Have Boro sold one of their CBs? I was under the impression they were already pretty well stocked there before they signed Lenihan, I was surprised to see them linked with another CB who probably won't come cheap.

Or we could get relegated by having too thin a squad. No issue with signing them (though I'd prefer permanent to an expensive loan) but we have to work within our budget to get the squad depth to an acceptable level. The size of the budget is how we measure the sign of ambition.

I think it's usually that the scale of it all either scares people or they don't understand it well enough. Some people don't have a sense of wonder about the big picture and only care about the small picture of their mundane daily lives. I've also heard people moan things like 'what are we doing fannying about spending money looking at the stars and building spaceships to barren planets when we have all these problems down here? Put the money into fixing homelessness' etc. I can understand that thought process, but it's very shortsighted. Plenty of tech advances have come from the study and exploration of space, too many to name, but satellites and everything we get from them, like GPS, are the most obvious. Science is very interconnected too, so some ways it has pushed us forward are less obvious. Longer term, there is a strong chance we will need a second home even if we don't hothouse ourselves into extinction. Also, things like asteroid mining can bring practically limitless resources without having to despoil the Earth to get them. But sometimes, knowledge is its own reward, with the sense of awe and expansion of minds it can provoke.

Agree on Van Hecke not returning, but why would you spunk the whole budget on two players (one of them just a loan) when we need 6+?

I remember a time where people a fair bit older than me were calling the internet and smart phones 'garbage' and the like. I do agree that NFTs are mostly a load of old bollocks, but the metaverse has a good chance of being the future of social media. Which might in turn make NFTs viable, garbage/bollocks or not. I don't see very much market in a club like us selling them to fans though, not any time soon at least. And they'll still be a mug's game, but if the metaverse becomes as prevalent as some think, buying stuff in it could take on a bizarre amount of social prestige. Basically, an NFT is an electronic proof of ownership in a sense. The easiest example to explain it is digital art. An artist makes their art digitally, and encodes it into an NFT. The NFT uses blockchain tech (basically like a digital ledger of sorts) so the owner can verify they are the true owner. Where it gets a bit daft is that the digital art (well, the image) will usually be available online to pretty much anyone for free. But only the NFT holder truly 'owns' it. I guess it's a bit like owning the original of an artwork rather than a perfect copy, and that already changes art values enormously, so it's not much different in that sense. Although art has long been a ludicrous bubble world of its own.

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages All the initial images revealed today.

He's not a prospect, he's 27 in August. I remember we supposedly paid a £1 mill loan fee for Tosin (and I think that was partly because we wouldn't cover most of his wages) but apart from that I've not heard of us paying that kind of loan fee. If we have been doing that routinely for most of our loans we have really been fucking ourselves and not making the most of our budget.

Thought there'd already be a thread for this but doesn't look like it. We have just started getting the first official completed images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble. Decades in development, it's quite the upgrade and will allow us to look at some of the very oldest galaxies, up to 13.2 billion years old, which is about 600 million years after the Big Bang. Below is the first completed image they revealed yesterday. What's mind-blowing is that if you took a grain of sand and held it up to the night sky at arm's length, that grain would cover the same portion of the night sky that this image is showing! A lot of these points of light, maybe even most of them, aren't just stars. They're entire galaxies with billions of stars in them. All in a grain of sand's worth of what we look out on every night. The scale of the universe is mind-boggling, really puts all our petty squabbles and power struggles into perspective. On the actual full resolution image you can zoom into those blurs of light and see galaxies in surprising detail, testament to the power of our new $10 billion toy. Much of what you're looking at doesn't look the same anymore, as the light from them has taken billions of years to arrive here. Webb was initially planned to search for these oldest galaxies to help us better understand the Big Bang and the early physics of the universe but another huge part of its mission is now to study exoplanets (planets in solar systems other than ours) and figure out what kind of atmospheres they have, which will help us in the search for life. Right now they're dropping the other initial images, and there'll be more every week. It's a NASA project, but there has been plenty of collaboration with other space agencies, especially ESA (European Space Agency). It's going to revolutionise what we know about the cosmos. Edit - the image isn't coming up as clearly as the one I copied, so here's a link to the image on NASA's site. I don't think this is the full quality version but it's still a fair bit sharper than the one I've posted: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet

Hope not. Even at 25-30k if that's what he's on, plus a million, is 2 to 2.25 million just to have him for a season. Fuck that. I'd rather put it towards a permanent signing there.

