Vegetable

We need both. We've seen our reasonably quality yet young players shitting their pants in CL games or getting carded like rookies by more experienced players. We need some mentors to lead the kids (and make them not want too much if needed).

There is supposed investigation due to St Maximin being too expensive at 35 million that raises possibility of Newcastle paying themselves via Saudis. Wonder if this possible 300 million of free FFP money for FFP respecting, oil money PSG will grab anyone's attention. Let me guess…

What guarantees 250 mil M'bappe being here for a year peforms anyhow similar to what he does in farmer's league? It's not FIFA / EA footy. What if he gets injured and misses substantial part of season? Would he even try, given he know where he is going after season and want to conserve fitness? Does he fit our tactic anyhow? We dropped any tactical regime for one player already with Lukaku and it didn't quite give us much profit. And do we need a guy holding his club hostage and acting bit like overemphasized version of Zlatan? Football is not one man show and sum of elements is much more effective than individual talent, something we had apparently understood this season and started implementing. No need to blow it out with gamble on Mbappe, which is uttery unrealistic anyway. No serious club is paying 300+ milion for a player for single season, so it leaves only PSG and Saudis in game.

As You said, they are a big club now 🤪 I don't think this stale mate was intentional actually, we for once decided to act like a serious club and stick to reasonable valuation, yet not making any concrete moves anymore and they were hoping for us giving up Colwill first and bidding war on their gem second, but all they heard back was crickets and no other club gave a toss, so not sure if they actually have any plan in place other than pathetic barking about their greatness and Rice costing 100 mil.

Except they will forcefully (?) retain unhappy key player, that they have shafted twice at this point. If he will drop his head down and kiss their badge after this instead of going ballistic on the club and agents involved, he may not be quite the Chelsea material I'm afraid. Just look what happened to Zyiech after the PSG mess-up. He couldn't be arsed much before, but he clocked out totally after this.

I don't really get the endgame here - We are tip-toeing around Brighton in some crazy way. Dragging it forever want give Caicedo a reason to kick a fuss. Make final offer as United made with Mount, take it or leave it. If we actually have plan B, open the talks publicly. I am afraid that all that Tchouaméni thing was made by us, but why not to actually explore it? 85 million is money that gives some possibilities. BTW, Brighton want Colwill AND cash for him? Rotfl. Don't get the Rice talk as well. Following this logic, we shouldn't have let Kova go for anything less than 500 million Pounds then.

Just red that Brighton has threatened to sue one of polish celeb-pundits at least twice, because he claimed that it was their physio's fault that Moder was out due to injury for so long. What's up with this club 🙄

Hopefully holding talks with Real 👀

Absolute scandal and shitshow if it happens, hope it's some Romano's fluke. Plus wonder how are they going to do this, since most of Russian banks except some national entities are supposedly banned from SWIFT. UPS them boxes of cash? Nah, even UPS is not providing service in Russia. Plus I can't imagine the government not batting an eye on someone trying to send 10 million Euro to Russia for something as non-essential as football player.

I wonder if it run through anybody's else head… what if in, say, six months Saudis decide "f*k that, we are not interested in football anyomore" and just not pay those players on crazy contracts? I wouldn't even be super surprised. And what you gonna do to them, shame them on Twitter? Month of a scandal, but they will pour some oil money to Europe and everyone will forget, business as usual.

I don't think this guy himself would be much of a problem, except maybe PR, but the problem is he is playing for Russian club. For the next two years or more it's a waste of energy to even discuss it. Still I'd stay away from trying to sound super cold reasonable and level-headed just because we'd like a player and looking for justification to make the situation morally clean. He had a chance to get the hell out of there. He knew what was coming. Russia is not Belarus where majority of society is against the dictator and is aware he is just a doll that fixes the elections. Imperialistic policy and "western enemies" has a lot of following. It's not like majority of society is caught in collateral damage, nor the Ukraine is the holy nation that some media is trying to make out of it, but it's heavy ot. Either he runs out his contract or buys it out or we can forget the guy playing in western world anytime soon.

