OhForAGreavsie

Firstly, Antonio scares me. I really wish Arsenal had taken the last CL spot to slow him down a bit. Secondly, am I missing something? If it cost ENIC £150m to add an additional 1.9% of the total stock to their shareholding then that values Spurs at close to £7.9bn. That can't be right can it? I know the stadium is already producing great additional income from both football and non-football sources but even so, £7.9bn? Either my late-night arithmetic is up the spout or something odd is going on there.

Surely for FFP reasons alone we can't afford to pay him over £40m a year? I mean; even if we replace Kepa with Bettinelli, then brought back Broja, Colwill, Gallagher, Maatsen, and Sterling, we'd still struggle to afford it wouldn't we? Even then it wouldn't last long because we'd need to extend them all on first team money. Savings made by not recruiting expensively from outside would quickly get chewed up.

Agreed but winning will cure burnout. Hopefully there will be enough of that. Hopefully!

Or at least of a group which includes TT.

Spot on analysis in my opinion. I think he bought Chelsea because he loved playing football manager and wanted to play for real. Evidence... Close to the very beginning Bruce Buck gave an interview extolling Roman's love for football and described how you could name any player, no matter how obscure, and RA would have data about him. While Roman had the dosh to employ an army of scouts and IT operatives to build an independent database if he wanted to, Football Manager is obviously what he was using to impress Bruce. In that same extended interview, Peter Kenyon was asked who was buying the players. Trying desperately to square the circle between admitting that Roman was buying some and outright lying, he said it was a 'committee decision' with input from everybody. Personally I have never blamed Roman for this because, as I've confessed before, if I owned CFC I'd have made the football decision on all incoming transfers. Certainly I'd have taken recommendations from coaches and scouts but the final decision would have been mine and mine alone. Bad but true. 😒

Possibly agent hype of course but I'll be delighted if true. I do not rate this bloke at all. Like any professional footballer he is capable of great moments and the occasional good game but his talent level is such that he will not be a reliable contributor to top level sides.

Overrated, not overhyped. I'll be dismayed if we sign this bloke. It will be a very discouraging sign from the new owners.

I agree we need a DM but if Bellingham was available to us, which he isn't of course, we'd have to take him. Boy's a star.

I have no interest in us signing this player. I predicted he would fail at Munich and at Swansea and I believe he would fail here. Why? He's a limited footballer. He acquired some fame when Bayern spent an absurd amount of money on him ahead of Euro 2016. A decision which was shown up for what it was by Sanches's dreadful performances in that tournament. People who remember that Sanches was named young player of those Euros will be amazed by my description of his displays but instead of that award showing how well he played, it simply showed, once again, that voted awards are almost always worthless. The bloke got the award partly because he scored a good goal but mainly because he had name recognition due to the transfer fee and Portugal's win. For those who doubt me all touches videos of Sanches's games in Euro '16 were available last time I checked. If they are still there, and his agents have not paid to have them replaced with edited versions, no one will be able to argue he deserved the award. He did not. Not a Chelsea player in my book. Steer well clear.

He already is but I have a feeling that we will never get him. I've been reduced to celebrating the fact that Liverpool will not get him this summer as had been rumoured.

Wish it was net but, as we're pretty much all agreed that the club needs to have a smarter approach to the market, gross will have to do.

Has Nadine Dorries broken a finger nail?

I have no words to describe my hatred for this woman and every politician involved in this travesty. Like Jack Nicholson, when I say Hate, I'm talking HATE.

There's a shock!

👏

Apologies upfront to Tammy Abraham because, although I post this to praise him, I have a second reason for adding this comment. As people have probably read Tammy set a new goals record for an English player in Serie A season when he notched a double for Roma yesterday. Speaking after the game twenty-four year old Tammy reiterated how much he loves Italy, his club and his coach. That feeling is obviously reciprocated. He's certainly had a lot of love from the Roma fans during his thirty-seven league appearances. Top work Tammy. Let's hope that Roma win the Conference League so that what is already a really good season for him turns into a great one. Twenty-one year old Jimmy Greaves join AC Milan in 1961 but he did it for the money and no other reason. He hated the idea of the move so much that he tried to have it cancelled after it was done but Milan would not agree. Once he got there he could not get on with the more professional approach. He wanted to be on the golf course by midday, the Italians trained longer and harder; he wanted to be on the booze by three pm, the Italians wanted him to drink water; he wanted to stand around on the halfway line as usual, the Italians wanted him to work for the team; he wanted to spend alone time with his wife whenever he wanted to, the Italians wanted him to avoid strenuous activities in the build up to match day; he hated the coach and the coach hated him. Jimmy was miserable and forced his way out of the club in six-months. Despite being three years younger than Tammy, despite being miserable where Tammy is completely at home, despite not being trusted by his coach, Greaves scored 9 goals in just 14 Serie A Appearances. Tammy is a good footballer making a name for himself. Greaves was a football god. The best Chelsea player ever bar none.

