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Yeah agreed, not right now. Another season like this one though and his agent will get real busy.

It is scary but you and I agree more and more each month. Eeeeeeek! 🤪

I will likely walk for a spell. Will not waste my time on a failed ownership-produced shitpot.

I don't think there's any worry of this happening. At least this summer. Club is offering him a new deal.

Hearing more and more noises of club wanting to stick with Poch for another season. Stability and all that.

I think we will be torn to bits. I am hyper bearish on us a club (at every level) atm. Bo Clownlake has doused us with petrol and tossed a Swan Vesta in our direction.

Jesus fucking christ, some cunt on BBC suggested we sell Palmer to help balance our books. IF we sell him, I AM DONE, OUT. EOS

If we hire De Zerbi and it plays out like I fear it will, I may well end up walking away from the club until the monstrous scum yanks sell off. I cannot express adequately how worried I am about our future under their ruinous ownership. For the first time in my life I legitimately don't want to watch our games on far too many occasions, as it is a shit watch and bad for my mental health, as I am so emotionally invested in CFC since I was a child growing up in a Blue west London household.

The long-term contracts all our new signings are on, should itself be a clue. This a long play by Eghbali & Co. They ultimately want a squad that has appreciated in value 6-7 years from now, when they are ready to sell the club. From their perspective., it doesn't matter if some players mature faster than others. The ones that mature faster., might want to move before that time period, but Eghbali & Co. will make a good profit from the sale of such players., who feel they are too good to remain. That's their primary objective. Any trophies or results we pick along the way will just be a bonus. Th3ats why they will only hire a manager that agrees with their 'vision'. Glorified yes-men. Hopefully some of them will have decent coaching credentials.

So you are ok with us being pegged at the same spending level of Palace or Bournemouth?

Yup and I reckon the missing variable in their equation is "time." What do we do while these players develop? Watch grass grow? 😃 Players blossom at different times in their careers -- there is no guarantee these youngster will get anywhere near their peaks in 2-3 years from now. Take Solanke as an example. He's playing well now at 26!

That's why this whole 'build for the future' argument is so speculative. It might pay off, it certainly will raise the resale value of the entire squad, but it doesn't necessarily amount to the trophies. AKA, Wenger's Arsenal. But hey, maybe some fans like that. Basically enjoy the process, not the end results.

I saw a report that Palace have put a £60m price on Michael Olise. Now, it has to be acknowledge that if he was interested in coming back here he'd have done so last summer. Worse, if he didn't fancy Chelsea last off-season, why on Earth would he do so this time around? Even so I'd be happy to see the club try again. Of the players linked last summer he was the one I wanted the most.

Massively in favour of this. Have been calling for it, here and elsewhere, for decades. Let's bury the Financial Unfair Play nonsense once and for all.

Yeah, so, maybe, like, actually enforce the current FFP rules. If petrodollars would actually bother people in charge, they would be contained. Just a quick reminder that Chelsea had an actual freaking government on its back for a few years, trying to do as much problem for the club as possible. Petrodollars will find a way no matter this mumbo jumbo. Anyway, all those "fairness" ideas seem bit delusional to me. Did motorsport became more interesting after pushing F1 and WRC teams to be pretty much same thing? Unfair advantage is a problem that ruins sport, but the advantage is pretty much the point of sport. Let the big clubs be big clubs, smaller be smaller, just stop pretending to not see what City or PSG are doing. Reminds me of the pseudo-draft idea of choosing random players from few years back. What is even the point of owning and investing into the club then? You earn more, you spend more, trying to enforce equality sounds like making the football one corporation with few different logos. Meanwhile PSG or Real won't care for any caps, so it's shooting the world's best league foot off.

