Seem an odd one.

Weller

Weller

Roofer
I've always maintained I don't really understand the FFP rules.
But I've run haulage companies successfully for many years.
I'm starting to believe we are hiding behind this bollocks or completely incompetent, why would you fly a player in from Italy give him a medical even if there was a hint of not being able to sign him due to FFP ???? If my account's department had have sanctioned such expense on a whym!!!!!!
 
Weller said:
I've always maintained I don't really understand the FFP rules.
But I've run haulage companies successfully for many years.
I'm starting to believe we are hiding behind this bollocks or completely incompetent, why would you fly a player in from Italy give him a medical even if there was a hint of not being able to sign him due to FFP ???? If my account's department had have sanctioned such expense on a whym!!!!!!
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Presumably we flew him in because we thought we might be able to sell somebody (therefore freeing up the money for somebody else to come in) and wanted to get Sensi's medical etc sorted so that we would be ready to confirm the deal once the sale of player x had gone through. When it became clear that we weren't going to sell anybody, we tried to renegotiate with Inter, but they were so pissed off at that point that they told us to stuff it.

It looks like incompetence on our part, but I can understand how it happened. I'm just glad we didn't sign Sensi to placate Maresca only to find ourselves in breach of FFP and facing a points deduction. Now that would have been incompetent....
 
Weller said:
why would you fly a player in from Italy give him a medical even if there was a hint of not being able to sign him due to FFP ???? If my account's department had have sanctioned such expense on a whym!!!!!!
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At a guess because you figured that there was a chance that someone would be going or if not that there was room to negotiate with the selling club. But as tight as things may or may not be, if spunking a few thousand £££ to fly someone who you would probably be paying over £50,000p.w. to is the difference between an FFP sanction or not then they are shafted anyway.
Weller said:
I'm starting to believe we are hiding behind this bollocks
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And I get why it feels like that but, really, given all of the figures, what is at stake and past record I really feel it is such a negligible likelihood as to be absolutely not the case.

I think events around Everton & Forest as well as our past run-in with the EFL mean we are going to be trying to take as few P&S/FFP risks as possible.

Anyway, look on the bright side. Means we don't have to come on here all angst riven at 5:00pm on Saturday cursing the fact that our new signing is going to be making the acquaintance of Seagrave's fitness table for the next 2 months.
 
Yeah, just a bit of loose change in the football world. Imagine the fucking uproar if we'd missed out on the signing cos the medical wasn't done in time or, worse, we'd taken a punt without doing one (it does happen) and then found out he only had one lung.
Plenty of incompetence around I'm sure, but coughing up for a flight and doc weren't examples.
 
There are parts of me that isn’t that bothered this hasn't worked out. It’s obvious, in Enzo’s eyes anyway, that he was a straight replacement for Casadei. I’m still baffled why Chelsea wanted him back especially as they’ve a load of others to choose from. I’m assuming it was in case Gallagher left. But they’ve 4 players for every position anyway.
Whist Casadei was improving, he was hardly fantastic IMO. He’s cost us a few points by coming on to close out a match only for the opposition to score. He was far too lightweight for this division.
As for Sensi I’m sure Enzo knew what he was getting but the guy hardly inspires confidence. He’s been loaned out multiple times, injuries here and there and in the last 4 1/2 seasons has played just over 85 times. This season just 3 appearances from the bench. He was hardly match fit IMO for a cold February afternoon at Stoke!
We were offering him a 2 1/2 year contract at £50k/week apparently. If he’s that good we can get him on a free in June.

In conclusion we’ve surely got enough in the tank to get us over the line automatically. Let’s hope Wilf is back soon and we pick up no season ending injuries
 
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Of course the signing of Sensi was a risk whch is why it was a giveaway price.
And we had a buyer for HarryS but declined it. That would have freed up some 10-15 mill.
Pathetic.
 
Oadlad said:
Of course the signing of Sensi was a risk whch is why it was a giveaway price.
And we had a buyer for HarryS but declined it. That would have freed up some 10-15 mill.
Pathetic.
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Did we have a buyer or was it on loan?
Would anyone sreiously pay £10m for a player that can't get in our first team? We couldn't sell for less than that or FFP would have kicked in.
 
