Vesper

Arsenal have agreement with Riccardo Calafiori, trying to beat out Chelsea https://thedailybriefing.io/i/146302702/arsenal-have-agreement-with-riccardo-calafiori-trying-to-beat-out-Chelsea Arsenal have an agreement with Riccardo Calafiori, the clubs are negotiating. Arsenal have presented a first offer, I can't say for how much but it's a high offer. Arsenal are pushing to get the deal done quickly, in order to get ahead of the other teams that are interested in Calafiori. First and foremost Chelsea, and then a little way behind, Juventus. There's been an auction for him, and ultimately, Juve cannot reach the figures that the Premier League can offer. Arsenal will attempt to speed things through as quickly as they can, Juventus have started looking at other options to strengthen their defence, as evidenced by their offer for Buongiorno, as it looks difficult for them to sign Calafiori.

hard pass, he will never be the same after that horrid knee injury, unfortunately

Cala has the real potential to be

he has scored THREE GOALS in his last 31 EPL games and will turn 28 near the end of this coming season so only 2 full sub 30yo seasons left if he bombs after 2 or 3 years, he will either be turning 30 or already 30yo and his value for resale will be fuckall

Rüdiger’s treatment a damning representation of modern Germany Defender should be able to count on a nation behind him but far-right nationalism reflects society’s ingrained racism https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jul/04/antonio-rudiger-germany-euro-2024-football Antonio Rüdiger was eight years old the first time he had to ask his father what the N-word meant, because the kids at school were using it. He remembers running over to an old white lady in his neighbourhood, offering to help carry her shopping bags, and seeing the look of pure terror in her eyes. He remembers growing up playing football on the concrete pitches of Berlin, and being told he didn’t belong there, to go back to Africa. But these were the bad old days. The dark ages. A more benighted era of Germany society. And of course, Rüdiger is now a star of the German national team in a home European Championship, their best player in the 2-0 win over Denmark last Saturday and the key to Friday’s quarter-final against Spain. Times have changed. Attitudes, surely, have shifted. “Footballer Rüdiger outs himself as a radical Islamist!” screamed a popular German right-wing YouTuber this week. “This man has no place in our national team,” declared Beatrix von Storch, the MP and deputy leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. “Islamism in the German starting eleven this evening,” wrote Julian Reichelt, the former editor of Bild and now the editor of Nius, a kind of equivalent to GB News. Then there was the member of the AfD’s youth wing, interviewed on television at the party’s conference in Essen a few days ago, who stated on camera that Rüdiger should be “expelled”. Not from the team, not from the camp, but from Germany itself. And before what promises to be the match of the tournament, a game that feels – one way or the other – like the crux of Germany 2024, a reminder that among this fiercely united squad, some players are playing for higher stakes than others. This much, naturally, Rüdiger is already used to. From his earliest days in German football, he was cognisant of the ways in which society’s ingrained racism would be coded and coddled, more creatively framed. “As soon as you have a few bad games, the press starts digging, and now what do they call you?” he wrote in a 2021 Players Tribune article. “Antonio Rüdiger, from Berlin-Neukölln.” Even now, with Rüdiger enjoying his most productive international tournament, the knives are out for him in a way they so rarely are for others. Every gesture and word is parsed and scrutinised for anything that might inspire some cheap right-wing outrage. After the Denmark game it was a throwaway comment that Germany should have “killed” the game earlier. Days of hand-wringing commentary and social media fury ensued. Back in March, meanwhile, it was Fingergate. At the start of Ramadan, Rüdiger posted a picture of himself with his index finger raised, wishing “a blessed Ramadan to all Muslims around the world”. For Reichelt, however, it was not a gesture of solidarity but an “Islamist salute, which the whole world has known since the horror of the ISIS terrorists”. Rüdiger and the German football association filed a complaint to the public prosecutor, but in many ways the damage was already done: for a small but increasingly emboldened subset of German society, Rüdiger had been successfully recast as the “other”, a dangerous outsider, even a traitor in the midst. And of course this is all part of a broader strategy, a concerted effort to position football as a frontline in the struggle for the soul of the nation. On social media, disinformation and flat-out untruths have been propagated by far-right accounts and allowed to flourish largely unchallenged. One viral video shows a prayer room in the fan zone in Berlin, with the (false) suggestion that it has been installed for Muslims alone. Another widely shared post rages at the ban on German flags in fan parks, a ban that does not and has never existed. While it’s easy to dismiss this kind of stuff as the kind of desperate nonsense barely worth dignifying with comment – and you know, when has fringe far-right German nationalism ever really hurt anyone? – there is a subtext here, and by identifying it now we can all spare ourselves a lot of performative shock later. “This team is not a national team, but a politically correct mercenary troupe,” the MEP Maximilian Krah declared before the start of the Euros. Because so far the racists and nativists have encountered one major issue: Germany are absolutely smashing it. The national flags are billowing from car aerials and apartment blocks. A proudly diverse and forward-looking team have cruised into the quarter-finals playing smart modern football and turning their diversity into a strength. “With every victory, good Germany wins,” the journalist Hajo Schumacher declared on a television talkshow on Tuesday night. “Every victory counts. This is modern Germany. This is a new Germany.” And yet even this leans into dangerous tropes, the unspoken compact that people of colour must somehow prove their worth in order to be accepted by a white-majority society. Brandishing a winning German team and a champion centre-half as evidence of the merits of multiculturalism is all very well until – you know – they stop winning. Until Rüdiger misjudges a high ball. Until Jamal Musiala misses a penalty. That will be the point at which we find out if “new Germany” is elementally different from the old one. Rüdiger, of course, has always understood this. That in most European societies his basic humanity will always be regarded, in part, as a transaction. In his Players’ Tribune article he reflected on the Chelsea fans who showered him with vitriol for his supposed part in the sacking of Frank Lampard, only to change their tune months later when he led them to the Champions League title. “Do you think they took a long look in the mirror?” he writes. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I know that we’re winning. So now I’m useful to them. Maybe I’m even a human being in their eyes.” The real shame here is that Rüdiger is easily good enough and compelling enough and entertaining enough on the pitch to be appreciated on his own terms. From Stuttgart to Roma to Chelsea to Madrid, this is a player whose commitment and personality and taste for the dramatic have long made him one of the most watchable players in the game, a riposte to the idea that attackers are football’s expressionists and defenders its silent yeomen. Take his wild celebration after making a crucial tackle late in the Denmark game, fists pumping, eyes wide, letting out a roar of pure alpha energy. This is a player at the peak of his powers, chasing the pinnacle of his career, who should at the very least be able to count on a blank canvas, a nation united behind him. For reasons only tangentially connected to him, that has rarely been the case. Often it is said, with a trite liberal blitheness, that Rüdiger represents modern Germany. In a way, so does his treatment.