Why a spending cap could signify a subtle but important power shift in the Premier League https://theathletic.com/5442600/2024/04/24/premier-league-spending-cap-importance/ So an era of unprecedented Premier League changes could be about to move into new territory — from points deductions to spending constrictions. The asterisks which dot this season’s table in relation to punishments for clubs who have breached the top flight’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) may soon be followed by question marks on balance sheets across the division. GO DEEPER Premier League clubs to vote on introducing new spending cap Should a majority of its clubs vote through the proposed hard spending cap for the 2025-26 season, it would not only aid the competitive nature of what is the world’s strongest domestic league, but also enforce a subtle shift in the perceived power base of English football. The cap idea is based on the concept of “anchoring”, designed to limit the amount of money any club can invest in their squad by tying it to a multiple of what the division’s lowest earners get from the league’s centralised broadcast and commercial deals. It would go a step further than the UEFA-mirroring new squad-cost rules, which clubs are set to vote on in June, that permit squad spending to a ratio of revenue and player sales, a small but perhaps overdue concession to those who are worried about the league’s competitive balance. Under the additional anchoring — or hard cap — plan, greater clarity and transparency would arrive, ensuring — so the theory goes − that everyone from Chelsea and Manchester City to Wolves and Crystal Palace are playing by precisely the same rules. The multiple is the multiple. Obfuscation, workarounds, and overspends would no longer be backstage levers for the big boys to pull. For years, the Premier League’s ‘haves’, super-rich City, Chelsea and, more recently, Newcastle, have seemingly had things their own way: the former pair as yet unsanctioned despite allegations potentially far more serious than those that have triggered punishments for Everton and Nottingham Forest, the latter able to take a seat at the petrostate top table and enjoy some (if not all) of the benefits City and Chelsea have had over the past two decades. If those clubs squirm at the notion of a hard cap, then many supporters outside of their fanbases will have little sympathy. Of course, it might require slightly reduced salaries for current or new players, but the bank balance pains for those stars could be worth it for the sustainability gains. Anyone familiar with Everton’s piteous predicament would argue that if one of the league’s handful of ever-presents can sink to their knees so badly, something needs to be done to prevent it happening to others. Everton tried and failed to chase the established ‘Big Six’, with their owner Farhad Moshiri bankrolling a misguided spending spree that in the end has them close to rolling off a precipice. The Merseyside club might not have been able to get into such a mess had anchoring been in place in 2016, when the British-Iranian businessman first took over. But how has such wider ethical concern seemingly won out over self-interest? What has got anchoring to the point of genuine consideration, where it would seem like the big boys are not getting it all their own way? The answer could be a subtle power shift, caused by new mutually-beneficial alliances. The Premier League’s broadcast revenue sharing has always been, by European football standards anyway, a relatively noble meritocratic arrangement. It is less that sharing ratio which clubs such as Everton, West Ham and Palace are worried about — and more the consistent advantage clubs such as City, Chelsea and Manchester United have accrued from decades of participation in European football. Not only do the ‘Big Six’ tend to pocket extra millions every season from qualifying for one of the three UEFA competitions, they also get to strike more lucrative commercial deals each year because of it. Newcastle and Aston Villa are doing their best to prise open the door to that clique, but the established gap already seems fairly structural. A larger Champions League designed to ward off a European Super League and next summer’s first, much-expanded Club World Cup will only reinforce the gap between the Premier League’s long-standing haves and have-nots. It took an interesting coming-together of not only the top flight’s minnows and its middle classes — such as Palace, West Ham and Fulham — but also some of that upper-class elite to get anchoring on the agenda so firmly. A move towards a North American sport-style salary cap system might well have been endorsed by the likes of U.S.-owned Liverpool or Arsenal in the hope it could rein in a common foe. If City, as widely predicted, overcome the spirited challenge of both those clubs to retain their Premier League title, meaning four in a row and six in seven years, their steely dominance over English football will be underlined. Perhaps the hope from rivals is that the introduction of a hard spending cap will loosen Sheikh Mansour and City Football Group’s firm grip on Premier League success in the past decade, and start to level the playing field a bit. For the Premier League, much maligned in some quarters with their application of PSR sanctions casting uncertainty on this season, it is another pushback against the need for external regulation. Anchoring is unlikely to have got this far without Richard Masters, the league’s chief executive, recognising it as another concession to ease his ongoing scrutiny. All this may still not be enough to make it a reality, though. Ultimately it is the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) who might have the decisive say. The players’ trade union will need to be demonstrably consulted, listened to and likely negotiated with for the proposal to actually come into force for the season after next. Even then, if Premier League footballers revolt strongly at the potential for pay cuts, it could throw the whole deal into doubt. Nobody will want the potential for U.S.-style sporting strikes, such as the mid-1990s baseball walkout that saw two major-league seasons left incomplete. There would be the potential for the PFA to ask for rises in the multiple (already up from an original four and a half to five) until the point that it makes little difference and becomes lip service. Monday’s vote may be the first step in a small but important change for the Premier League but the players on the field who do the running could yet stop it in its tracks. Until such point, anchoring will remain a tantalising notion for a potentially fairer top-flight game, and a rare moment when the petrodollar-boosted ‘haves’ were made to contemplate the fact that not everything will always go their way.

"I owe Mourinho everything... but he still scares the life out of me!" ⚽ John Terry | Up Front Video length - 1 hour and 21 minutes

Hard spending cap likely coming in for 2025/26 we are so fucked

Mark goldbridge on that's football watchalong quit at half time. Saeed of saeedtv a fan of man utd quit at 3rd goal for man City on his stream. First time ever they quit a watchalong. Thats a bad look at THE FARMERS LEAGUE PL.

Seaweed 0 Citeh 4 Great viewing for Wallpusher FC fans

We are mainly talking about problem solving. I don't know if AI can do the Putnam exam paper, but I assume it is feasible. But self awareness is of course a different philosophy. It's ok to solve a problem when someone else gives it to us and says "solve this problem" and quite another to think of the problem and then proceed to attempt to solve it. In this context when I say a problem it can be anything, hard or easy. Who makes better spare ribs ? Al downtown or Joe uptown ? I have to go there and decide for myself - it's a "problem". What do I say to that blonde I keep seeing in the supermaraket ? She looks the part but conversation opener ? Those are the issues and again they exist because a) I like spare ribs, b) I like blondes. Why I like spare ribs ? I like them because when I was small my mom took me to a restaurant. Why I like blondes ? Because they are nice looking blondes. All these things are related to of self awareness and libidinous drive, unchecked so far in the field of AI. But nevertheless it looks like the story has began.

Not confident at all. Same sort of effort shown vs Arsenal particularly second half and we get pumped again.

There is no AI "thing." Ai may bring paradigm changes to a number of different areas. My skepticism is regarding the self-awareness bit, which I think is just a "fun" clickbait doomsday scenario based more on sci-fi ideas than science. There is no evidence whatsoever that self-awareness may be just around the corner; I've been hearing that that's the case for decades. It is very likely the probabilistic ML engines in use today will indeed disrupt a lot of industries, services, life in general. It's also likely that they are completely incapable of achieving self-awareness and we are still a breakthrough away from seeing that. We don't even grok what it would take to get self-awareness in artificial systems. Of course it can, and perhaps should be discussed, but my take remains that this specific issue is a potential concern, not an urgent concern like other aspects around AI and automation. There are good points made in the video linked above, and a lot of speculation too.