tajjuk

I mean yeh they have just made a signing to the women's team, so hopefully that is not counting as the two medicals.

It must be hard for the club to identify how to improve our defence considering it was so up and down last year, early-mid part of the season we were defensively solid, we just seem to have an ability to concede lots of goals in single games. 8 clean sheets is not terrible, and then we conceded only 1 in 7 other games, but then shipped 6 v Chelsea, 4 against Leicester, Liverpool, Villa, 3 against Brentford, Wolves, Arsenal, Chelsea and Everton. Which is 33 goals in just 9 games. Man City only scored once against us in 2 games and Man Utd only managed 2 goals in 2 games, we also managed clean sheets against Arsenal and West Ham, but somehow ship 3 to Brentford and 4 to Villa.

We must be approaching what £60 million ish spend with literally no sales.

I mean getting better value, iirc a while back the owners son was mouthing off on twitter about potential signings and iirc they did go for Pellegrini's targets, so I'd presume something has changed behind the scenes with their transfer strategy.

Spot on, you only have to look at the expensive flops from the likes of Everton, Man Utd, Arsenal, Spurs or even someone like Villa to see spending big (which we don't have) doesn't seem to work out well that often. Hell West Ham have had their own collection of expensive flops and have actually improved with some better scouted and cheaper signings like Coufal, Soucek, Bowen etc.

whoscored has him as 'gets fouled often', 'commits fouls often' and the scout report in the other thread said he was mainly used as lone striker in a 4-5-1, so that involves a lot of playing with his back to goal, link up etc. so he'd have to have something about him physically to do that. Plus the scout report also mentions he is good defensively tracking back when needed and pressing from the front. The Toulon tournament video I thought showed him brushing off challenges pretty well, so overall I think he should be fine. Not expecting him to be some sort of target man but seems to have decent physical size and enough about him. Plus if he gets fouled a lot then more JWP free kick chances!

Continues the summer signings trait of non-small players, I think every single one of our signings has been at least 6 foot. The entire team is going to tower over JWP at this rate!

Supposedly played most of the time up front on his own in a 4-5-1 system and Bordeaux were trash last year so it looks like he did as much as he could. He's also 6' and looks like he gets fouled a lot, gets stuck in and takes a few bashings in that video above, so not sure on 'lighweight'/

More top flight experience at 19 than Broja has, just saying. Also kind of knew we'd have something come out leftfield. 6 goals for a bottom club from the equivalent of about 10 full games (minutes wise) is not bad to be fair.

If you go through the top scorers in the major European leagues, anyone who scored 15+ is either - 1. Established major stars at big clubs and never gettable for us, i.e Lewa, Benzema, Shichk, Immobile, Vlahovic etc. 2. Or old like Aspas or Modeste. Ben Yedder etc. 3. Or already moved like Haller or Adeyemi or Nunez etc. Someone not in those sort of brackets, like say Terrier from Rennes (21 goals last season) or Scamacca (16 in Serie A) they are talking about £30 million plus fees for them. Also there were only about 6 ish players in those leagues (per league) that got 15 or more goals last year. Jonathan David is about the only one that might be a shout, 22, double figures in the league for every pro season he has had, potential to grow and Lille finished mid table last year and I think might have money issues. But he'd be expensive and probably would want to join someone better than us. Raul De Thomas is a wildcard option, good season last year for a poor Espanyol side, regular scorer in his career but 27 and still being linked with £30 million ish fees. I think realistically we just aren't going to pick someone up with a good goal record.

He's been a free agent for 3 weeks and no one has picked him up so far, so not seeing how he's a 'no-brainer', he's old, not particularly fast, got relegated and played in a Burnley team that defended deep in their box making him untested in more progressive systems. To me he screams Championship defender.

I get that, we made such a fast start securing highly rated players quickly that it set the bar pretty high and makes this mini-lull in transfers feel more worrying than it probably is. Forster was only fine for a little bit and the rest of the season we had a poor McCarthy, plus you've only mentioned one centre-back there which highlights the issue, we only had one reliable centre-back last year (and he went through some poor form). So really if you think of our back 5, nearly one half of that wasn't performing very well which is going to cause issues for any defence no matter how good the other parts are. I feel pretty confident we have upgrade our GK and whilst Bella-Kotchap is a bit more unknown he doesn't have a very high bar to clear to improve the team, plus by the sounds of it he is more suited to how we play. Add in we have I believe a new AM who specialises more in defensive set up to take the strain off Ralpha and we have in Lavia a centre-mid who offers pace and power that we don't really have in our current midfield options despite JWP and Romeu being good players. So that gives us different options to use and we could potentially see more 3 in the middle set ups as well. Overall as a package, new GK, new CB, new defensive mid offering skills lacking in the group, new coach who specialises in defensive set up I feel more comfortable with our defensive ability.

