That's more of a statement on how bad the refs are in this league though.

Yep. Felt we should have signed him when we sold Rhodes.

If anybody knows anything about watching this game without being in Bristol, I'd be amenable to a DM...

Combining your two posts, I'd say it's more like it's becoming a big part of the equation. As he said, we were converting at an unsustainable rate, and we have stopped sustaining it.

Pretty sure the player actually was Bulgarian. I think the time they put in was close to 10 seconds, so about half a second slower than Usain, but quicker than anyone you're likely to find in football! But yep the papers ran with it, I think even Sky quoted the running time. I thought it was Ivelin Popov, but I could be misremembering.

Well, not wherever he's been. 0 goals for Brighton. Had a season (2018/19) in the third German tier where he scored 6 in 35. Until 2020/21 season he played his whole career in the third German tier or below. Mostly below. In leagues of any note, he basically has two and a half seasons, where yes he has been about 1 in 2. The Belgian league is a mixed bag of teams though, some are trash, some play regular CL and would likely woop us. The 0 for Brighton comes from just 8 games and the Prem can be a tough nut to crack. Hopefully the Championship is the right level for him to get back on the goal trail. Can't see what Brighton would gain by sending him to Belgium again, he can't achieve anything there they haven't seen. Surely better to try and get him scoring in England. Sounds like this one will happen.

Tbf, whilst I agree with this post, you've always insisted that the best player should always be picked first, and that this (and loanees) doesn't block pathways for young players.

It's been claimed before that Pears is on something like 5k pw. Might be false (hopefully!), might be true, but if it's true then surely we will be paying at least 1.5x backup keeper wages anyway? I can't see Pompey covering the whole of a wage like that.

Funnily enough I was thinking about him earlier, and nearly mentioned him in the post, as I saw an old post of his in the BBD thread. Where he called it a waste of money because 'watch him leave for free' or something like that. Quite an accurate prediction it's looking like... Someone (I think Exiled) also predicted the club would do bugger all to take advantage of the BBD buzz in Chile.

I can't imagine Pears going on loan to League One frees up a whole ton of money, enough to permanently sign a new GK, so why does it slow the deal's conclusion? I sure hope we aren't signing this guy just so Pears can go on loan as some kind of favour to him. We already did him a huge favour - signing him in the first place.

Ok I'm getting sick of this false narrative that everyone wanted rid of him before the 21/22 season. I already tried to dispel it, at length, but I suspect the length of the post put many off reading it. Here's the simpler version: June 2021. Here are some comments from that page, during or just after a Chile match. 'Play the lad up front. Fuck Armstrong. Barcelona bound 😆 ' 'BB Diaz should have been playing for England tonight, better than anything on show at Wembley. ' 'At this rate, he’s going to be lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy in 2026. ' 'Majestic - first time we’ve all smiled this much at anything rovers related for a long while. He looks like a quality player and absolutely made up. Arturo Vidal slapping him on the back instead of Corrie Evans. ' 'Brereton does seem to be thriving in the Copa America. Let's hope he gets used properly by Blackburn next season, now we've seen what he can do in the right environment. ' Some of those are a bit tongue in cheek, but not all, and still not how people who want rid of him would talk. Also includes JB successfully raising £375 towards a giant Diaz flag. That's all on just one page. Going back a bit further to page 190, 30th May 2021, I see Tyrone asking if people would give him a new contract, and I see three people responding (Chaddy, Exiled Rover and TheRoversReturn) - all saying yes. So, can we all stop pretending everyone wanted rid of him that summer? Please? Some serious Mandela Effect shit going on here, and whilst I like balance, I'm even more a fan of accuracy.

On the plus side, it really doesn't matter a jot if the keeper was signed today or Monday. He won't be playing, and I don't think we even train the day before or the day after matches do we? Or if we do it's light training. Players are often able to meet their teammates and start settling in before signings are completed anyway.

" [U21] Games had previously been scheduled alongside first-team matches, but the majority have now been switched to Sundays, allowing players around the senior side, but lacking in minutes, to get opportunities to feature. " (LT article) Good, I said in this thread as soon as it was announced that this way made more sense.

You can do better than that, try again.

Either you don't really read my posts in general on here, or you have me confused with someone else. Not your first time either. I've never ever been in either the 'doom and gloom brigade' nor the 'happy clappers brigade'. I call everything as I see it on a case by case basis. Assuming that someone who criticises or praises the club is in one of those camps might be something that works fairly often, but there are also plenty on here who are willing to do both. In this very thread I can be found making counter points to things said by people I'm sure you'd mark as 'doom and gloomers', including in the post above the one of yours I'm quoting. Positivity, right. Mowbray is gone, thank fuck for that. We have a manager who is far more engaging, and the league position he has us in is something Mowbray only achieved even briefly in this division once (I also think we will slide further down the table yet in much the same way, as much writing is on the wall, but I'm not allowed to bring in balance right?). We have at least attempted to bring in somebody to deal with the contracts and player dealing that Swag proved inept at, and although I'm not sure his profile was quite right for the job, he's also not just some chancer, his past achievements hold a bit of promise, and I'm happy to give him more time. We have a vibrant young core to the team, a stellar academy for our level, and I think with just a few key additions we could become a real force in this league in the next season or two.

