In the case of tramways, they need to be much better value than the one Blackpool Council put in near where I live...I'm struggling to find the exact length of it for some reason, all I can find is planning permission from 2017 that said it was for 422 metres, so well under half a KM. It's definitely not very long, stretching from near the train station Blackpool North to the promenade, so 422 metres sounds about right. The cost? £23.4 million! Just to appease lazy fuckers who can't walk 10 minutes or less to the train station. A couple of years ago I was told it was the most expensive tram track per metre in Europe. Obviously this country has lots of issues with planning permission, bureaucracy etc, and we need to improve those to improve our infrastructure. Oh not to mention, it massively affected footfall for businesses in the locality for quite a long time. But overall I do agree public transport infrastructure improvements are massively needed. Before I could drive about 7-8 years ago, if I was going from Blackpool to Darwen, I had to go to Preston, then Blackburn, then Darwen. The connect at Blackburn was a brief window, so if one of my first two trains was delayed by about 5 minutes, I would have to wait at Blackburn for nearly an hour to get the next train to Darwen. Even though it's a very short journey and the towns virtually bleed into each other. A total joke and one of the things that made me finally learn to drive. The train tickets for this bullshit journey also cost similar or more than the petrol. Future battery techs reaching scale production in the next few years should enable buses to go electric, and that could really help without any need for new tracks laying down. Similarly, the Tesla Semi and other developing electric lorries are a very important step. Goods transportation is a huge driver of emissions, so this could take a lot of pollution out of the equation. They can also save businesses huge amounts in the medium to long term due to the fuel savings on those beasts. The Tesla Semi has been tested with Pepsi, who have been very happy with it. I think one estimate I saw said the extra initial investment in one of them vs an ICE truck would be recouped in about 1-2 years, depending on Tesla's final launch price not changing too much.

Personally, I think depreciation is only really a big deal if you're the sort of person that likes to (and can afford to) buy new cars and switch them out for another one a few years later. If you look at your EV as a long-term investment you plan to drive for at least 10 years, and you don't feel the need to buy new cars, then instead you should look for what is the best actual car, and in particular how likely it is to need maintenance or battery replacements (newer battery chemistries won't need that inside 10-15 years, maybe much longer in some cases), and efficiency per kWh. If you're the sort of person that buys used cars, I'd say the large depreciations on some EVs are actually a huge plus as you can take advantage of them when buying.

See above.

Tell that to the person above that I quoted pointing out I myself was only assuming based on a hunch 😉 I only quoted your post to mention it because I have experience over many years on here of somebody saying something like you said, and before you know it the next 3 pages are full of people assuming it's an absolute fact. I'm not having a pop or anything. Just the way that one post was phrased and one or two reacted to it made me think it was about to happen again. You're fully entitled to speculate, obviously.

There's a fairly simple explanation to that I think (well, two) - transfer fees aren't paid all at once, and yearly accounts are complex. Granted, fees we pay aren't all at once either, but spend-shy Venkys will probably have wanted money in the bank before we committed. The accounts are what FFP is drawn from, and sometimes you have costs from a couple of years ago still weighing them down, and all kinds of other weird shit the accountants on here know more about. Amortisation, etc etc. Shouldn't be forgotten that Armstrong was sold during Covid either, when we, like everyone else, had a deficit in income. I think from memory this was around £3-5 million? Probably equal, or close, to a year of the Armstrong installments I imagine. So spending the next installment a year after that makes sense in that context. And as always some gets swallowed into other costs, and if the installments were larger than I'm assuming that probably happened to the excess too. So some should have been spent last summer...but we already know Venkys hamstrung us with their ludicrous court case. All the noise from people at the club, official and unofficial, seemed to suggest they were primed to spend a little bit until that crap happened. Again, nobody should get me wrong, the majority of fees received gets hoovered up into losses and we reinvest a pitiful amount of it. But I don't think it's true that money we receive is irrelevant, or that no matter how much we receive we won't spend anything whatsoever, as is often suggested. It will be a shit portion of what we receive and the club/owners are stupid not to recognise that modest spend has yielded huge returns in the past, but we need to maximise sales and it does contribute towards what we can spend (or sometimes just towards not having to sell even more).

I know that, thanks. In the absence of clear information, you get speculation. That's what the vast majority of this thread will be. I think my assumptions are logical though. A loan fee will be separate to a transfer fee. If Arsenal had an option rather than obligation to buy, I can't see how the loan fee will be included in calculations for the sale profit unless we've explicitly stated it in our deal with Brentford, and we're not top tier negotiators by any stretch, as it isn't a sale.

I didn't say Brentford owe us anything. But it's financial chicanery from a club who already got the bargain of a lifetime out of us and have blatantly used shifty accounting to turn a £30 mill transfer into a £27 million transfer on the books. We should write our clauses better in future and ensure loan fees are amalgamated into any sell-ons, but I'm more than entitled to have a bitter taste in my mouth about it.

Everyone else, for the sake of stopping a snowball effect from a Chinese whisper - there are no reports there is an £8 mill release clause to PL teams. This is something Forever Blue has assumed on the basis of a Tweet by a supposed ITK, who hasn't said there's an 8 mill release clause to PL teams. By God we're beyond stupid if we put something like that in his newest deal. New contracts are supposed to give us security, not reduce it. If the 8 mill claim is true, I find it more likely it's just our own asking price. Which is still us being stupid, but is perhaps from some sense of obligation to the player. Or of course, that might not be true at all given there have been previous reports our opening asking price is 15 mill.

