I didn't say Brentford owe us anything. But it's financial chicanery from a club who already got the bargain of a lifetime out of us and have blatantly used shifty accounting to turn a £30 mill transfer into a £27 million transfer on the books. We should write our clauses better in future and ensure loan fees are amalgamated into any sell-ons, but I'm more than entitled to have a bitter taste in my mouth about it.

Everyone else, for the sake of stopping a snowball effect from a Chinese whisper - there are no reports there is an £8 mill release clause to PL teams. This is something Forever Blue has assumed on the basis of a Tweet by a supposed ITK, who hasn't said there's an 8 mill release clause to PL teams. By God we're beyond stupid if we put something like that in his newest deal. New contracts are supposed to give us security, not reduce it. If the 8 mill claim is true, I find it more likely it's just our own asking price. Which is still us being stupid, but is perhaps from some sense of obligation to the player. Or of course, that might not be true at all given there have been previous reports our opening asking price is 15 mill.

I agree, we've been more than fucking generous enough with sales in recent years. Raya, Kaminski, Wharton, Cairney, Phillips, Finneran about to be poached, Lenihan, Nyambe, Rothwell...our pants are already down so much they're subterranean. What we owe Sammie is just not asking ludicrous prices like £20 million. We owe him a move at a fair market value, and we owe that to ourselves too. A penny under £10 million is a joke. Asking price should be about £14 mill, we should settle for about £12 mill. Side note, I don't agree that the money makes 'no difference'. We have a very poor reinvestment rate from transfers, but it's not non-existent. If we hadn't sold Armstrong etc and instead had given everyone away for free, would we have signed Hyam, Brittain, even Szmodics? Nope. It matters what money we bring in, it's just that very little of it will be reinvested. Some years none will, but even if it means we don't have to sell yet another player to make ends meet it still contributes. It's still a fucking bullshit situation but we do need to ensure we extract every penny from sales (something we are bad at).

I've been a bit confused by this deal. When the loan was signed it was very much described as an obligation to buy, with the implication it was triggered when he played a certain amount of games. Given that he played 41 games for them this season I'd expect any obligations clauses have been met. And yet now it's being talked about as though it's totally up to Arsenal. This tweet also firms up something I suspected at the time. The fee was described as £30 million but with a loan fee of £3 million. Now it's a £27 mill option...I'm pretty sure Brentford have conspired to fuck us out of a bit of our clause. We will get a percent of profit on the £27 million, not on the £30 million. Suppose it could have been worse, like a £15 million loan and £15 million purchase, but that sort of distortion would probably have opened the door for us to sue (much in the way that clubs didn't get in trouble with FFP when they were selling their stadium naming rights or whatever, but they did when the figures received were ludicrously out of whack with market values). Pretty cheapskate from a Prem club tbh, the 450k I believe it amounts to is nothing to them, but probably equal to or higher than a shirt sponsor for us. I'd expect the add-ons in Raya's initial deal have been mostly met too, so we've probably already had about 5 mill for him total, meaning we'll get 15% of £22 million, which is £3.3 million. (Yeh yeh, it will all get swallowed by Venkys anyway, who cares, blah blah, don't be boring and quote me saying that please)

I think you mean his inexperience wasn't favoured in a relegation battle. He barely had a sniff, and scored when given one in the cup. I don't think we can say he isn't pushing on, he hasn't played enough in the seniors (should have, IMO) and has been tearing up the U21s, which he hadn't really done previously.

The press are quite heavily saying he's off to Newcastle.

Sorry Chaddy, but your views here would hold a lot more weight if you had been critical of JDT and GB at the time. But when you only criticise them after they leave, it upholds the view that you defend nearly everything the club does. Maybe consider this next time personnel at the club are being criticised. If you're willing to accept criticisms of club staff, even if you're also defending correct decisions (that's the balance I try to strike, honest criticism, honest defence), you won't be mocked for it on here when you do a 180. Btw I think you've been making quite good posts in this thread for the most part. I'm not having a go, but you undermine your own future arguments by staunchly defending the club's staff even when they're indefensible.

39m over three seasons is 13m a season, so 20m minus 13m means a 7m deficit per season. Or 21m total. Armstrong and the STC raised about 30m. And that's before we consider Kaminski, the Raya money, Phillips, Wharton...

What more do I want? Well I'd like you to make sense, ideally. My point wasn't that Waggott has been here for a number of years. My point was that your highlighting he had been here for a number of years only shows that an incompetent member of staff was kept around here well past his sell by date, which doesn't strengthen any point you were making.

I haven't. You've undermined your argument but don't seem to be able to see it.

Then why mention it? It might be stability in one area of the staff, but it's the area we don't want stability because the current incumbent is dogshit, and is probably a good portion of the reason other staff turnover is high. The fact we have had the same useless CEO for 6 years is part of the problem.

Unless the rules have changed, or Red Bull are owners of the club, I believe it should all help with FFP.

Do you think that's a good thing considering who it is?

People will choose to be the way they are, indeed. You do realise that your track record of predicted spend pretty much never matches the actual spend, right? Possible exception of the summer of 2022 where we spent a little, but I feel like you expected around 10 million spent. Hard to remember 2 years back though.