Think Souttar is perhaps worth holding on to, if we're hanging on to a 1-0 lead with 15 to go then I'd sooner bring his height on than someone like Choudhury.
 
From FT
Heard a bit of Talksport last night. They had the former financial advisor to Man City in the studio (there's a man who earned his corn - 115 charges or whatever it is???)

He was basically saying that PL clubs are now really panicking after Everton got deducted the ten points - and he seriously doubts their appeal will be successful. He also said Chelsea are heading for a world of pain after all the money they've spunked under the new owners.

Clubs basically treated FFP as a joke until Everton got the points deduction and they are all now seriously looking at their finances and making sure they are compliant.


Spending this window
Palace £30m
Spurs £26m
Villa £15.8m
Man C £12.5m
Bright £10m
Notts £7m
Brent £6.5m
Luton £2.5m
Sheff £2m
The other 11 clubs didn't buy anyone.
 
Also from FT
The crux was that I still don't think people quite understand the relationship between Amortisation and FFP and that it really, really isn't simple to "just" sell footballers - ESPECIALLY for a loss.

The problem isn't that "Rudkin can't sell players", the problem is that we as a club have signed too many players for too much money that haven't lived up to expectations. Its the amount we buy them for with the risks that we do that then make them so difficult to sell because you need to clear the entire book value of a footballer in that one year that you sell which can cause crippling losses as far as FFP is concerned.

We overpaid for, for example, Soumare by so much that literally nobody wants to buy him for enough money that we wouldn't be screwed by our own amortisation if we sell him "too early." And that's ignoring the fact that because we're paying him big old Premier League wages he quite possibly doesn't want a permanent move even if clubs are interested (see Dennis Praet and formerly Yannik Vestergaard.)

Now don't get me wrong, as I said earlier, that still means the buck stops with Rudkin but the problem isn't that he can't sell - Don fvcking Draper couldn't sell Bouba Soumare or Dennis Praet for a profit - the problem is that we identified these talents in the first place and signed them for inflated fees well above their market value (also see Islam Slimani, Rachid Ghezzal, Filip Benkovic, Timothy Castagne, Bartosz Kaputska, Adrien Silva and a long list of other flops.)

I highly doubt Rudkin personally identified any of these targets, it isn't really his wheelhouse, but he has overseen the recruitment of a procession of extremely middle-of-the-road heads of recruitment since Walsh left and he has been involved in the negotiations of the fees of a lot of these players and he does seem to have a track record of going extremely high with fairly poor negotiations. The best two deals this club have done in the last few decades was the sales of Maguire and Fofana and its my understanding Whelan got involved to directly oversee both of those?

So I'm not defending the guy entirely and I'm largely in the camp that if we want to be a world class football club then we need to start acting like one, I've said before that I do actually like our owners' valuation of loyalty and commitment but ultimately you wouldn't find Tony Bloom letting his inadequate mate stick around as the DoF for so long just because he's loyal. But I do think people are expecting water from wine when they think that anyone, and I do mean anyone, is going to easily just sell Souttar, Soumare, Kristiansen, et all.

We're fvcking stuck with them for the long haul and people need to get used to it.
 
hackneyfox said:
Also from FT
The crux was that I still don't think people quite understand the relationship between Amortisation and FFP and that it really, really isn't simple to "just" sell footballers - ESPECIALLY for a loss.

The problem isn't that "Rudkin can't sell players", the problem is that we as a club have signed too many players for too much money that haven't lived up to expectations. Its the amount we buy them for with the risks that we do that then make them so difficult to sell because you need to clear the entire book value of a footballer in that one year that you sell which can cause crippling losses as far as FFP is concerned.

We overpaid for, for example, Soumare by so much that literally nobody wants to buy him for enough money that we wouldn't be screwed by our own amortisation if we sell him "too early." And that's ignoring the fact that because we're paying him big old Premier League wages he quite possibly doesn't want a permanent move even if clubs are interested (see Dennis Praet and formerly Yannik Vestergaard.)

