Jype

So he's finally gone. Been wanting him gone since around 2017 when I finally gave up hope that he'll improve on his poor decision making. Had all the tools (technique, pace, work rate) to become a real world class player but his final ball never improved, thus a poor record in both goals and assists. On his day he was as good as anyone but at this level he needs to be at his best for more than two or three games a season. Not a bad player by any means and I'll thank him for his service to the club but I'm glad he's no longer a Chelsea player. Still, seeing him at fucking Arsenal is going to be weird to say the least. But I understand his reasoning, his family are really settled in London and if they are offering him the long-term contract he was after so badly the move makes a lot of sense for him. Similar to Cech and Luiz in that regard. Kind of funny that players move from Chelsea to Arsenal because they're no longer good enough and they still want to stay in London, but the other way around they move because of the trophies.

Yep, looks like it's not just the PL with shit VAR. Was big fan of the VAR system before this season but it's been a complete disaster.

They checked the penalty call on VAR. Abraham. It's a ridiculous call because the play continued for ~20 second after that slight offside (was like 20cm) and all their defenders had time to drop behind the ball before CHO's shot. But that's just VAR for ya, always looking for reasons to disallow goals. Completely against the spirit of the game.

So can't fill the 12 man bench even though there are six teenagers included who've played a total of 4 minutes PL football. The situation with injuries / suspensions is ridiculous. Reading on Twitter that RLC was set to start but was left out with a late setback. Can't seem to catch a break.

Moyes did say he considers Rice to be both his best midfielder and best CB, so the position he's been playing could be more of an indicator to the quality of other players they have over at West Ham rather than Rice himself. If they have decent enough CBs but no good alternative for Rice at DM, it's an easy choice to play him in midfield if he's good at both. I'd like to see how Rice does at a better team before making any judgment on what his best position is. At CB his level is still unknown but as a DM he's already quality and it would be worth having him for midfield alone and if he can develop into a good CB that's only a bonus. As a DM I see some of the same qualities in Rice than Nemanja Matic circa 2014 and he could be a really good sitting DM behind two more attacking-minded central midfielders (let's say Mount and Havertz).

That's probably true, but it doesn't mean Lampard wouldn't happily accept Reguilon instead of Chillwell if it meant £50M more money available for GK / CB signings. There are so many areas to improve in defense it would be incredibly stupid to spend so much money on Chillwell and settle for scraps in other areas if there's a 3x cheaper option at LB available who's pretty much the same level as Chillwell. If Real Madrid are really selling Reguilon, it's a no-brainer to get him. Price should be less than £25M.

It's not desperate if it's a club option. There's literally no risk for them that way, if anything it's better for them because if he's a big success and keeps his level going near the end of the contract they could just activate it and keep him for another year or if they're planning to sell him in two years they might even be able to get a small fee with the contract length being effectively two years due to the option (even without actually activating it). But like I said if it's some performance related option or if Willian himself has any say in whether to activate it or not, Arsenal have been totally duped.

If it's a club option, there's zero risk for them on the fourth year. If he's good enough three years from now for them to want to activate it, he has earned it. But if it's some appearance-related clause for an additional year, they're fucked. That way if his level goes down, they are effectively forced to do a Mesut Özil on him and freeze him out to prevent the option from being triggered while still having to pay him a big wage. Either way, 3 years is already too much. He'll be 35 by the time the contract is done and for a winger who's quite heavily reliant on pace and high work rate I can't see him age that well going closer to his mid 30s.

You totally should.

How the fuck should I know who gives him the info? But in big news like confirmed transfers Law very obviously gets briefed by someone directly inside the club on the details. It's crazy to suggest otherwise. The best football journalists in England have close ties to the clubs and get briefed when something big happens, just see yesterday's reports on the development of the Sancho deal and you'll see the journalists were clearly briefed by United because there's no way they would publish 100% same articles at the same time if they weren't briefed in advance. The journos usually specialize in one club only, like Matt Law with Chelsea. Yeah, and like I said that while it may well be true the signing fees are very rarely added up to the weekly wages in news reports. The £11M signing fee inflates his weekly wage for £40K/wk. Obviously on the club's financial records the one-off signing fee gets divided to the five year contract length just like the transfer fee etc. so in that regard it matters fuck all whether it's a signing fee or just a higher weekly salary but the only difference is how it gets reported in the media. I don't see signing fees added in media reports for other players so it's just the journalist going for a sensational headline by adding up everything. It may be true, but I'm just saying it's not how they are usually reported. But let's say for now that the overall £270K/wk figure is in fact true and £40K of that consists of the one-off signing fee which Werner has already been paid in full, that leaves £230K/wk. There's not that much of a difference to the £170K/wk reports that the British tier 1 sources were saying (BBC, Athletic, Matt Law) so I wouldn't rule out there being roughly £60K/wk worth of performance-related bonuses in Werner's contract depending on how many goals he scores, how the team perform in competitions etc. It could easily just be that BILD added all those up too and arrived at a total of £270K, no matter if the targets are ever reached or not. But I'm not saying I'm 100% right, just something I would assume based on the reports of good English journalists and my own comparison to other deals Chelsea have made lately (RLC, CHO contracts) which also included a lot of performance-related add-ons. For example CHO's wage reports in the media were all over the place, but putting piece by piece together I can quite confidently assume he makes a £120K/wk basic wage and has bonuses to potentially take it up to £180K/wk if he reaches all targets (this season he obviously didn't). No one is ruling out anything, just curious about as to why Werner's reported wage includes signing fee and possibly even some bonuses etc. all added together and pretty much every other players gets reported just their basic weekly wage. It's very obvious that Werner is getting paid a high wage by Chelsea's standards but I wouldn't just take £270K/wk at face value without looking at the specifics and compare that to all the other players in the squad. Also, have you actually read the detailed breakdown from BILD yourself or are you just going by snippets you read on the internet? It's behind a paywall so I haven't seen the full article, would be very interested in reading the whole thing if possible.