https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/article/julia-bartel-signs-for-Chelsea

we have not even submitted a bid for Calafiori, wtf

hard pass

How PSR deadline impacted transfers: £323m of sales, questions marks and young players on the move https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5611939/2024/07/03/psr-transfer-Chelsea-aston-villa-newcastle/ June used to be known as domestic football’s dormant month. The shutters went down, staff summered and meaningful business all but ground to a halt. There was always scope for the odd super deal to be signed off — like Jude Bellingham’s move to Real Madrid or Erling Haaland joining Manchester City — but June was the organic divide between one season and another. Rest up and return in July to do it all over again. In the last two years, though, June has felt that little bit different in the Premier League. Relative serenity has given way to frantic dealings, all in the name of compliance with profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). This year felt even more frantic than last June. Not everyone is dragged in, but plenty of clubs had little choice but to sell players ahead of June 30 if they were to avoid the threat of a points deduction in 2024-25. The final 10 days of June saw six Premier League clubs — Chelsea, Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Everton and Leicester City — strike agreements to raise a reported £323million ($410m) through the sale of 15 players. This was a significant leap from the year prior, when £198million was raised through sales. And the sense of PSR hitting hard only grows when you look at the figure from 2022, when just £75m was raised through sales. Some of those last-ditch deals were not formally signed off until the opening days of July — and some are still to go through — but still served the same purpose. Accounting practices will allow for legally agreed transfers to be booked in the financial year that closed on Sunday, redressing losses and, most importantly, helping clear any PSR shortfalls. Forest, for example, saw Orel Mangala’s sale confirmed on Tuesday evening, while they will expect to get where they want to be once the proposed sale of Moussa Niakhate to Lyon is also complete. European football’s close season is not accustomed to weeks as chaotic as the one that has led us into a new financial year. The money raised by clubs was the equivalent of almost 15 per cent of all outgoing transfers in the Premier League last summer and, most strikingly, often involved mutually beneficial business. Nine transfers involved one financially challenged club buying from another. People at other Premier League clubs, who asked to be kept anonymous to protect relationships, questioned the values of the deals on more than one occasion. The quasi-transfer deadline of June 30 was around last season, as Chelsea’s glut of sales to recoup £141million underlined. The number of clubs seeking remedial work this summer heightened its intensity. Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa all accepted they had to sell at least one asset if they were to be PSR compliant, while the business done by Chelsea, Everton and Leicester suggested they also had accounting concerns. Players were bought in the process, but it was the selling that mattered. Especially if those were academy graduates or inexpensively recruited youngsters. That was where the “pure” profit could be found. Newcastle United could likely record £60million of profit in selling Elliot Anderson to Nottingham Forest and Yankuba Minteh to Brighton & Hove Albion, while Chelsea’s sale of Lewis Hall (Newcastle), Omari Hutchinson (Ipswich Town) and Ian Maatsen (Aston Villa) will see in the region of £80million added to their profit column. Aston Villa were another to benefit, selling Douglas Luiz to Juventus for £42million and Omari Kellyman to Chelsea for £19million. Everton did enough business of their own when shifting Lewis Dobbin (Aston Villa) and Ben Godfrey (Atalanta), while Leicester were convinced to take the £30million needed (from Chelsea) to part with their influential midfielder Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall just two months after winning the Championship title. Forest are yet to formally confirm their necessary