That's a very good explanation of transfer financing but he hasn't spotted that the stadium loan covenants is both more restrictive than PSR and has a bigger penalty for breach. I think the losses over each of the last few years tell us pretty exactly what that limit is. The PSR limit is about £50m per season higher.
Almost every other club does the same on transfers. Do the same list for Man Utd and Chelsea or for Liverpool or Arsenal starting 5 year's earlier and you will get the same outcome.
Yes, his fundamental mistake is that he basis his calculations solely on PSR restrictions, not the covenants which are independent of those. But it is a superb analysis.
No other club of any stature buys as many players at the death of transfer windows. None. We're obsessed by doing it. When I was young (angry) and poor, I used to wait until the end of the day's trading at Surrey Street Market to buy 'bargain' food when the traders were getting rid of it...because I had to. Despite being in theTop 10 richest clubs in the world, we're doing it again this window, just as we did it in the last...looking for cheap deals...not playersvthat the coach/club needs. it's a ****ing nonsense and needs to stop.
Would you like me to list the number of players Liverpool or Arsenal have bought in the last days of the January transfer window to underline how wide of the mark your argument is?
Despite being in the top 10 richest clubs we have a covenant limiting our spending which according to my calculations means we can basically afford to spend nothing in this window. That's the explanation of what we are doing, not incompetence.
Those suffering from Levy Derangement Syndrome found the quickest way to lose the argument: replying to social media posts about the club commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in the most boneheaded manner
Part of the reason I am an outlier on many discussions is that I don't expect the club to have an edge in a number of areas where others seem to take it for granted that we will. The principle ones that come up are transfer performance, manager selection and distribution of goals scored. I expect us to be exactly average at all of them because I can't see any way of generating a long term edge.
I think a better comparison is Bournemouth, who, like us, have been hit by injuries but have brought in 5 players already, IIRC.
I could be wrong, I just thought I’d read that somewhere. But still, even if it’s 2 already, they’ve addressed the issues long before the end of the window, knowing the injury problems they had.
I think what makes it damning on our account, regardless of work done or not by other clubs is that Postecoglou, whether you like him or not, has been pretty much as close to begging for new signings as you could get since before the window opened. Yet with less than a week to go he’s not gotten anything, well anything significant anyway. By waiting this long too, our results have further suffered and any selling club will have seen our desperation grow, likely making any targets even tougher to get. A lot of clubs raise the price when Man Utd go in for them, I think we’re gonna have a similar effect for the remainder of this window now, to the point I’m genuinely now of the belief we won’t bring anyone in.
But the simple fact is that EVERYONE thought spending £60m on Richarlison was insane. Many of us thought buying Sessengon for £35m was mad. We clearly did not show due diligence when spending the money on Ndombele when you consider that he was thought to have a real problem with his commitments to being a professional footballer. I could go on. None of this is anything to do with how much money we have to spend. It is about the way we have wasted so much of it in the past 5 or 6 years
Ask any fan about their club's signings and you will get a similar list. Wasting money seems to be an unavoidable feature of transfer business. There are also some examples where everyone on here was demanding we sign someone who we decided to overlook and the guy was hardly heard of again.
Nail on head. We probably had a higher transfer success rate in say the last 10 years at WHL than we have done in the 5/6 years at THS. It felt like we had more logic in signings back at WHL too, even with ones that may have ended up flopping. So many of the signings at THS have had fans scratching heads before a ball was kicked.
They've bought an 18 and a 19 year old for about £8m in total. That would have caused a riot on here if we had done it.
we bought an inexperienced youngster from the Czech Republic league, and we were all bloody delighted, even if it was argued that it wasn’t a priority position. We were also excited by the arrivals of Bergvall and Gray in the past. Ages doesn’t matter, it’s the quality we need, and the depth.
I don’t think age necessarily matters but price definitely does. Using the current flavours of the month forest and Bournemouth, Huijsen and Zabarnyi cost about £35 mill in total and Murillo and milenkovic cost about £25 in total. If we’re going into a season with a starting centre back pairing on those prices then we’re already on the back foot as the social media meltdown would have been off the chart with the ‘levy being tight’, ‘shopping at the bargain basement’ again. We don’t necessarily need to spend more, we need to spend better but that won’t satisfy a lot of the baying levy out groups.
It’s like a social experiment in it. Probably find out there’s some documentary being made on this all that’ll come out in about 3-4 years.