I agree, we've been more than fucking generous enough with sales in recent years. Raya, Kaminski, Wharton, Cairney, Phillips, Finneran about to be poached, Lenihan, Nyambe, Rothwell...our pants are already down so much they're subterranean. What we owe Sammie is just not asking ludicrous prices like £20 million. We owe him a move at a fair market value, and we owe that to ourselves too. A penny under £10 million is a joke. Asking price should be about £14 mill, we should settle for about £12 mill. Side note, I don't agree that the money makes 'no difference'. We have a very poor reinvestment rate from transfers, but it's not non-existent. If we hadn't sold Armstrong etc and instead had given everyone away for free, would we have signed Hyam, Brittain, even Szmodics? Nope. It matters what money we bring in, it's just that very little of it will be reinvested. Some years none will, but even if it means we don't have to sell yet another player to make ends meet it still contributes. It's still a fucking bullshit situation but we do need to ensure we extract every penny from sales (something we are bad at).

I've been a bit confused by this deal. When the loan was signed it was very much described as an obligation to buy, with the implication it was triggered when he played a certain amount of games. Given that he played 41 games for them this season I'd expect any obligations clauses have been met. And yet now it's being talked about as though it's totally up to Arsenal. This tweet also firms up something I suspected at the time. The fee was described as £30 million but with a loan fee of £3 million. Now it's a £27 mill option...I'm pretty sure Brentford have conspired to fuck us out of a bit of our clause. We will get a percent of profit on the £27 million, not on the £30 million. Suppose it could have been worse, like a £15 million loan and £15 million purchase, but that sort of distortion would probably have opened the door for us to sue (much in the way that clubs didn't get in trouble with FFP when they were selling their stadium naming rights or whatever, but they did when the figures received were ludicrously out of whack with market values). Pretty cheapskate from a Prem club tbh, the 450k I believe it amounts to is nothing to them, but probably equal to or higher than a shirt sponsor for us. I'd expect the add-ons in Raya's initial deal have been mostly met too, so we've probably already had about 5 mill for him total, meaning we'll get 15% of £22 million, which is £3.3 million. (Yeh yeh, it will all get swallowed by Venkys anyway, who cares, blah blah, don't be boring and quote me saying that please)

I think you mean his inexperience wasn't favoured in a relegation battle. He barely had a sniff, and scored when given one in the cup. I don't think we can say he isn't pushing on, he hasn't played enough in the seniors (should have, IMO) and has been tearing up the U21s, which he hadn't really done previously.

The press are quite heavily saying he's off to Newcastle.

Sorry Chaddy, but your views here would hold a lot more weight if you had been critical of JDT and GB at the time. But when you only criticise them after they leave, it upholds the view that you defend nearly everything the club does. Maybe consider this next time personnel at the club are being criticised. If you're willing to accept criticisms of club staff, even if you're also defending correct decisions (that's the balance I try to strike, honest criticism, honest defence), you won't be mocked for it on here when you do a 180. Btw I think you've been making quite good posts in this thread for the most part. I'm not having a go, but you undermine your own future arguments by staunchly defending the club's staff even when they're indefensible.

39m over three seasons is 13m a season, so 20m minus 13m means a 7m deficit per season. Or 21m total. Armstrong and the STC raised about 30m. And that's before we consider Kaminski, the Raya money, Phillips, Wharton...

What more do I want? Well I'd like you to make sense, ideally. My point wasn't that Waggott has been here for a number of years. My point was that your highlighting he had been here for a number of years only shows that an incompetent member of staff was kept around here well past his sell by date, which doesn't strengthen any point you were making.

I haven't. You've undermined your argument but don't seem to be able to see it.

Then why mention it? It might be stability in one area of the staff, but it's the area we don't want stability because the current incumbent is dogshit, and is probably a good portion of the reason other staff turnover is high. The fact we have had the same useless CEO for 6 years is part of the problem.

Unless the rules have changed, or Red Bull are owners of the club, I believe it should all help with FFP.

Do you think that's a good thing considering who it is?

People will choose to be the way they are, indeed. You do realise that your track record of predicted spend pretty much never matches the actual spend, right? Possible exception of the summer of 2022 where we spent a little, but I feel like you expected around 10 million spent. Hard to remember 2 years back though.

The players you want to sell wouldn't bring in enough money to bring in replacements that were particularly any better, not with our scouting. Let alone bring in the additional ones you mention.

https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/24355889.middlesbrough-example-may-offer-hint-sam-szmodics-future/ LT claim Galatasaray's reported interest is real. Personally I think Ipswich are the most likely destination. We like to get rimmed off freshly promoted teams who haven't been heavyweights for a long time (or ever in Luton's case) and Ipswich have already been sniffing around us this season, as Travis and Gallagher show. Given no real re-sale value, his transfer profile suits a side who can afford him with freshly acquired Prem money to boost a low wage squad, and know they are likely to come back down to this level, at which Szmodics is a monster. If he shows his worth in the Prem he could keep them up or earn a move for a similar or better fee, or they come down and he helps them make a fist of going back up. If they're interested I think that's where he will probably end up.

The point was to show his goals in the same number of seconds as there were goals scored though. I think there's a clip elsewhere of all his goals this season with a bit more time spent on them. What a finisher!

As I've covered in the U21 thread, I'm confident Phillips would have played as many or more games here than he did at Plymouth. He was awfully young last season and was bound to develop and get a chance when injuries and suspensions hit. No need to sign McFadz then. Then he could have moved to a club for a proper fee and been earning about 30 times his salary, with more chance of breaking into the Prem team he moved to. Ya know, like a certain Adam Wharton.

I've literally never heard of him. I see he has played 47 league games this season for Leeds though, who are a better side than us, at the age of 18. So I can see why they'd be asking for a lot, and they have more financial power than us so can stick to their guns more comfortably. That's nearly double what we got for Wharton though. I'd be surprised if anyone pays that for a Championship midfielder, in which case it won't matter how much they demanded.