OhForAGreavsie

It's sad to say this about a man who grew up a Chelsea fan, but Merson knows so little about football it puts producers who keep booking him for their broadcasts to shame. His lack of knowledge is embarrassing.

Thanks UJ, I may be unusual, but I have no faith in such stories. So many interested sources to place tales, and equally many different motivations for publishing them. I don't count those as evidence. I'm not prepared to base my judgement of the performance of club officials on scant information. That's not to say that these reports are always wrong, but they are not right often enough for me to get excited about. I have a feeling that reports of Barca's interest in William were planted as a distraction. I believe that if it was as serious as suggested, Willian would have agitated until he forced it through. I think too that Barca and Malcolm's agent allowed the interest from Roma to be used as a stalking horse to establish a transfer fee minus the usual Barcelona tax. My money says Malcolm was their real target all along. As it turns out the young Brazilian can't seem to force his way into Barca's side but, if you were shopping for them last summer, who would you have targetted; Willian or Malcolm?

Then you agree that merely being better than Willian is not enough. We need players who match the profile of the footballers we need, not ones who are simply less bad than those we have now.

Let's hope this doesn't turn out to be one of those comments you later repent of at your leisure.

Yes, of course we need more than one player to revitalise this team. Although I have not seen enough from Christian to convince me that he really is a step in the right direction, lets say for the sake of argument that he is. Is that enough? Don't we need to find players who upgrade us all the way up to the level we want to reach in that player's position, not players who only take us closer to that destination? Perhaps you didn't mean 'a step in the right direction' in the way I've interpreted it. Perhaps you believe Christian is exactly the player we need in his position and that this takes the team a pace forward. If that's what you mean, I don't agree but let's hope you're correct.

That's not based on a lack of recognition that we need upgrades, but on a lack of belief that Christian is the right solution.

My mistake then. Thanks for the correction. 18 months gives us more power at the negotiation table.

People trot this out ignoring, or seemingly ignoring, the fact that anything which goes into a contract is a matter for negotiation. If Player and buying club do not agree than there's no buyback. Given that in six months time Callum will be available for a 'development' fee only, one possibly set by an independent body if the clubs don't agree, Chelsea's bargaining power is quite limited. Worse, if press stories are to be believed, Bayern keep upping their bid. That must mean that they are getting encouraging noises from Callum's camp. Worrying.

Obviously if the club intends to sign both Barella and Parades, and then register them in the various squads, they must have a plan to handle the cap question. Either enough foreign players will leave, or else one or two will not be re-registered in the squads at the end of January.

Agreed. Parades ain't that good, isn't required, and should not be signed.

I don't want to believe that the club is so stupid as to have got this wrong and left themselves open to a sanction. I don't in fact believe it and will be very surprised if we are banned.

Hello FB, You'll see from my post that I referenced Spurs fans wanting to claim the word yid and that this was a discussion for non-Jewish Spurs fans to have with Jewish people. We don't have the right to abuse other people in football stadiums. They are private properties with by laws against such behaviour, even if those laws are not always applied. Worse, I say again it is not good support. Don't ask fellow supporters about this, ask the players. It embarrasses them, while motivating our opponents' players and fans. It's stupid in every possible way.

I know they do. They are wrong. Many decades ago I was travelling home by bus from a midweek game at QPR. A young Chelsea fan of colour, Asian rather than African, recognised that the conductor was a Jew and began baiting him. I told him to shut it and he did. I was bigger than him so he may have been intimidated but it seemed to me more that he was shocked at the idea that he was doing anything wrong. I don't think he meant to seriously abuse this man, and probably would have denied that he was a racist. I think he'd just learned to associate this behaviour with football. I hope he realised that night that there is a better way to think about this.

This is an old thing now surely. Everyone knows black people can claim the n word and proudly call themselves nigger, but non-blacks cannot. Do Jewish people want to claim the y word in the same way? I don't know but it can be argued that its use as a term of abuse aimed at them, gives Spurs fans the right to claim the word if they want to. That's a conversation to be had between non-Jewish Spurs fans, and Jewish people. What's not up for debate is the fact that sensible, decent, rational, people are not going to use that word as a term of abuse. As I said in another thread, I'm totally fed up with Chelsea fans who think that abuse constitutes good support. They are wrong in every way possible.

How any Chelsea fan can speak in these terms about a Chelsea player is a mystery to me. There's room enough in the English language to describe even the lowest opinion of a player without going for the crude insults.

Reports of interest.

Agent talk surely.

I was listening to Wolves fans last night talking about their opinion that Traore should not start for their club. (He hasn't been starting, but he did yesterday.) It reminded me of a conversation I had with someone on here who accused me of foolishly commenting about Traore when I had never seen him play in the Premier League. Not withstanding that I had in fact seen Traore play top flight football, you can tell what a player's attributes are wherever you watch him. I stick to what I said then; Traore is not good enough for Chelsea. I'd have thought that his struggles to get in the Wolves team would be even more evidence of that fact.

Hello UJ, Hope you had a good Christmas. Have the details of the negation you're referring to been officially confirmed? I've seen you write very confidently about what happened between Chelsea, Willian and Barca. Are the facts about this really known?