I disagree - we need football folk with a can do ABILITY. Just being positive doesn't magic things into reality like some seem to believe. You need confidence and ambition, yes, but you also need to be able to see the flaws and compensate for them. Plenty of managers around who can throw out passionate bluster, far less who can deliver on it.

No, I'd just believe it about as much as I did when we were gonna sign Beckham. And to flip it around a bit, I sometimes think that if they came out and said they could turn their piss into wine, 'you guys' would line up in front of their phalluses.

It wasn't a mistake. It's valuable for others in the fanbase to have this sort of information and viewpoint. I'd also suspect Swag got a different vibe from this meeting too, and saw that he can't always pull the wool over people's eyes.

Makes enough sense to me. One feasible explanation would be that the terms of the deal have been agreed, but Brighton need another target to come through so they're not left short on backups. I doubt they have a Venkys-style ownership situation, where everything gets arranged by underlings then presented to the owners to sign off, which would have been another feasible explanation if they did. Nobody for now. JB (spotty record I know, sorry JB) posted that he has heard this, the keeper and Porteous are all close, so the state of play may be about to change quite a bit. Personally I never really judge the window 20 days into it, unless we have had a major shortfall of numbers in some area of the pitch that needs addressing immediately. If we get to a few days left and nobody is in the building I'll get a bit antsy.

He means it's irritating for those who don't want to see any wrong in how the club operates. Because it's a glaringly obvious and pretty much indefensible failing.

This made me think...we used to be the best ran club in the country probably. Now we aren't even the best ran club beginning with 'B'. Not even close. You'd probably (begrudgingly) have to add Burnley to the list of B named clubs better ran than us.

27 ish is young (well, peak years usually) for a CB, but we were talking about resale value in the future. He cost 1.5 mill so we are talking 9-12 million for the 6-8x profit mentioned. I don't see how he proves himself enough for a team in the Prem (which is the only place such a bid could come from) to rate him to that sort of tune before he is about 29, at which point his age would make it still a bit of an offputting fee. Is it possible? Sure, but it's not a reasonable prediction to make at this juncture. If he were a striker, maybe. I thought Brittain had cost around 1.5 mill personally, as that was a figure quoted around the time (maybe what Barnsley wanted?), but the LT seems to have said it could rise to 7 figures, so we'll call it 1 mill (may be above that from the vague wording so seems fair, and for him to attract the sort of bids we are talking about he probably hits all his add ons). So £6-8 million needed for the profit multiplier stated. I'll assume 2 years again to impress Prem sides enough to gamble on him jumping up, so a 26 year old wingback who can attack effectively might be worth that, although he's also proving very injury prone which reduces the allure. I disagree with this repeated notion that everyone would have kicked off if he signed a new deal 2 years before this one expired. For one thing, as is oft said, who cares? We are often told the paid professionals running clubs know so much more than us, so it's not unreasonable to expect them to judge a situation better than us (or to have faith in someone they already sank a lot of money into). But moreover, it's just not true. Summer of 2021, Brereton had just finished his first decent season with us. I think there is a lot of rewriting of his history on here. His stratospheric improvement has cultivated the myth that he was dogshit, and then suddenly overnight, he was a machine, but it's bollocks. He was dogshit for his first two seasons with us. Then the pandemic happened, and in the behind closed doors games he grew in confidence and started being a useful member of the team. He was still unorthodox, a little clumsy at times, but he scored 7 in 40 games, many of which weren't full matches and saw him used mostly from the flanks, a decent enough Championship-level return from out wide. He was called up to Chile in May and in June he scored his first international goal and played against Messi's Argentina, now world champions. There was a bit of hype brewing about him in Chile and we were starting to see that there was a footballer in there, and glimpses of the talent we paid so much for. At this point it was clear he was at least a useful squad option with an effective skillset, with room to grow. There were 2 years left on his deal and anything could happen to his profile if some international games went well. Summer 2021 was actually the absolute perfect time to both observe that he probably was worth keeping around, and to agree reasonable terms. No, we didn't know he was going to smash 20 by halfway through next season (neither did he, so I'm sure his agent wasn't asking for 20-30k pw), but we knew he could fill a spot in the squad, we could see he and his stock may improve, we had a significant investment to protect with about a year max to resolve it before the difficult final year negotiations where the players hold the cards, and he had allegedly signed on pretty cheap wages initially. There was also a worthwhile marketing opportunity in Chile to engage in to recoup some money, though of course we didn't bother with that. Personally, just trying to recall anecdotally and unverifiably of course, I'd say there was about a 50-50 ish split in fans who would have been fine with him signing say, a 3-year deal with another year option on what I expect would have been reasonable wages. But we should expect the paid professionals running the club to have a much more than 50-50 chance of getting it right.

Nothing in this post refuted anything in mine, which it was quoting. Offering contracts doesn't mean you've managed the situation well, and if that's how you define it then you're easily impressed.

I don't want to speak for him, but I imagine it's more likely he is advocating proper planning and negotiation skills.

Show me a club of our level or above that lost 4 key players for free in two summers. If you can find any it won't be many. These things don't 'just happen', not on this scale, they happen due to incompetence.