https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/sport/football/portsmouth-fc/portsmouth-boss-message-over-future-of-prized-assets-linked-with-swansea-city-blackburn-rovers-co-3764264 Former targets Ronan Curtis and Marcus Harness for sale as they enter the last year of their deals. Article says Curtis believed to be valued at about 500k, which is a lot less than when we were looking previously (though I've heard on here he hasn't done too well for them recently) and Harness it just says they'd want to recoup the 800k they paid Burton for him. Which might mean the minimum is 800k, or that it would do the job. Course, we might not be interested anymore under the new regime. Both are 26 years old. Harness scored 11 in 40 games in the league last season, with 6 assists, Curtis scored 8 in 43, and 8 assists, which was his weakest goals return in the last 4 seasons. He's been good for 10 or 11 goals usually, though of course in League One. From what posters have said about his attitude previously, I'd swerve Curtis personally. Harness scored the vast majority of his goals in the first half of last season, when I think we were discussing him and Twine a lot, as they had similar goal numbers at that point. Seems like Harness' season dwindled after that, although Curtis and Harness are ostensibly wingers but seem to get moved around the pitch a fair bit so he may just have been moved further back. I'm not really inspired by the idea of either, although they seem to be going cheap, our budget is low, and we need players.

Also, if anyone is wondering what the stretched points of light are, that's something called gravitational lensing. I believe all of those bits are galaxies, as it's something that happens when light from an incredibly distant object is warped by gravity of nearer objects. This can actually enable us to see things we couldn't normally, which would be obscured by something else, because the bend of space-time causes light to follow a different path and stretch around it. On the Webb image, the red light will be all or mostly from particularly ancient galaxies. The light is so old that its wavelength has stretched out and it shows up better in the infrared. This is why Webb was made, to be able to see things that Hubble never could by operating in the infrared. This does also mean it isn't as good at seeing visible light as Hubble, but overall it will really take us to the next level of understanding the cosmos. Some of the galaxies we can see now are older than any we have seen before, including from Spitzer, a cheaper, less advanced infrared space telescope that ran out of fuel in 2020.

On this point, here is an image of Webb (on the left) vs Hubble (right) covering the same area of space. If you want to compare specific points of the photos, just mentally rotate the Hubble one slightly anti-clockwise until they line up. The star to Hubble's right, with the lengthy red smudge line to the right of it, is a good point of reference for this rotation, being easily identifiable on the Webb pic. But you don't really need to do that to see how much better the new photos are.

Yes, we've just chosen to ignore it and talk about unrelated bollocks instead, like what feet centre backs should use.

But, he is a foreign striker, he's Chilean! 😂

If we end up playing 3 CBs, 2 of them are going to be left-footed or 2 of them are going to be right-footed, so it won't matter. (Obviously unless we find someone genuinely ambidextrous)

I suspect at least 5% of the huge number of posts is people complaining about the huge number of posts or our lack of activity.

I have to assume that by 'outscoring anyone' he really meant 'anyone' rather than 'everyone'. And yeh there's a small chance he would outscore Kaminski.

I'm talking relatively too. 1 million plus wages to borrow a player who sold for 500k two seasons ago, didn't play at all in that first season, then was loaned back to this level where he made 23 appearances for Sheff U is relatively bloody high. It's like paying 100k up front for that 50k BMW. His market value absolutely certainly isn't anything like 20 million, I dunno where you get that notion. He wouldn't be getting loaned down to the Championship for the second year running at age 26 if that were the case.

Our lease payments in this case aren't fuck all. A million is more than Liverpool actually paid for the player so not sure about it funding depreciation in this case. As for someone permanent at 2 million being less beneficial in terms of risk, that entirely depends on the player. That's 2/3 of the cost of the highly-rated lad we lost out on to Sheff U. Be mad to go from owning a 23 year old to having someone in for just a year instead and not costing much less.

True but at under 5s there isn't anything even vaguely resembling a guarantee that the player is as good as they seem, and they haven't put in that much work into developing them yet. Phillips on the other hand is on the verge of our first team at 17 and we have developed him for years.

https://footballleagueworld.co.uk/sources-late-interest-emerges-as-middlesbrough-look-to-strike-deal-for-ex-blackburn-rovers-man/ Two French clubs looking to hijack Nyambe's move to Boro. I'd certainly prefer he moved leagues, strengthening a rival for free with one (or two in Boro's case) of our academy products is particularly galling.

Well you're more optimistic than I am. I'm sure those clubs intend to sign players.

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