Now don't get me wrong, as I said earlier, that still means the buck stops with Rudkin but the problem isn't that he can't sell - Don fvcking Draper couldn't sell Bouba Soumare or Dennis Praet for a profit - the problem is that we identified these talents in the first place and signed them for inflated fees well above their market value (also see Islam Slimani, Rachid Ghezzal, Filip Benkovic, Timothy Castagne, Bartosz Kaputska, Adrien Silva and a long list of other flops.)

I highly doubt Rudkin personally identified any of these targets, it isn't really his wheelhouse, but he has overseen the recruitment of a procession of extremely middle-of-the-road heads of recruitment since Walsh left and he has been involved in the negotiations of the fees of a lot of these players and he does seem to have a track record of going extremely high with fairly poor negotiations. The best two deals this club have done in the last few decades was the sales of Maguire and Fofana and its my understanding Whelan got involved to directly oversee both of those?

So I'm not defending the guy entirely and I'm largely in the camp that if we want to be a world class football club then we need to start acting like one, I've said before that I do actually like our owners' valuation of loyalty and commitment but ultimately you wouldn't find Tony Bloom letting his inadequate mate stick around as the DoF for so long just because he's loyal. But I do think people are expecting water from wine when they think that anyone, and I do mean anyone, is going to easily just sell Souttar, Soumare, Kristiansen, et all.

We're fvcking stuck with them for the long haul and people need to get used to it.
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This is the crux of my irritation with our transfers since the summer of 2016 we've basically spent about half a billion on some really poor footballers. It all started under Steve Walsh, they were his recruits in that summer, it's got worse since then with a few good un's chucked in.
 
TartanFox said:
This is the crux of my irritation with our transfers since the summer of 2016 we've basically spent about half a billion on some really poor footballers. It all started under Steve Walsh, they were his recruits in that summer, it's got worse since then with a few good un's chucked in.
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Walsh has been very explicit about his warnings not to buy Slimani...
 
Nomadic Fox said:
We were always going to have to overpay that summer - its what happens when you win the f*cking league.
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It was an Akinbiyi job with Slimani. The window went on and on and if I remember rightly a £22m fee was agreed. Because we’d let Sporting dictate to us, it went basically to the wire whereby their crooked president said £27-29m. We should have walked away but there wasn’t time for a replacement. With our extra CL games we needed a bigger squad.
 
I have a very large suspicion that neither of the two clubs interested in HS wanted to pay anything near what we needed to make it work under FFP and that a souttar sale (or whoever it was) for less than we paid and a sensi buy put us in a worse FFP position than not doing the deal at all. Hence no deal was done. So not necessarily club incompetence.
 
Sailing so close to the FFP wind is exactly the responsibility of the board.
Milan are saaid to be fuming over this. They are a serious football club and have been round the block
a few times so it makes us look the second raters our board are.
There is talk of going for Sensi in the summer.
Would you be interested if you were him? And every club with £3m spare has been alerted anyway.
The way this club has been run financially in the last few years has been embarrassing.
Being Premier status begins at the top...
 
Not one of the players we signed in the summer of 2016 should have been purchased. Not one of them enhanced the squad let alone improved it. Bearing in mind we’d already weakened the squad with Amartey and Gray and then sold Kante.

Slimani
Musa
Mendy
Hernandez
Zeiler
Kapustka

They were players scouted for another relegation battle. When it became clear we were not going down Walsh and the scouting team should have been working night and day on different targets.

That summer is one of regret and missed opportunity.
 
hackneyfox said:
Is that right, thought he wanted him but said not to pay more than £15m for him.
We paid £27m?
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I forget whether it was a written or video interview with him about 4 or 5 years ago, but I'm 99% sure that it was reversal of the don/kante situation – the don wanted him, but sw thought he was wrong for us (or total shite, I can't recall). I believe the full rip-off was £29m, though we somehow recouped a couple of million from a couple of loans.
 
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