Matt Law has very close contacts directly at Chelsea too, why would he just go with what Bild are reporting without checking it by his own sources too? Would be quite unprofessional of him. Either way, I would assume there to be a bit of truth in both figures. £170K basic wage with bonuses to potentially take it up significantly if he does well. About the signing on fee, I wouldn't include that figure in his weekly wage to keep it more comparative to other players. Like I said before, pretty much any transfer has a signing fee included, the size of which is proportionate to the transfer fee and wages involved in the deal. If you want to include all signing fees and bonuses for Werner, you should probably include them for every other player too. If you include everything for Werner and go with the basic weekly wage for other players, you're only going to get confusing figures that have no correlation with each other. And while we were talking about Sancho, I have no doubt he will get also be getting a big signing fee at United too on top of his basic wage which going by reports will be somewhere between £250-340K/wk. He's definitely going to be making a lot more money overall than Timo, just going by the fact he will be United's record signing and they tend to pay significantly higher wages than Chelsea anyways. But that's their business, couldn't really care less. The date on the BBC article is literally from the day he signed, June 18th.

I'm pretty sure Matt Law and the BBC, for example, have their own sources and fact-checking too. I don't think it's a surprise that tier 1 sources in Germany report the figures higher and tier 1 sources in England report lower. Both have their own agendas and the truth is probably somewhere in between. And like you said, the BILD report even includes a signing on bonus to arrive at that total figure. Pretty much all player transfers include sizable signing-on fees but they're usually not summed up in the weekly wages except when the media has an agenda and wants to inflate the figures as high as they can. And like I said above, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the weekly wages were also tied to performance-bonuses. Obviously we can never know these things for sure without actually seeing the contract and tbh I couldn't really care less how much a player makes as long as he delivers on the pitch and the club can afford it.

Not really sure who to believe on Werner. All sources except Bild said it's around €10M/year. Could easily just be media bias to make it seem he only joined for the money because I would think many German journos would've wanted him to join Bayern eventually, or at least stay in the Bundesliga. And even if that figure is true, I'd think it's only £270K/wk with every possible bonus clause triggered. Many recent contracts (RLC, CHO especially) at the club were reported to include a lot of performance-related bonuses so I would assume that's the case for Werner too. A basic wage of €10M/year and another €5.5M in bonuses would seem fair enough, so if all clauses are reached he'd have played a hell of a season and it'd be money well spent. Of course the £270k/wk basic wage could be true too but somehow I doubt it. United on the other hand haven't favored performance-related contracts, and to be fair with the state the club's been in the last 7 years they've had to pay over the odds wages to attract good players or even keep their current best players from leaving. If Sancho on a €120M transfer gets anything less than £300K/wk his agent has done a bad job. Similar to the Kepa transfer, a crazy fee leads to crazy wages.

Yeah, on that I agree. In hindsight the good options would've been to either back him 100% or get rid as soon as the first cracks in the relationship appeared (for example the Diego Costa incident). No half-measures like spending a lot of money on shit second-rate signings and still end up with an unhappy manager. The situation is eerily similar at Inter now. Either the board have to suck up and accept his toxic personality moving forward or cut ties with him asap, anything else will only end up in tears.

Lukaku does seem like a really good fit for Conte's system though, 29 goals this season for Inter. If he'd joined instead of Morata in 2017 the following season would've 100% certain been much better (at least top4) and who knows, maybe Conte wouldn't have had his total meltdown and gotten sacked. Conte was desperate to get Lukaku, which is even more obvious now that he went and signed him for his next club. Can't say I regret the way things turned out with Conte now that the current project at the club is looking really exciting too but sometimes I do wonder what the team would look like if Conte had been backed properly and gotten the signings he wanted. He's a great manager tactically and even though some of his players look underwhelming to the outside, he knows exactly what he wants from his team and gets players who fit the system. While not all signings work out, Conte's teams overall are more often than not more than the sum of its parts. But as a person he's toxic as fuck so I don't really miss him. And yeah, under Sarri or Lampard I wouldn't want Lukaku anywhere near the team. But for Conte he's a great player.

Yep, exact same thing happened with Bruno Fernandes and Harry Maguire last season. In the end United ended up paying the full asking price anyway, this is just another case of them trying to flex their muscles. Don't think Dortmund will go lower on the asking price. They've been clear about it for a long time.