business. But the transfer of Niakhate, on top of Newcastle-bound goalkeeper Odysseas Vlachodimos and Mangala, who has now joined Lyon, should spare them a second successive PSR charge coming next season. There has been a heavy air of desperation this last week that did not use to exist in the carefree weeks of summer. Barely a sale was done in June 2021 and in 2022 it was only moderately busier. There was Richarlison’s move to Tottenham Hotspur for £60million, announced on July 1, that gave a window into Everton’s looming problems. The only other clubs to sell so early in that summer were Liverpool (Sadio Mane to Al Nassr and Takumi Minamino to Monaco) and Manchester City (Gavin Bazunu, Southampton). Neither were then preoccupied with PSR problems, even if City have since been given 115 things to think about. Last summer saw the pattern begin. Although Wolverhampton Wanderers operate to a financial deadline of May 31, thus making June 30 an arbitrary date, they sold off Ruben Neves while the Saudi Pro League money was on the table. Leicester’s perilous position after relegation was eased by the £40million sale of James Maddison. And then there was the June business done by Chelsea last summer. Kai Havertz (Arsenal; £65million), Mateo Kovacic (Manchester City; £25million), Ruben Loftus-Cheek (AC Milan; £15million) Edouard Mendy (Al Ahli; £16million) and Kalidou Koulibaly (Al Hilal; £20million) were all moved on in time for their sales to be included in the 2022-23 accounts. Unlike Everton and Nottingham Forest, they were not found to be in breach despite lavish spending. Chelsea repeated the trick this June but others were forced to focus sharply on the new and artificial deadline. Newcastle’s weekend, in particular, was a manic microcosm of the fight for PSR compliance. That story is best told in detail, but the fact there was consideration given to selling Anthony Gordon and Alexander Isak, their two attacking favourites, illustrated the desperation of their plight. In the end, it was a 21-year-old local boy (Anderson) and a 19-year-old never to have featured for the first team (Minteh) that solved Newcastle’s problems in timely sales totalling £65million. The profile of the players sold across the Premier League captured the need for a quick accounting fix. There is nothing to be gained from off-loading players bought for big sums, given the ongoing amortisation of those costs. Instead, the instant hit comes from selling the rookies. Of the 16 players sold (or in the process of being sold) by Premier League clubs since the transfer window opened last month (including Taylor Harwood-Bellis’ move between Manchester City and Southampton), 10 were aged 22 or under. The average age of all sold has so far been 21.5. It is this new artificial deadline and all that comes with it — the convenient trades, the sacrificial lambs and the pressurised players — that leave plenty feeling uncomfortable. The clubs involved will insist they have been creative in attempts to level out a playing field skewed towards those able to spend more, and that accounting constraints will always lead towards loopholes being spotted. Rivals, though, have misgivings about how the last month has unfolded. A “number of clubs” requested clarification of the transfer rules, The Athletic has been told by people with knowledge of the situation, who have been kept anonymous to protect relationships. The Premier League then wrote to all 20 clubs in a circular. A reminder was given that the Premier League are entitled to investigate any deals it believes are not conducted at “arm’s length” and holds the power to request any information over how a fee was negotiated and determined. The Premier League, in theory, have the power to return a transfer fee to the buying club if it has been deemed to be artificially inflated. Every transfer of the last week will be subjected to the standard assessments of fair market value but the subjectivity of a player’s valuation, ultimately shaped by potential, makes it a difficult area to challenge clubs. The cynicism of others will not be enough to reverse deals. Changes are coming to the Premier League’s financial rules but, so long as annual accounts form part of the assessment, these late deals pushed through before June 30 may well be here to stay.

