeah football finances are a mystery to me. Leeds fans are all up in arms about their transfer window this year having sold so many players and not brought much in. They think they are the only club who are following the rules. They used us as an example of a team who blatantly broke all the financial rules in a bid to get promoted and it worked and now we won’t get any punishment for it. Also said Leicester did the same and Forest/Everton when they were in the PL Not sure why they think we broke the rules, I think we were probably a lot more conpliant with the rules last year than they were given the amount of sales we made. Or maybe they are just thick Leeds fans who are looking for a reason why a pub team like Saints beat them
Leeds fans are thick. I think they really thought they’d not have to sell anyone other than Summerville and he would go for 40m They hedged last year on getting promoted. They sold no one. Both us and Leicester did. I think we sold more. They loaned everyone out to clear the wage bill but got no fees. It always looked insane to offer those deals but they were so confident of going straight back up that they assumed there would be no problem. They might well have still had a problem if they had gone up. Just a smaller one
Bizarrely MLT called it last year before the season started at that function I went to. I gave a quick precis the day after on here. (He) Spoke about last season. Really wasn't impressed, said it looked like the players downed tools and didn't care (hard agree here) Spoke that modern football is in danger of becoming really boring because everyone plays to a system and individuality is unwelcome. Says the days of high scoring games will be all but over at PL level. Finds it bizarre that Stu Armstrong has been sidelined as believes he's our most dynamic player. Sadly for Southampton FC we have a manager where individuality is a cardinal sin. To be in this RM team you must do what you're told, how you're told to do it. A player like Charly never stood a chance. If prime MLT was at Saints now, not a ****ing chance would RM pick him. As soon as he'd score a worldy Russ would bench him for missing an obvious sideways pass. We'd sell him for £8 million quid and a loan defender for Goztepe the very next window.
That shouldn't make me laugh, but it did "£8 million quid and a loan defender for Goztepe" - chapeau my man.