Another source I saw said 60k too. He was moving to one of the biggest sides in world football when they had a defensive crisis, and the fee was puny. So his agent clearly did what agents do and scored him a very good deal with the difference. He must have negotiated a lot harder than Preston did (not surprising, same club that let Dolan go for free). The average Prem salary is 75k I think I read the other day, so although it's outlandish to us, it really isn't to Liverpool.

I dunno, Burnley scoring 20 million for an inexperienced CB seems more annoying than anything else. It's more than enough money to score a good replacement for this level and have left over to strengthen other areas.

There is no way Nixon is right about us taking on Ben Davies' full wages. He's on 60k a week at Liverpool. https://empireofthekop.substack.com/p/eotk-insider-opinion-ben-davies-wages

Not even what I was saying, at any point of the discussion we had. I absolutely am letting it drop now, as I tried to in the last post, but here you are again. Keep it up if you want but I really am done, no more replies from me, you do what makes you feel best.

Another pathetic reply Tomphil, where you confuse your petulance and overreaction for being mine, and standing by your flimsy argument, so I agree, I'll leave you to it and move on.

Wow. Yeh really disproving the notion that you're the one being a dick here eh? Firstly I didn't say it was 'seriously' provocative, I said it was provocative. Which it is, because it's a demeaning reply rather than actually giving your counterpoint. It's not how polite discussion works on a messageboard. I responded in kind, and the fact it got you wound up enough to start calling me a dick only shows that's not how you start a discussion unless you want it to devolve. Don't give it if you can't take it Tomphil. Anyway you finally 'explained it' but you seem confused. You start by going on about budget, which wasn't really the discussion, as I never mentioned what our budget was in League One, or how well we did, only what our gates were. You had initially said that if it came down to gate money dictating budget, we would be mid-table in League One. So I took all those other factors away that you're adding in now, and kept to your own point of gates, and showed we had the third best in League One. So no, if it came down to purely gate money dictating budget, we would have the third best budget in League One, based on our last stint. 7th based on last season's crowds in that league which have since gone up, still firmly in the top third rather than squarely in the middle. This also ignores that there were also 9 teams in the Championship this season who had worse crowds. I see your version of me not thinking it through involved you tossing in unrelated matters, future speculated decline based on being in and staying down in a league we aren't even in yet, and other budgetary factors to your initial point, as well as ignoring other clubs' potential for decline under the same model, so I can see why you confused yourself there. Now I'm not sure what's gotten into you today because you're not usually like this, but you should probably go and do something relaxing as the lack of transfers seems to have put you on edge.

Oh please. As if replying to my post with 'Not really thought that through have you' wasn't provocative. And giving you some snark back makes me the dick, even though you're the one throwing an actual insult at me. And refusing to back up your claim, which the evidence refutes. I'll let others decide who is being a dick here.

I'd question the drive of anybody who, at 31, just spent two seasons in China.

Oh do enlighten me. What with you having said we would be in the middle for attendances and me presenting the fact we were third, I'm curious how you think I'm the one who hasn't thought this through.

I think we got an indication at some point, something like 15-20% I think. Could be misremembering though.

Berget having contract talks with Malmo. And Birmanevic thought to be outside our price range as other European clubs circle. https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/20270780.jo-inge-berget-malmo-contract-talks-amid-blackburn-rovers-links/

Well we were 3rd for attendances in the season we spent down there, so I don't think so.

Are you referring to the UEFA changes, which I assumed only applied to clubs who qualify for European competition? I was under the impression the EFL sets its own 'FFP' rules.

Those who think promotion is on the cards are in for a long season.

He has never played a Premiership game. It would be a risk for any such team.

Same reason we have done it repeatedly in the past.