Agree with that, people seem to be dead set on selling him for sake of it, but if he is supposed to be mainy doing cardio shifts, why not do them for us? He is HG, seems level-headed, good ethics, eager to work and eager to train, people will be crying we need this kind of players next week. He is atm just a squad player, but if we were supposed to sell him just for sake of it for a laughable 35 million and then convert this 35 million into 1,65 random brasilian children, what's the point?

GABA, Rhodiola and ginseng are the hot stuff since years, so surely our Dr Foo Fighter will take a look into this, since they've come to conclusion that Sterling "just needs to eat bit less" after, like, whole season 😂

As ridiculous and idiotic as this headline sounded, he was refering to him getting bulked up and it's not unheard of slim players losing their advantages after getting some muscle, still quite hard to believe it took him whole year to notice this…

It was often said Azpi is too nice and not vocal enough to be a captain, he was more of the office leader, than field leader. For years we lacked someone ready to go full Ballack on refs and opposition feeling too well sometimes. It felt quite weird to me when Kepa was carrying the armband and why should Enzo have anything to do with our captaincy I have no idea.

It boggles my mind that Chelsea decided not to even leak to media that we are after Tchouaméni, so f*k Brighton and Caicedo to put more pressure on them. Apparently we are the nice guys now, but nice guys rarely rock the world. Fun thing is that given that apparently we have another 45 million to shit on Olise whoever he is with all due respect, we could actually make it happen as Tchouaméni wouldn't be *that* expensive.

This guy supposedly wanted to have a say in transfers and basically a board position in PSG, like we are not dumpster fire enough after the take over. Again, one thing I really respected this club for is that we somehow avoided drama queens and shitheads when recruiting, no matter how good of footballers they were, and I really hope it stays this way.

Still, the inflation of this as some groundbreaking success last year was absurd. Overperformed? Yes, but the headline story and something to copy, especially by us for some reason? Hell no, it's not some kind of miraculous stuff. The most respect I have for people responsible for their transfers as they seem to have build up some decent and cohesive pack on budget. Shame we don't have Jose nor anyone of his character around anymore. He'd mop the floor with this fella and rub it in 5 seconds after it was published.

During which they've achieved mid-table 😅 Said it million times perhaps, success was Leicester getting the championship, not lower-end team becoming mid for a season.

Oh, right no point in this then, unless the fee is symbolic or none, but reports are Saudis are actually interested this kind of "business". Talk about shady money operations. La Gazzetta dello Sport reports Lukaku tried to apologize to Inter and claim he wants the transfer again 😂😂

Why not? You've got 1 year of highly probable decent output, shirt sales skyrocket, media coverage and given he won't turn to trash or get injured, sell him on a profit to recover some of his wages. I absolutely don't want him here with his attitude, but it would be for us what Felix was supposed to be I guess. On the other hand I doubt he will go anywhere to waste a year. Do you imagine him having Newcastle in his CV for single season during prime years?

It's hard for me to believe that technical director "didn't have clear role", as it's a very clear role. Rather it was hard to manage certain fields as club have put other people in place to manage it anyway and the structure doesn't seem very vertical - it's more of a collective it seems. Reminds me a bit of what was reported as an owner's first clash with Tuchel, "different views" etc. Maybe modern German football philosophy is completely incompatible with what is happening in this club, and it would be rather sad, as RB's or Bayern aren't bad run teams anyway.

It's beyond me why won't we pull out of dealing with Brighton for sole sake of negotations/publicity stunt, just like Inter did with Lukaku the first time. The window isn't closing tomorrow. Utterly soft people in those terms seem to lead the club's business.

So, the club conducted "long, insightful, careful, data-driven blahblahblah" process to recruit second choice director in the end, only to later recruit people overlapping his job, ending up with what we all see - another mess and trying to pull three different strategies of operation at once, a particular thing that he was hired to avoid? At least with Roman we knew who was in charge - it was either him or Marina. Now it seems like we have "board of directors", board of owners and who knows who else, everyone pulling in his own direction and putting people supposed to mitigate it in position doesn't seem to mitigate it much after all.

Brighton may rate him "as highly as Rice" (that btw doesn't sound very tempting) , but maybe it's time to point to them that they are the only ones doing so, hence lack of other offers and our reluctance to piss away even more cash than we were about to do