From one half game yes, but the guy has been getting rave reviews since he was 16, everyone who has worked with him has spoken highly of him and how good he is, he was excellent for Pompey (albeit league 1) and has been excellent for ROI as well, including some key games against quality teams like Serbia and Portugal. So I think him making a confident start against a good team like Leipzig only adds to what has gone before that all points to him being an already good GK and potentially great one in the future. I can see him getting the no.1 jersey pretty quickly and not giving it up any time soon.

Yes I am sure you are more knowledgeable than academic researchers at the LSE The amount of head burying going on is just staggering. Just accept reality, Brexit is a flop, it sucks, we are the worst recovering G7 country from the pandemic and that is purely down to Brexit. It's also why NI is the best performing part of the UK, because it's still in the single market. As that quote above says, it's a self inflicted wound and was totally avoidable.

The warnings make sense because the UK population time and time again proves themselves to be complete idiots. They don't need to do it in other countries because they are used to it, they stay in the shade, they drink plenty of water etc. We have a population that go prancing around in the midday sun without sun cream on and burn like lobsters.

'Struggling'? We haven't even started the season yet, how can we be 'struggling'. At no point last year were we really involved in a relegation battle. Most players would prefer to play in the PL and playing at the highest level is surely best for their development. We also will have better coaches and facilities as well. Also Burnley have lost most of their good players, seemingly are in debt and have a relatively inexperienced manager, they could just as easily be struggling in the Championship next year.

True but as an example Broja seems to be pushing hard for a permanent move rather than another loan, so you'd think Delpa himself would be pushing for a similar move if its there. I am also not sure a loan to Burnley in the Championship is likely to change things massively. We've already plucked high scoring players out of the championship in Armstrong and Che for around the £15 million mark, I don't think anyone is suddenly paying £25-30 million for Delap if he scores say 20 goals in the Championship. It also seems a convenient link considering its Kompany who is their manager, old Man City legend gets Man City youngsters on loan.

Delap is what 19? Haaland is 21, Alvarez is 21 and despite having no strikers most of last season he didn't get much of a look in, and they now have two players barely older than him, surely the guy wants more than loan moves and can see there is no real pathway to the team for him?

People were 'loving' Villa's last year and that didn't go that well. Also Palace have only signed Johnstone (meh), a guy from a mid table side in Ligue 1 and a young kid from Derby, and one of their stand out players last year was Gallagher who they haven't replaced. They very easily could go down IMO, their defence is not stellar and like us they have a distinct lack of goals seeing as Edouard (another player everyone was raving about) didn't really cut it. Also Zaha only has a year left on his deal and he scored double the goals of anyone else in their squad (and the person who scored the next highest was Gallagher!), if he finally gets his move they will be massively in trouble I reckon.

Possible but for Mane they'd have to be adding like the sell on clause to Salzburg when we sold him to Liverpool for the fee to almost double what it was. Ings is still our record transfer and the fee for him was around £20 million and Carillo was about £19 million, we haven't gone over £20 million yet. Pretty much every transfer we have done, at least on initial fees pretty much is in the £10-15 million bracket.

Most of those figures do not look right at all. Mane was like £12 million, Vestergaard was definitely less than £20 million.

Yeh but they would do that to let him go on loan as well. They seemingly want a loan or a buy back at the very least it seems

He's agree terms but doesn't look like Chelsea have agreed and seem to want to keep him.

Very difficult to judger the standard of the MLS, most players usually coming out of that league go to a lesser European league first and then progress up to a to 5 league.

Yeh pointed this out a while back, when you look at recent history of non 'big 6' PL clubs going big on transfer fees, the record is not very good, most of them are relative flops compared to their transfer fee. The only like £30 - 40 million signings that a mid table PL club have made in recent years to my recollection that have come good are Tielemans for Leicester and Jimenez for Wolves, both of whom were bought after successful loans so 'safer buys'. You could also add to that list - Ings 30M, Sander Berge 25M, Wesley Moraes 22M, Ayoze Perez 30M, Felipe Anderson 36M. Even the likes of Spurs, Arsenal and Utd, you could put a lot of their failures down to massively over paying for not very good players, like Pepe, Ndombele, Maguire etc. The PL collectively spends an absurd amount of money on players, but rarely seems to actually get good value from them