Transfer Rumours Summer 2025 Transfer Thread…

OK, against my better judgement, here goes in good faith! Keep it civil.
It is still going round in circles as I've said these things (too) many times.
I wasn't going to reply, but YOU asked ....
Things I don't agree with....

-> I feel like I've addressed this multiple times and you keep referring back to it. So I'll say this all again because basing a gotcha on a false premise is just ****.

Gotcha? I've never posted anything as a 'gotcha'.

-> 1. Owner lost all interest - Acun himself admitted he hadn't put 100% into City last season due to his responsibilities at Fenerbahce. Those are his words. Tan left, not because of some dodgy ****, but for the same reason Murat Ulker withdrew his funding pretty sharpish - they didn't think Acun was taking it seriously and didn't see a mutual way forward. Acun wanted big signings and automatic promotion with a "sod the cost" attitude, while Tan understood it would be a process and wanted the club to be frugal enough to remain sustainable (which once Ulker had gone, suddenly became very difficult with the wages we had that season we finished just outside the playoffs).

Not having 100% focus, which I've never denied, is totally different from the BS claims of "owner has lost interest (or 'all interest' as some actually said) in us" (and wants out etc etc). The BS later is what I called out.
Re. Tan and Ulker. Pure speculation. We still don't know why Tan left nor why Ulker withdrew his sponsorship.

-> 2. The club is heavily in debt. Yes, the money is owed to Acun Medya (not Acun himself, that's important for reasons I'll state in a moment) but it's still tens of millions our club owes to somebody else. Even if he was to sell (which we'll come to), he isn't getting £60-80m for the club because we don't have assets worth that much - even if you use Transfermarkt's squad valuation (which I'm loathe to do because it doesn't reflect a player's value at all), our players apparently only come to a total value of just over £51m. We don't own our ground, our training facilities are crap and we don't have any home grown youth prospects like KLP, Greaves or Bowen coming through that are going to suddenly skyrocket in value. We still owe money on several transfers which, hopefully, we're paying on time after the fiasco this Summer. 22 players left the club this Summer. That's ****ing mental. Alright some were fringe players like Amrabat and Burns, there's the whole thing with Zambrano and Puerta, but seriously, our turnover of playing staff is appallingly high. We have a monkey on our backs about not giving players enough time, but our owner is worse for it - off the top of my head, we bought Mehlem (£2m), Omur (£4m), Kamara (£4m), Sinik (£4m), Burstow (£2m), Racciopi (£2m), Giles (£4m) and Woods (£2m) and all of them ended up going out on loan instead of playing first team football for us. That's £26m we spent on giving players to other clubs for free across the last three seasons. It's not just insane, it's borderline criminal how much money we've pissed away on indecisiveness and short-termism. And don't forget, as well as those transfer fees, we also heavily subsidised their wages while they were at their clubs. With the exception of Giles, who is now back in the first team, what the hell are we playing at?!

I've never disputed that the club isn't "heavily in debt".
I've never disputed the player turn over has been too high nor that we've pissed away too much money.
I don't know why the response went into all this detail, it had nothing whatsover to do with my posts.

-> 2a. Had we gone down, yes, we almost certainly would have gone into administration. The players have relegation clauses in their contracts, sure, but even at a hypothetical 20% we would still have a chunk of players on more than £20k a week in League One, lower attendances and much lower income from things like TV and sponsorship. Acun Medya makes a decent amount of money, but it still needs to operate as a business, it's not as though every penny it makes goes to the running of our football club. They also have shareholders and the like to pay who aren't linked to our club and I imagine they see City as a drain on their potential income. I don't know what it costs to host shows like Survivor and whatever Turkiye's equivalent of The Voice is, but it can't be cheap. If push came to shove, do you think Acun would tank the company, media empire and reputation that he built up for half his adult life for a football club in East Yorkshire? No, me neither. Us going into administration would mean he would have to take a whack, but he'd be guaranteed money back as a debtor. We have this image of Acun being a smiling, happy, uncle like figure that would never shaft anybody, but nobody worth what he is gets to that point without being ruthless and savvy in business (which makes what happened all the more annoying, presumably he has people in his company that do his finances for him).

An opinion (that we'd have gone into administration).
We didn't go down. We haven't gone into administration.
Again, I don't know why the response went into all this detail.

-> 3. Fire sale - so, I don't really get what you mean by this. A lot of the players from last season are still here. If you're claiming that we're not selling off assets with value, then what do you call selling Macca, Jones, Alzate and Mehlem? Yeah ok, we've got Hughes for now, with Egan as his first choice partner. But two of our four first team centre halves are free transfers and Egan arrived for what I was told was somewhere around the £200k mark. We need the money to pay the wages of the players we have here now. As much as I dislike the EFL as an institution, they wouldn't be involved if everything was rosy and above board. They're here because we got in the ****, tried to get away with it and then gave a really crap excuse. The concern about our finances that they have is actually a separate issue from the transfer malarkey, they weren't aware of cash flow problems or financial difficulties until Villa went to the EFL and complained. So it's not so much a fire sale as a common sense sale. We need players in order to play football, obviously, but we also don't have the luxury of turning down bids for players that match our valuation.

