They had the same owners as Udinese I believe it was. They got quite a few players from there, mostly or entirely on loan. I assume at very reasonable rates if any cost at all. I don't remember hearing anything about them getting in trouble for it, though I feel like it eventually stopped for some reason (rule change?). Maybe they're still doing it, I dunno. It was seen, probably rightly, as being a way to skirt FFP rules by getting good players for bugger all, and it helped them get promoted. I don't know if it ever went as far as Udinese actually buying a player just so they could loan them to Watford without it ruining Watford's books. They did have an excellent youth system at the time though, and may have sent the odd bought player who wasn't cutting the mustard in Serie A.

For who? You don't mean us do you? I don't think an injury-hit season in League Two is going to get him in the squad here, at least when Pickering and Ribeiro are fit. Think it would be more beneficial for him to have another loan, at least til January.

IMO, multi club ownership should just be banned. There is zero reason the sport needs it, and it raises too many dubious scenarios.

I know it isn't, I was just giving it as an example in the absence of full figures. I read it properly, don't worry 😉 But since only 400 of the 1500 clubs who got anything would be eligible for upwards of 100k, I can't imagine we would be on for much more than that. So it seemed a reasonable example to use. Agreed a full breakdown would have been more indicative, though that's a lot of figures to trawl through.

I think that's harsh about the DoF. I don't think he's fit for the role, but you can't say he knows so little about football you could put it on the back of a postage stamp. He was a professional footballer and played in the Premiership. He will know a lot more about football than a lot of us on here do. He just has no credentials to be a DoF at a club of this level, nor has shown any competence other than in sucking up to his superiors and towing the company line for his own advancement.

It's a nice idea but they should at least double it. 100k sort of figures won't make much material difference to most clubs receiving funds (and none to us, as you say...even though being 250k down on season ticket sales is apparently a massive deal to us, 18 million quid sales don't affect budgets). We are one of the better producing second tier sort of teams around, and we will only benefit from Raya and in future Wharton. 100k isn't much at this level, if we're even eligible for that much. Most teams contributing multiple of CL players will be from Europe's top tiers. 100k to a Prem club doesn't even register for them.

Having any kind of minutes target for playing academy players is an outright admission of wanting to play young players for the sake of it rather than when they're ready.

And that was 18 million of very cheap. 300k (which according to Sufi is major money to us) isn't even worth mentioning. Besides, we've already been told transfers out make zero impact on the budget, so it will be interesting if the charlatans still try to make out that selling players benefits us. They probably will.

I can only assume you're talking about Chaddy and rf99, not me. That would also have no correlation to talking about Yates as if he was a replacement for Boggan though.

'Blackburn could soon have a pressing need to bring Yates to Ewood Park if young striker Joe Boggan is sold by the Rovers, after Football Insider revealed that five clubs across Europe want the 17-year-old.' That's an incredibly strange thing to say. Why would losing a youth striker, with zero first team appearances (including on the bench I think) with more U18 appearances last season than U21, necessitate us, in any way, getting a 28 year old first team striker? I'll file this under 'they don't know what they're talking about'.

Pull the other one Chaddy. You repeat yourself on here all the time. If you genuinely can't see that, it's not for me to go dredging up posts, it's for you to have a good think about it. You and RF99 have had so many circular discussions I can't even count. And it's not necessarily a criticism, we all repeat our points on here. I'm just saying don't throw stones in glass houses.

Why is it ok for you to make the same comments repeatedly but not for others?

Agreed. But I'd take him for about half that. Maybe a smidge more.

You know why. Starts with inc, ends with tence.

I don't have any confusion, I read it fine the first time. You're getting overly literal with it. And Ipswich invested enough that they would have failed FFP without promotion, as another poster stated. Venkys simply won't do that. Automatic promotion isn't a conversation we should even bother having here, we have neither the funding nor the competence. Sneaking into the playoffs is the best we can hope for under this outfit.

Then they immediately said a bit of luck would do it and quoted two clubs who did it that way without parachute payments. It clearly wasn't a literal statement but an emphasis on the difficulty.

That isn't what they said, and they also gave examples of such clubs going up.

He hasn't been here long. Or, apparently, asked around much before joining. He'll learn. It will break him. He'll leave. They'll find the next naive out of work manager and the joyous cycle will repeat.

I found myself highly irritated by these comments from Yasir Sufi (who once had a great reputation for doing sterling community work, and shouldn't have moved into this commercial role): “So we can't afford to lose a quarter of a million pounds in season ticket income to be competitive on the football pitch." Yes we fucking can! We probably spent more than that on the pointless Dennis loan. We threw away orders of magnitude more than that by letting the contracts of numerous saleable assets run out over the last few years. We brought in even larger orders of magnitude more by selling Wharton, Szmodics, Gallagher, Raya's sell-on clause, the impending Wharton sell-on clause, etc. The owners are fucking billionaires who are allegedly happy to fund us and only held back by that pesky FFP (or I would say that pesky perpetual court case, but we've been assured that's not an issue even though their funding has now become the minimum). On top of which, the reduced ticket revenue is hardly just down to a lower price. Every year, the fanbase becomes more and more disillusioned with the farcical cancer that presides over the club. Every time we are poised for the playoffs in January and the board and owners sabotage us with incompetence and a vacuum of ambition, more fans finally think 'fuck this I'm off'. But no, fuck all that, lets suck every penny out of this deprived northern town and chase more of our dwindling fanbase away forever because 250k is gonna make any fucking difference to our competitiveness, when sales amounting to tens of millions don't impact our fucking budget!

And not even the 2 years you predicted, not guaranteed anyway....1, with the option of another. Which gives us the opportunity to 'sign' him again next summer and fill a role again. Transfer market genius!

The entire way the club is ran is a recipe for a power struggle.

I would guess (top to bottom) chief, lead, senior. But it's all corporate cockwaffle.

Well that last part is definitively not true. The first part is right though.

That's abysmal. It's one thing if the story leaks before the player is informed, it's another thing to announce it publicly, in any forum let alone social media, before the very simple task of informing the player. Basic decency. Expect us to follow suit.

Hope we take the same approach to JRC, who has a similar fitness record. And costs a lot more to keep.