AFAIK, the buy-back clause is the first of its kind on these shores. When I'm king, I'll do away with them. And release clauses. Two inventions that we have Barca and Real to thank for. Both are directly responsible for the market being so screwed up.
The irony is that Barca are the team that have most notable team to have been stung by release clauses in the past twenty years, not once but twice. As with so much in football, release clauses were a good idea when first introduced as they gave clubs a certain amount of security against their players getting picked off - which is why they're so common in the lower reaches of La Liga or Serie A, as losing a couple of key players in the same window for small fees would likely cost them their place in the division - but the idea mutated into what it is today, where by and large they exist to price them out of the budget of 99% of clubs in world football while also being so high it will scare off potential interest from other members of the 1% Similar can be said for buy-back clauses: the theory is that a club would sell a youngster to a lower league club for a small fee, and if that player blossoms they can buy them back at a mark-up that benefits the club the player was initially sold to - for example, we sold Massimo Luongo to Swindon for £400k and reportedly had a buyback clause of three times that, which if we activated the clause would have given Swindon a tidy profit. Yet, again, this has mutated into a situation where we have Los Ladrones paying their buyback clause for Morata for the sole purpose of making sure they can keep hold of him rather than risk Juventus being a threat/selling him to a direct threat such as Bayern, and that's not how those clauses were created. The most obvious comparison for this would be Jacob Rees-Mogg using his local food bank because he'd rather keep hold of every last piece of his filthy lucre instead of spending an insignificant amount that would get covered by the interest on his bank account within a week at the local supermarket.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin has scored for Everton in their Europa League game. It's now 2-0 on aggregate with about ten minutes left, so Ruzomberok are in real trouble. They need three goals in the remaining time, so the blue Mousers should be through.
Good news for Liverpool: Adam Lallana is trending on Twitter. Bad news for Liverpool: It's because he's out injured for several months. Ouch.
1-1. Pen for Sunderland and a deserved equaliser. They look good going forward but still really shaky at the back.
Decent enough match. Sunderland definitely looked like they were running out of puff a bit after and hour or so and the game swung towards Derby. Grabban really shoud have scored though. Tenner down, good start to the season for me
Burnley's 'friendly' against Hannover has been abandoned due to Hannover 'fans' ripping out seats and throwing them at players at Turf Moor! Those guys are almost as angry as The Mouser Board when they found out that Coutinho's replacement is.........James Milner. Very, very angry.
Two weird things from the PSG/Amiens match. First their momentary belief they were playing rugby when they kicked off ...and then there's the fact they started with a cyborg up front
Heard a Villa fan on the radio say that he did more in 20 minutes than the rest of the Villa midfield in the whole game.