There is no fire sale as some were claiming. Simple as.
If there was we'd have seen players with real value being sold off (and at discounted prices) during past weeks.
And we clearly do have the luxury of turning down more than decent bids.
We've let Macca go, he's been chased by Blackburn for a season or more and probably wanted a starting place rather than a squad place filling in wherever). We've let steady eddy Jones go. Writing was on the wall for him when Egan came in. I get differences of opinion, but no great loss imo.
Is letting Alzate and Mehlem (!!!) go anything that equates in the slightest to some fire sale? Come on, be real.
Again, I don't know why the response went into all this detail. The 'fire sale' accusations were very clearly dramatised BS.

-> 4. Club being sold - some of us were made aware around Easter time that Acun was considering selling up. Parties had approached him, but that's as much as we know. Names were tossed about as they usually are, but there wouldn't be people approaching him if it wasn't for sale. There's a tiny chance you might get one group asking about interest, but not several all in the space of a few weeks. The universe isn't that lazy, pal. Now, that might have changed when Acun left Fenerbahce and as we've seen, we haven't been sold. Nobody ever claimed (at least as far as I've seen on here) that we had been sold or that the process of selling had even started.

Some say he's been looking to sell for more than a season now.
I see, heard and believe different. The facts also continue to say different (for more than a season).
I've said why several times. Acun was (is) open to investment without a controlling interest (unlikely to happen in practice). Unsolicited parties expressed a level of interest in taking over. Acun wasn't interested.

-> 5.Relegation nailed on - just pissing in the wind. Nobody can know how the season will go - last year we bought three potentially too-good-for-the-Championship players and they ALL got ACL injuries. You can't prepare for events like that happening, nor can you predict how a manager's style will impact the squad (in our case, very badly). Last season was a cocktail of **** ups that culminated in a poor season. At the start of Summer, people could have been forgiven for not assuming this season would be any different and given how the season has started behind the scenes, I think you can park any "holier than thou" stances when we're three games in and you're trying to use hindsight as a means to prove your point.

"Pissing in the wind". "Holier than thou". WTF is all that meant to be!!
Some posters, in their OTT dramatisations a few weeks ago were saying we're nailed on to go down this season. I called it out as just more dramatised bollox, and that was way back, not with today's hindsight.

-> I get it. We've been **** on badly by previous owners and as nice as it is to have somebody with good intentions and what comes across as ambition, you can't abandon common sense and reason in the face of evidence. Okay, if you want to ignore the ITK folks that's up to you, nobody who posts insider information or stuff they get told demands to be believed or cares if they aren't. But given everything I've just said, how the hell can you not blame people for being realistic? Most of the media were putting us in the bottom three - I don't think you'll find anybody who genuinely wants that to be the case, nor will you find anybody who wouldn't want to prove those pundits wrong. You keep rehashing the same points as if it's a stick to beat people with, but who or what exactly are you addressing? It's almost like you want people to say the things you've said because that's what you think happened. Except it didn't. Some people were aware of the issues a while back, said it at the time and it's turned out to be true. You seem to struggle with accepting that. Which is fine, I guess, but it doesn't change the reality of the situation, which is that we are walking on very thin ice and there's a world of **** waiting underneath if it breaks.

I'm one of a handful who openly maintains "common sense and reason" and looks for the "evidence", rather than jumping in with rumour, hearsay, speculation, drama, BS, etc. I suspect there's several more who do the same but just read and don't post.
Before anyone jumps in, to repeat yet again, yes the owner ****ed up with the EFL with the poor cash management and administration.
We were put in the bottom 3 by the media at the time because we'd just escaped relegation. It was obvious, except to the doom mongers & drama queens who pedalled the BS of we're bust, we're off into admin, we're being sold, the owner's lost all interest, blah blah) that moves would be made to address the obvious gaps. And we're managing to do just that, even in spite of the sanctions. Again, it's not hindsight, I said it all along, as I knew the owner wasn't palming us off, was still committed, hadn't lost all interest, wasn't going bust, etc).

Hopefully that explains why I just posted back that I disagreed with the comments. I expressed appreciation that ST had taken the time to write a long, sensible post , and one that didn't resort to short playground insults with no substance. I honestly don't want to keep going round in circles any longer.

 

Here we go again

 

I more mean we can only have 5 in a match day squad.

 

And here you and Kalman go again!
I simply answered what seemed to me to be a fair, genuine question. I didn't ask the question.

 

Not if they release dieng for him to sign for us.

 

Reality mate, we’re not a top side, we’re a struggling Championship club, begging for players on frees & loans, a year without throwing money on transfers isn’t going to change that fact, it’s also not going to get us loads of headroom to throw around next summer either.
Just accept it as it is & hope we survive & build gradually into a team challenging!

 

Here I go again how exactly?

 

You really are incredibly tedious. Approaching block territory.

 

I’ll be honest. I don’t think anyone will read your version of war and peace.

 

Waste of a post, 'they' will only keep on prodding and poking.


The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.

 

I didn’t even try to read it, took me 5 min to scroll past it lol

 

Oo er missus!

 

Ms to the likes of you.


The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.

 

LOL

 

Soz Ms TwoWrights

 

Does the window close at 7 tomorrow?

 

Yepp, it closes at 7pm. So, no late night pizza delivery at the City training ground. Also Costa Coffee next door to Tiger in Cott is closing on time, as they aren't expecting DJ Campbell nipping in for a Latte and a millionaire shortbread.

 

Maybe this should be in the grinds my gears thread but Latte literally translates to 'milk' in Italian. So why do people go into coffee shops and ask for a latte when in fact what they want is a cafe latte?
DJ Campbell can do one if he ever comes in my coffee shop asking for a glass of milk.