There needs to be a slant or an angle, to make a story as readable as it can be but: - Article 1 confirms we have not been found guilty of anything since it talks only of investigations. Had we been found guilty, and that initial judgement upheld, the paper would know it and the article would have said it. Instead it talks only of investigations; investigations which came to nothing. Article 2 contains allegations only. Allegations which have been in the public sphere for some time now, and which would have been privately known to the FA for some time before that. As yet no action taken by the FA. I don't think I'm alone in suspecting what the fees paid to Andreas's father were really for but suspicions amount to nothing legally. If we have broken FA rules they will act. It seems to me the FA have all the evidence they are going to get on this case and yet they have not taken action against Chelsea. It may be they are looking for something more but all we can conclude from their lack of a charge is that so far they've found nothing they can act on. Certainly this is not a guilty verdict on our record either. Article 3 ditto. The club's rejection of these allegations is pretty categorical. That rejection will perhaps be tried and we'll learn the verdict. So far however nothing has been proved and the club are clearly very confident nothing will be. My own guess is that this confidence is based on the belief that they've come up with cast iron stories to cover the payments. Stories which are not outside the rules themselves, no matter haw far outside the spirit of the rules the may be. if a guilty recommendation is made and upheld it will result in the first ever guilty judgement against Chelsea. That being so, it would take at least two such verdicts before we get repeat offender status.

And let's remember that the club's statement made it clear that they felt they were not in breach of the rules. I'm sure that all clubs push the boundaries of the rules as far as they can. If we've pushed too far then we deserve to be punished. If.

There isn't enough information in the linked report to conclude that the guilty finding was not overturned. In fact logic dictates that it must have been. If we were held to have been in breach of rules then the sentence would have included compensation to the 'wronged' club, the 'restorative' part of the judgement, as well as the ban, the 'punitive' part. We would not have been permitted to simply buy our way out of the punitive element by upping the amount of compensation. I'm now more confident that my recollection is accurate. We reached a settlement, the claim of wrong doing was withdrawn and CAS judged there can have been no case to answer and so no possibility of a guilty verdict being on our record. No first offence, no formal repeat on the cards. Edit: I've now looked it up. I'm sure it was just a ruse but, after reaching a settlement with Chelsea, Lens 'accepted' that they had never had a valid contract with Gael and so Chelsea could not possibly have been in breach of it. I know that deal was dodgy, you know it was dodgy and FIFA know it too but that does not amout to a legal finding. There is no guilty charge against Chelsea. Vesper, you know, or at least I hope you do, that I respect your contributions to the forum very much and that I consider myself to have been well informed when I read them. Indeed, more than once I've argued against people who have criticised your posts. May I ask you and the rest of my fellow TalkChelseaers to be a bit more cautious about statements of fact and the sources we use to support them. To be clear, opinion is free to go where it will but when we base those opinions on facts then it's only sensible to be as sure as can that we do have actual facts. When we can't be sure of the facts then lets at least admit that we're only giving an opinion based on our best knowledge of what's going on. A more detailed report of the Kakuta case.

I may be misremembering, but I don't recall any verdict against Chelsea which could represent a first offence. Obviously to be regarded as repeat offenders we'd need to have at least one guilty verdict on the record. I grant that, although the club would want us to see the outcome of the Kakuta transfer investigation as a vindication, that case seems only to have gone away after being settled out of court. As far as I'm aware the initial guilty charge in that case was quashed when the two clubs reached agreement. If I've got the facts right then that case is definitely not on the books as a first offence. Am I remembering that situation incorrectly, or is there another case altogether that I've forgotten about?

I don't see any evidence either way on that front but I'm open to persuasion. What factors do you say suggest that things are less well run now that they were when ME was here?

My point is twofold: First, simply saying we need a DoF is not enough. Any old DoF will not do for the people making that point. We had a DoF and they were not satisfied so surely this is not a controversial statement. Second, they want a DoF who does what they want done. We may not have anyone holding the title DoF at the moment, but someone is fulfilling the role. Someone is appointing and controlling the head scouts. Someone is designating the transfer policy and the profile of player we want to attract. Someone is acting as manager and point of contact to Maurizio Sarri, Neil Bath, and Adrian Jacob. Marina is the current hate figure but I doubt that she is handling all of those duties. We don't know who is doing these functions but they must be happening. Problem is posters on here don't like the way it is being done. Why? Because the decisions being made are not the ones they want to see. They want someone who will agree with them. This does not mean that the agreement must be about specific players but rather about the general approach to contracts and transfers and football policies. Cut the deadwood we read regularly, reduce the loan army, loosen the over thirties contract straightjacket, pay whatever the selling club wants, pay Eden whatever he wants, and so on. Are you telling me that if Ballack were appointed, and continued the current policies, people would be content just because he is Michael Ballack? I doubt it. I think they'd by just as discontent as they are now because what they really mean when they say they want a DoF is that they want one who agrees with them. More than one person has asked why Roman does not sack Marina. The answer to that is blindingly obvious. Roman does not sack Marina because he is happy with what she is doing. Unlike any of us, he knows what her real goals, and real restrictions, are. He knows because he gave them to her. Just like any of us he wants a DoF who agrees with him but, unlike any of us, he gets to have his way.