I understand your take on this but on your specific suggestion, I never want to see Sarr play for Chelsea again. We can rely on him doing well, looking good, even great sometimes, and then delivering moments of absolute disaster. Very bad for my blood pressure and for our win/draw/lose ratios.

No matter what non-Chelsea types may say or think I will never regret that Roman Abramovich was Chelsea's owner. I am gutted he was forced out and will always respect what he has done for this club on and off the pitch. That said, I am optimistic about the takeover because I think there are many things which can be done better than they were under Roman. This provides 'easy' opportunities for the new stewards to hit the ground running and take the club forward. Smarter transfer activity is one such opportunity. We will have to play it smart however. We are not at the top of food chain so, for example, if Bayern want Dembele and satisfy him that he will play, then that is a free agent deal we will not be able to complete. Roman tried to circumvent this problem by throwing money at it. Either by offering big transfer fees while the player was still in contract, by putting big agent's fees on the table, or by paying very big contracts of course. The new people in charge are going to have discipline themselves to avoid the same behaviour, and do so for one crucially important reason. It seems to me that Roman often failed to read the runes when the bigger clubs held back from matching his transfer offers, He was satisfied with winning the battle but didn't realise that this was sometimes because the others weren't actually fighting. As a result he often paid expensively for players no one else at Chelsea's level wanted. Many here didn't agree with me when I said that Liverpool's, "We can't afford Timo Werner.", statement was just an excuse. They mostly still don't agree, but an excuse is what it was. If Pool had rated Timo highly enough they'd have paid up and they'd have got him. Watch them fall over themselves to shovel money into Dortmund's account if Bellingham is available this summer. (I know he said he won't be moving and that's good news in my book because we will probably never get him but we certainly wouldn't get him this year.) The change of stewardship brings fresh, perhaps more patient, eyes to many areas of the operation and I'm not unhappy about that.

Looks to be the future of major transfers. Some clubs, notably Bayern of course, have been working this way for a long time. Now it seems the top players have bought into the idea of running down their contracts then helping themselves to much of the money which would otherwise have been paid as a transfer fee. An inevitable development really. The only surprise is that it has taken this long. Perhaps practises, legalities, and costs around insuring players against carear ending injuries have been an impediment. With players now easily able to afford the premiums to extend the cover to take future potential earnings into account they no longer run the risk of losing out financially if they let value of the club's insurance policy run down along with their contracts. Just speculating here and I could be wildly wrong of course.

The Telegraph didn't just make this up. Someone told them something which they based this story on even if they are mischaracterising it as they tend to do.

I'd like to seal this useless, lying, bunch of cretinous politicians into a spaceship and chuck it in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy. Now I know some of you will feel this is cruel but, even though Andromeda is hurtling towards us at unimaginable speeds, it will still take my little capsule about 4.7 billion years to make the trip. This should be plenty of time for any intelligent life in that galaxy to go extinct and so be spared the pain of having to deal with the morons from Earth. I do not believe anything which emanates from that bunch of ****s so I will wait for the club statement.

Agreed. I'm in no hurry to disbelieve that this problem is what caused his withdrawal on Saturday but it would be nice to know if this also happened when he was at Gladbach. If it did then that would be interesting corroboration.

I don't see any point in whining at the bloke. He did what he did and whether he had played or not, he is the past. Let it, and him, go. He was at the club for a long time but, for whatever reason, we were unable to get him to fall in love with Chelsea. If we are ready to wise then, instead of competing to throw the most cutting insult at Andreas, we should recognise that there is a lesson to be learned and try to learn it. In any case, Chris is not the first to do this. At least not in my opinion. Although Frank gave him cover, I believe that Willian feigned injury to avoid playing in the 2020 FA Cup Final. Remember that Arsenal had to win that game to qualify for Europe and, since he was about to join them, Willian would have damaged his sporting and financial potential if he had helped Chelsea defeat them. Obviously I can't rule out the possibility that Frank spoke the truth about Willian being injured, or that manager and player agreed between them that it was best for Willian to sit the game out, my own feeling is that Willian made that decision himself. If Chris returns to The Bridge to play against us I won't be wasting any energy to boo him. If I manage to get any noise out of my gob it'll be used to support my team not to motivate an opponent to try even harder against us.

There are only so many tears a single forum can shed.

Chelsea's allocation of tickets for the Women's FA Cup Final against Manchester City on Sunday have sold out but some are still available direct from Wembley. Anyone who fancies getting along to support the women as they try to secure their second successive league and cup double can get tickets using the link below or from the stadium box office on the day. If you do decide to pay on the day it's worth double checking availability before you travel. The game kicks off at 2:30pm, Sunday 15th May. https://www.wembleystadium.com/tickets/