Yep. But the way everything has gone super quiet could easily mean the deal is all done and just waiting for confirmation as soon as Leverkusen's season is done.

Having Martial, Rashford, Greenwood and Sancho to rotate in 3 spots is perfectly fine though. One injury won't hurt them at all and it's not like they're all going to start 50 games a season anyway so more depth is definitely needed to keep everyone fresh and in form. Having one of those four to come off the bench instead of shit like Ighalo or Dan James will improve them massively and they're all still going to play a lot. Either way, them getting Sancho is similar to us being after Havertz. A position where quality signings are not necessarily desperately needed but will still improve the team a lot and if there's an chance to sign a potential world class talent unopposed you should always go for it, no matter positional needs.

And keeping him on the books will still cost £7M/year in amortisation and another £6M/year in wages for the next two seasons, so overall around £26M. If someone were to take him on loan and pay half his wages (£3M/year) it would still mean a total net loss of £10M on the 20/21 financial year and the problem would still remain the same next season. Better to just cut ties now and get rid of him if at all possible. But I can't see anyone willing to take him off our hands even for free, because his wages are too big for his current level and all the problems (fighting with team mates in training etc.) he would bring with him.

What on earth do players like Del Horno, Torres or Romeu got to do with a potential new signing in 2020? Just because they share a nationality with some bad signings doesn't mean they're automatically shit. That's borderline racist. And either way, there have been plenty good Spanish players at the club too. Azpi, Cesc, Mata, Costa and Pedro have all been either good or even great servants for the club in the last decade. Kovacic was also signed from the Spanish market and he's turned out okay. Reguilon is way more comfortable playing in a back four than Alonso. And being just 23yo he still has room to improve his overall game. The only question for me is whether Real Madrid are willing to sell him. They do have Ferland Mendy who they spent a lot of money on and Marcelo is still decent enough to play as a backup for a couple more years. Maybe they need to raise some funds but I'd be really surprised if they were to sell Reguilon on a permanent transfer. He'd be a way better signing than Telles or Tagliafico. Between Reguilon and Chillwell it's a close call based on their ability level but with Chillwell costing three times as much it's a no-brainer if only Real are open to selling.

Reguilon wouldn't be a bad signing, especially if the price was that low. He looked really good for Real Madrid last season and I was surprised they loaned him out. Been even better for Sevilla from what I've heard, haven't seen much of him there tho. I'd take Reguilon at £20M over Chillwell at £70M any day. He recently switched agents to Kia Joorabchian who has a good relationship with the Chelsea board so I'm not surprised to see this rumor pop up. Whether it actually happens is still very much up in the air.

Dunk is a good defender but Brighton would surely demand stupid money to sign him and he's not THAT good.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8497307/Borussia-Dortmund-Manchester-United-August-10-ultimatum-decide-Jadon-Sancho.html Dortmund long ago set a deadline for Sancho's future at August 10th while Havertz was always likely to take part in the EL with a transfer finalized only after Leverkusen finish their season first. So it's not that surprising really. Also, the Havertz deal only really became a realistic option around June but United have been all over Sancho since last year.

So that's him gone then. Bye bye, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Can't say I will miss him when he's gone. In the short term (first half of next season) I think the squad would still be better with Willian than without him, but it would be madness to give in to his demands and offer him a 3 year deal on super high wages just because there are some question marks on how fast Ziyech will settle in. No matter the circumstances Willian is not, nor has he ever been, worth the wages he's demanding and a 3 year deal would be ridiculous for a 32yo player.

Totally agree. For this season the expectation (at least for me) was a top6 finish and any success in the cups would only be a bonus. The total point tally at the end of the season was pretty close to what I expected last summer and usually 66 points would've meant a sixth place but luckily for us that was enough for fourth place this year. It's been a fun ride so far with Frank. Shown plenty of promise and got the team playing some nice football but there have been some obvious flaws too and next season he won't get a free pass anymore, especially with the amount of money he's gotten for new signings. With Werner, Ziyech guaranteed, Havertz almost in the bag and possibly a new goalkeeper and left-back in the team the minimum expectation should be around 80 points, which would be more than enough for a comfortable top4 finish. Cups are always unpredictable so aside from reaching the CL knockout stages I won't place any minimum targets on those competitions and any deep cup runs will still only be a bonus and not something I value that highly unless he goes and actually wins the CL. If Lampard fails to make a significant improvement on the league points total next season, some serious questions will have to be asked about whether or not he's the right man to lead this team to a title-challenge in the coming years. Scraping top4 with less than 70 points or missing out completely won't be acceptable anymore. I remain confident he'll get it right but he has to learn from his mistakes too. With better quality up front the 'easier' games should be killed off early with a 2-3 goal lead and a better keeper alone should be enough to shave 10 goals off the goals against column but Frank needs to get the team balance right and know when to commit more men forward and when to sit deeper. I refuse to accept that all the defenders turned shit overnight, a lot of the mistakes we've seen this season has to do with defensive coaching and organizing of the defense too. Whether or not Lamps can fix that remains to be seen.