West Ham’s €30million transfer bid rejected for Nice defender Jean-Clair Todibo https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5613903/2024/07/03/jean-clair-todibo-west-ham-transfer/ West Ham United have seen a €30million (£25.4m, $32.3m) bid for Nice defender Jean-Clair Todibo rejected. The 24-year-old has emerged as a prime transfer target for West Ham this summer and their opening bid for the central defender was rejected earlier this week. There is still belief that a deal can be concluded for the Frenchman, with Nice open to cashing-in on him in this summer window. Manchester United had evaluated a deal for Todibo this summer but such a move was ruled out in light of UEFA guidance on multi-club ownership issued last month which warned clubs subject to multi-club ownership tests against such deals. Ligue 1 club Nice are owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s company INEOS, while they and United are currently waiting on a decision over whether they can both play in next season’s Europa League. Ratcliffe did not name the player, but confirmed that United cannot currently buy directly from Nice due to the ownership situation. Todibo initially joined Nice on a loan deal from Barcelona in January 2021 before making the move permanent that summer. He has played 119 matches for the French club, scoring one goal. West Ham have already completed deals to sign Brazilian teenage winger Luis Guilherme from Palmeiras and goalkeeper Wes Foderingham, a free agent, this summer. West Ham undergoing defensive overhaul Analysis from The Athletic’s West Ham correspondent Roshane Thomas West Ham are in the market for a centre-back with captain Kurt Zouma and Nayef Aguerd set for uncertain futures. Aguerd has attracted interest from former club Rennes and West Ham are open to offers for Zouma. Following Angelo Ogbonna’s release in June, Zouma, Aguerd and Konstantinos Mavropanos are the only recognised options in central defence. West Ham had a £25million offer for Max Kilman rejected by Wolverhampton Wanderers. Kilman is West Ham’s first choice, but Wolves value the defender at £45m. Kilman previously worked under head coach Julen Lopetegui at Wolves.

Never did that deep of a dive into him, as opposed to others on the list. I was more focused (remember that is almsot a year ago) on Estêvão Willian, etc.

great post

the post (he was the 2nd highest valued LWer on it): Best teen Brasilian players still available In order of valuation RW Estevão Willian Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras (16yo) CF Matheus Nascimento Botafogo de Futebol e Regatas AMF Matheus França CR Flamengo CB Robert Renan Zenit St. Petersburg AMF Luis Guilherme Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras LW Pedro Sport Club Corinthians Paulista CB Lucas Beraldo São Paulo Futebol Clube RW Sávio Girona FC (on loan from Troyes) CF Deivid Washington Santos FC DMF Alexsander Fluminense Football Club RW Biro Sport Club Corinthians Paulista CMF Marlon Gomes Clube de Regatas Vasco da Gama RB Vinícius Tobias Real Madrid Castilla (on loan from Shakhtar Donetsk) CMF Victor Hugo CR Flamengo CMF Rodriguinho São Paulo Futebol Clube RB Wesley CR Flamengo CF Giovane Sport Club Corinthians Paulista LW Wesley Sport Club Corinthians Paulista U20 <<<<<<<<<<<<<< RW Rayan Vitor Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama U20 DMF Gabriel Moscardo Sport Club Corinthians Paulista GK Mycael Club Athletico Paranaense LB Thauan Lara Sport Club Internacional LW Erick Marcus Clube de Regatas Vasco da Gama LW Caio São Paulo FC U20 RW Adyson América Futebol Clube (MG) CB Jean Pedroso Coritiba Foot Ball Club CF Kauã Elias Fluminense Football Club U20 CMF Bernardo Valim Botafogo Rio de Janeiro U20

it looks (and likely sounds) so much better in German! makes me sound like von Goethe

post of the month and the month is only 3 days old

so so many of my targets blowing away in the wind like dandelions next will probaly be Mamardashvili and Diogo Costa and maybe even (a bit cooler now due to age) Oblak whilst we suffer with Donkey Sanchez probably costing us 9 to 12 or so points in the EPL throughout the 38 games with a veritable cornucopia of blunders and howlers plus overall quotidian meh meh play

come on m8 we have overspent by hundreds of millions combined on players since 2017, when the nightmare windows started, many of them not from other EPL teams (do you want me to make a Vesper List© ???, lolol) the most common premium for EPL players has historically been the 'English Tax' for HG

he is not just any CB if he goes to Arse I predict he haunts us for year he is cut, IMHO, from the legendary Italian CB rock, and thsoe types almost NEVER leave Italy plus he will be a marketing star, massive commercial revenue generator look at the lad

FUCK gutted if we lose him J David and Cala are my two obessions this summer we could have BOTH for around what we paid for just CuCu do not get me started on Fofana, Mudryk, Rom, Caicedo, Enzo, Sterling (wages included) , Lavia, and DisASSi

£42m for him is a fucking STEAL we paid a combined £140m for CuCu and permawrecked Fofana ffs!!!!!!!

yes, Marbella likely in something like these:

Tiemoué Bakayoko is French, and never played in the Netherlands

they play a back 4 and their LCB Gabriel is tied with Bastoni as the most valued on the planet Calafiori can play LB but Arse has 4 LBs already

fair point, he is not that technical at all