The players you want to sell wouldn't bring in enough money to bring in replacements that were particularly any better, not with our scouting. Let alone bring in the additional ones you mention.

https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/24355889.middlesbrough-example-may-offer-hint-sam-szmodics-future/ LT claim Galatasaray's reported interest is real. Personally I think Ipswich are the most likely destination. We like to get rimmed off freshly promoted teams who haven't been heavyweights for a long time (or ever in Luton's case) and Ipswich have already been sniffing around us this season, as Travis and Gallagher show. Given no real re-sale value, his transfer profile suits a side who can afford him with freshly acquired Prem money to boost a low wage squad, and know they are likely to come back down to this level, at which Szmodics is a monster. If he shows his worth in the Prem he could keep them up or earn a move for a similar or better fee, or they come down and he helps them make a fist of going back up. If they're interested I think that's where he will probably end up.

The point was to show his goals in the same number of seconds as there were goals scored though. I think there's a clip elsewhere of all his goals this season with a bit more time spent on them. What a finisher!

As I've covered in the U21 thread, I'm confident Phillips would have played as many or more games here than he did at Plymouth. He was awfully young last season and was bound to develop and get a chance when injuries and suspensions hit. No need to sign McFadz then. Then he could have moved to a club for a proper fee and been earning about 30 times his salary, with more chance of breaking into the Prem team he moved to. Ya know, like a certain Adam Wharton.

I've literally never heard of him. I see he has played 47 league games this season for Leeds though, who are a better side than us, at the age of 18. So I can see why they'd be asking for a lot, and they have more financial power than us so can stick to their guns more comfortably. That's nearly double what we got for Wharton though. I'd be surprised if anyone pays that for a Championship midfielder, in which case it won't matter how much they demanded.

I can't go quite as far as to say it's pointless. Not when so many of our first team are academy graduates and in the last year we have made enough profit from some of their sales to fund the academy for over 10 years. But it's massively frustrating when we could have had double that in the last few years if the rules were different (and on occasion if the club had more planning or spine). If we do lose these latest two for bugger all, I'll understand the sentiment of it being pointless, but in a literal sense it's still not true. It would also leave us with nobody to get heavily excited about coming through. Best bets would be Gilsenan, who we've already seen a bit of, couldn't break through when he was on fire and got injured I believe near the end of the season. Whitehall, who is very injury prone so will need some luck to make it. Gent, who has come on well but it would be surprising if he ends up being more than an average Championship LB at best. And Batty, who once had serious promise but seems to have gone off the boil. I guess Duru might be able to push on to be a squad player. Decent things have been said about one or two others, but those seem the most promising, and none of them on close to the hype level we had for Wharton, Phillips and Finneran. Our most promising crop for many a year could end up all elsewhere in very little time (the golden portion of them I mean). Whitehall could be a hell of a player if he somehow stays fit though, he's seriously impressed me whenever I've seen him. And you never know who is going to rapidly improve. Seems to be better they stay under the radar until they've been secured on a proper pro deal anyway.

Yep but it won't have benefited us in the slightest to scout and train him if we lose him for nothing. I can understand kids being able to move around for nothing when they're 14 and under, they need the freedom to do so and their potential is much less certain. Once they're 15 and 16 they can be prodigies on the verge of, or even having made, first team breakthroughs and then they get snapped up for nothing just when the fanbase is getting excited. It was Rochdale wasn't it? They'll get better money relative to their level for future moves than we will (that thing, can't remember what it's called, where you get a tiny portion of future fees if you trained them between certain ages). Think he was 15 when we took him, so what I'm suggesting would have also benefited them a bit more. It's almost a disincentive to move these kids along quickly at those ages because you enhance the chances they attract bigger fish. Also, frustrating that when we take a good player from lower down the food chain and they quickly move on, we get squat, but when Palace do it, they'll reap a quick 40 million ish profit. I'm not saying poachings from above aren't natural, of course they are, just the protections at that specific age range are poor and can see clubs lose major prodigies for nothing (or enforced fees well below market a la Phillips, due to the negotiating power the rules allowed his agent...who in fairness could have also had him leave for far less a year earlier). IMO, the higher you are in the pyramid, the more you should have to pay for players in that age bracket if the owning club has made a contract offer. The academy category the owning club operates should also come into it, a cat 1 isn't cheap. It just needs reviewing and protections adding is my point, but of course the Prem love to be able to harvest the best for nothing. If I remember right they're the ones who brought in changes making the poaching easier some years back.

https://www.wearepalace.uk/news/after-adam-wharton-crystal-palace-now-want-to-pinch-another-top-talent-from-blackburn-rovers/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook Igor Tyjon allegedly attracting suitors - Palace, Manure and Brighton. It would be beyond frustrating if him and Finneran got pinched for nowt. IMO, protections for clubs when players are aged 15 or over need to improve.

Was the Nixon rumour about Palace, Manure and Brighton wanting to sign our young striker Igor Tyjon posted? Just seen it, but looks like it's about 3 days old. Of course, 3-club rule, the one Nixon himself told us about. And the Nixon rule too (weather report says info will be hazy with a chance of scattered bullshit).

Not to work for Rovers.

I guess we can't be surprised. Much like for GB, it must have been frustrating to spend all that time scouting and refining targets only for the goalposts to shift every time, the rug get pulled out from under you, and then your professional reputation be tarnished when the club only goes for target number 86 on your list. I can see why someone would want to leave before they become unemployable.