You’ve seen some of the Championship -> Premier League transfer fees for attackers, right?

It’s terrible recruitment. They’ve not spent 7m on him for no reason. They thought he had everything and was good value.

Rhodes had scored 1 Championship goal when we signed him. Gestede was playing in Cardiff’s reserves. It’s not illogical to think that Brereton - who had scored a few for Forest and had brilliant ‘scouting’ reviews and Gallagher who had already been successful for us would score a fair amount of goals.

We’ve been very close though at points. They hoped Brereton and Gallagher would be scoring Rhodes and Gestede amounts of goals - if we had that sort of firepower on top of being close, we would have been top 6. The striker signings haven’t worked - yet - and we’ve been unlucky with injuries. That’s the reality.

Yep league 1 doesn’t count. The Dack injury is massive - if we had him available to sell in Summer, or January (much to Mani’s disappointment!) we would be in a position where despite being close to FFP we can spend, as we had an asset worth millions to FFP ready to be cashed in at any point. We could have got 20m for Dack at basically any point we wanted. If Dack didn’t get injured we would be spending THIS window. We haven’t bothered scouting players between 3-5 million for no reason. We can afford to buy them if we have a Dack sale in our back pockets. We can’t if we don’t. I can’t express just how much of an asset having a player signed for 750K and sold for 20M is in FFP terms. It’s basically a PlayStation cheat code and gives you a license to go from loses of about 38m over three seasons to just under 60m over three seasons.

Yes that first sentence is exactly right - it’s rolling over a three year period, based on the current year and previous two. The approach the board have made is actually very clever, and suits a club like ourselves who’s owners are happy to invest. When Waggot talks about the Brentford model they don’t just mean buy cheap sell high as a model, they’re also talking about the FFP approach. What Brentford have been very good at is having the resource available to spend when they see a player that will improve them quickly (Jansson, Raya etc) but also having the right approach to buying players which means should they ever be close to the FFP threshold they can immediately sell players which the system likes - Maupay, Mepham, Konsa. We tried similar with Brereton and Gallagher being our equivalent to Jansson and Raya - but it hasn’t yet worked out. We have also been really unlucky with injuries. If we had Lenihan, Cunningham, Dack plus the strikers we had hoped for we would be top 6 and it would have worked.

He isn’t selling Adidas trainers. He’s offering to customise your existing trainers. You provide him with the trainers, he customises.

Thats not how FFP works - it’s done in three year cycles. If it was as you say it, you’d get clubs doing literally as you say - one year big fees, if not promoted have a year off. This is part of what FFP is designed to stop, which is why it’s based over 3 years not 12 months. There’s three options: 1) Sell a player for a big profit - note the word profit, selling Brereton for 5m does nothing for us in FFP. FFP doesn’t mind you buying big as long as you’re selling bigger. 2) Take another 2.5 seasons working with frees, loans and cheap buys - then go big in season three. This is essentially what we’ve just done - you put 2 years of no significant outgoings against 1 year of higher spending, essentially you spend 3 years worth of budget in one year. 3) Develop and sell academy players - FFP likes this route a lot, it’s ‘pure’ profit.

If we are close to the FFP limit, the way it works means we can either expect up to 3 years before we can “go for it” again, or a big outgoing very soon. Not sure who we could sell with Dack out. Essentially the signings of Brereton and Gallagher will take 3 years to recover from.

JRC has a Burnley tattoo - we can all get over things.

Walton Nyambe Lenihan Tosin Bell Holtby Travis Downing JRC Gally Arma Id love to see this!

Stop talking to people about it on here then?

Is Ryan Namibia’s greatest ever footballer?

The board is up and down and has been since yesterday - not sure how many have experienced problems, but check our twitter as that’s where we keep people in the loop.

If you get there at a decent time, you can park directly between the terrace houses and the Jack Walker stand for free and get away from the game straight away. It used to be monitored but isn’t this season.

Jesus. Some interview is this. https://www.rovers.co.uk/news/2020/january/boss-explains-mulgrews-return/

Further evidence that I know absolutely nothing about football.

Sorry Charlie but you’re on 20 grand a week and have signed a contract to say Wigan are going to pay 50% of that. We don’t have 10 grand a week spare for you to play in our reserves.

Why on earth would we pay him off when we had someone paying a % of his wages? If we’re paying him off that should have happened the minute after Wigan stopped paying him. If he’s going he should be going for a fee or staying at Wigan.

Well well well...

...why has he been let go by an MLS team?

That is categorically not what the players thought. If the fee was agreed he was off, his side was agreed.

Nonsense - if the playing squad are aware, the manager is aware. No way is that not fed back to the manager.

Side note, Silas is right.

Have you considered that crying because of boos today could just be the final straw? Perhaps he’s very handsomely paid and has a beautiful partner... but loves playing football and his dream move to become a star striker is falling apart because he hasn’t been given opportunities to shine upfront, and when he has it just hasn’t happened for him. Perhaps he’s having all sorts of family trouble, Nottingham is just a bit too far away, his partner is staying down there because she can’t do her job up here and doesn’t want to become a wag. Perhaps he himself has no idea what’s going wrong. Perhaps he’s up all night worrying because everything he did at Forest that worked brilliantly seems to fail here, and he just can’t understand why. Perhaps, just perhaps, despite the 6m transfer and massive wage increase, the promises he was given just haven’t materialised and suddenly the transfer is the single worst thing he’s ever done. I suggest you read Matt Jansens book when he talks about returning from injury. I have edited out my final comment on this post because on reflection it may not have been fair.