Jype

I actually would have preferred if he kept it tbh but what's done is done.

I can only imagine the scenario. Two club chairmans having an MMA match and the loser has to buy Torres for £15m.

Nah, he can make a legacy for himself wearing the odd 28 shirt.

This will definitely be my year, last season I held the lead for most of the season but let it slip in the end. We Go Again, as a certain Liverpool player would say. Anyone here up for a little private league on the side with some money involved? :eyebrows:

Yay, let's keep paying £18.5m annually for Torres because he's got a shitload of facebook likes.

It's much worse than that if we think about it further. Deduct manufacturing costs, Adidas' share of the profits, taxes and whatever additional costs there may be and the club are lucky to get even £20 per shirt so the total amount would need to be significantly higher than 1.3 million. Also, people who buy the shirts are mostly fans of the club who would buy one with someone else's name on the back if Torres wasn't around so in reality the amount of money Torres has earned the club through merchandise sales matters fuck all if the costs are £80m+. In another news, I just read on AS that Simeone has green-lit a bid for Torres. As they say, it's the hope that kills you.

All these sources are quoting Eurosport, nothing to get excited about unfortunately.

http://www.oddschecker.com/football/football-specials/fernando-torres/club-after-summer-transfer-window On 888Sport.com they have odds of 7/5 that Torres will still be at Chelsea come September (Atletico are 3/5). Talk about a win-win situation, bet a lot of money on him staying at Chelsea and if by some miracle he does leave then who the fuck cares about some lost money if the ladyboy is finally gone?

Hardly anyone is questioning Lukaku's talent, it's more a case of people being fed up with the attitude he's shown towards the club with his comments to the media. Of course the opposition fans think even more highly of him if he's badmouthing Chelsea because they agree with him whereas we naturally think he's full of shit when he's saying those things.

If it was true in the first place I would guess it had something to do with Jorge Mendes being Tiago's agent and them still having an ongoing contract between them. Anyway, doesn't matter anymore now that he re-signed with Atletico. Good for him, although I would have liked having him back. Wouldn't be too worried about the homegrown quota. It's true that we don't have enough of them at the moment, only the three you mentioned and maybe Lukaku too if the rules are like I've always assumed them to be, but we can still have a big enough squad even if we left a few HG places unregistered. 17 non-HG, three or four HG and a few U21s is more than enough to have a full 23-24 man squad. We just need to make some room to the squad if the plan is to add any more players but I'm sure the club will take care of that. At the moment it's not looking likely that we'll be adding any players other than Drogba to the team and we'll only need to offload two players to be able to register everyone and having guys like Torres, Mikel, Romeu, MvG and three non-HG goalkeepers I'd say it's not impossible to sell or loan enough players to make room for everyone else.

Jorge Mendes owns a part of Tiago's economical rights so we'd have to pay him some money to get Tiago because in England these part-ownerships are not allowed. No such problem in Spain.

How is it official?

At least in that one picture he looks a lot like Javier Mascherano with that haircut.

This "we're only defending ourselves" argument is just sad. @CFC_4EVER, let's say you're at a bar and you have an argument with another lad. The argument turns heated and you push him but you don't really hurt anyone yet. Would it be better to try and solve the matter like human beings or is it then okay for the other lad and his friends to take out baseball bats and beat you to death, and maybe go on and do the same thing to your friends and family? That's pretty much the same level of overkill as Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza and killing thousands of civilians in the name of "self defense".

"Atletico Madrid sources and sources close to Fernando Torres have flatly denied negotiations as reported by Eurosport" [Mundo Deportivo]

Today is Monday.

Manchester City's Negredo out for three months with a fractured foot.

20 goals in 53 games for Galatasaray is not a bad return and the Turkish league is a lot better than people here are giving credit for. Drogba knows the club and Mourinho inside and out so adaptation would be quick and I feel he can still contribute a lot as a third choice striker / coach. Costa, Lukaku and Drogba would be a perfect strikeforce IMO, though first there's just this small matter off telling Torres he's not wanted anymore and finding him a new club. Easier said than done I'm afraid.

Well, they did pay David Villa €160k a week + bonuses last season and they've now got him off the wage bill. Paying high wages is not unheard of at Atletico. While even the €160k figure is not close to Torres' current wages, approximately €220k a week, I would assume he's willing to accept a little less to re-join Atletico, the club he supposedly loves.

If the board manage to get £50m for Luiz and £13m for Torres in the same window, someone deserves a raise.

Plenty of people do the respectable thing by joining another club and taking a pay cut if they feel they're not good enough for a big club and don't want to be a burden anymore. For example Kaká took a pay cut from €10m to just €4m a year when he left Real Madrid for Milan last year. That being said it's definitely not the norm among these greedy modern footballers and I perfectly understand Torres if he desperately wants to hold onto the contract that was given to him but then again going to a smaller club might make him actually enjoy playing again, not to mention it going a long way in getting the Chelsea fans to remember him more fondly as compared to the abuse he'll get if he actually stays till the end of the contract and further hinders the club's development. I suppose it's just a matter of what kind of a person he is and what he values most. He has already earned himself a ridiculous fortune after playing a decade of top level football and earning tens of millions in the process so he doesn't really need the money but he's more than entitled for it, having signed a legally binding contract. Winston Bogarde signed one too but that doesn't make him any less of a cunt. You can't really compare his situation to regular people like us because none of us here are multi-millionaires, at least not that I know of.

Of course it's legal, happens all the time. With Torres that's not going to happen because no team will consider him to be worth even a fraction of the wages he's earning.

Of course, I fully trust them to do what needs to be done but what I meant was that we can start speculating on who will be left out. We have a very balanced squad at the moment and there's not many players in there we could afford to lose without it affecting the strength of the team, maybe one of the three non-HG keepers, Mikel, one of Romeu / Van Ginkel and dare I say Torres. Personally I would be delighted if the club pulled the trigger on the ladyboy and left him out of the squad but that's not very likely unless we somehow miraculously managed to sell or loan him.

Before even going into the discussion on whether or not bringing him back is a good idea, I would raise an important subject the club needs to solve if we sign Drogba and that is the HG quota. We had a discussion earlier today in the Victor Moses thread about the team's homegrown status for the season and as it stands our squad is already full with one player even missing out (Van Ginkel, Romeu, Mikel, Schwarzer, Cech or whoever, take your pick). If the plan is to still add Drogba and Tiago is coming back too like the rumours suggest, we're going to have to make room for them by offloading some of the existing non-HG players. Players like Lukaku, Zouma, Aké etc. will still be U21 so they won't matter but some of the others have to go.

Going back to Middlesbrough for another season, good for him.