Lighthouse

Which will be about £10-15m next summer and £0 the summer after. We aren’t going to let a player run down his contract and lose up to £25m, especially if he doesn’t even want to be here. £10m should buy us a very good replacement for Championship level, with a net surplus of £15m.

Ahhhh this is what I love about the PL. At any given moment in time the glory supporting armchair fans of at least three ‘big clubs’ are having an absolute mare.

It’s a bit more than we paid for him, which makes sense as he hasn’t really gone beyond what he was back then. When we agreed a fee of part of his loan, he was a top quality Championship player who’d just got promoted with Burnley. Now he’s a top quality Championship player who’s just reached the playoffs with Southampton. We can’t just demand more because we want it. £25m is about the ceiling for a Championship defender, I can’t think of any off hand who’ve sold for more. It’d be our record signing if we were buying him.

Looks like his ‘one home league win since 2021’ stat survives for another fortnight.

I'll admit I did have some doubt at half time. Sorry no, trout. I had some trout at half time.

None of that means that we can’t expect anything other than defeat against a Stoke team who, man for man, I wouldn’t swap a single player for any of ours. Eighth is not realistic, it’d be disastrous with the players we have and the money we spent on them. Usually that’s in the region of seventy-ish points. This team should be getting mid to high nineties before the minus four is applied.

We’re still a far better team than Stoke, and indeed most of this league, even without THB. Clearly we’re weaker without him but anything other than a win in this game is unacceptable.

Arsenal not wasting money on lube tonight. Coventry look very open at the back, including at set pieces.

We'll struggle to get £10m for those players combined, I'd say three or four of them will end up as loans. Their wages are the real, real issue, we simply cannot afford to have them on the wage bill come September.

He said what he had to in order to get the best money possible for the players we sell. If he’d said what you suggested it’d probably have knocked a couple of million off the Charles and potential THB fees. It was mooted by one of the local journalists, I forget who, that we’d need a net transfer surplus of around £50m to conform with PSR this year.

I think you may have taken his interview a little bit too literally. He was hardly going to come out and say, "yeah we’ll probably have to sell two of our better players to balance out the wages vs. Income from not getting promoted." That unfortunately is the reality of the situation.

I think you’re going to be disappointed TBH, Championship defenders don’t tend to go for deals touching on £35m. It’s far more likely that the add ons will take us into £25m territory, maybe close to £30m at the top end, but I wouldn’t expect more.

We can if they’re worth a lot of money, which is needed to balance the books.

There’re plenty of negative comments because in the two competitive games he’s played for us he has been poor and nobody is really sure if he fits into our team. Nobody is writing him off, he may come good.

This squad should be top four, even with the points deduction. There's absolutely no way I'd be happy finishing seventh with the players we have available. For reference the team in eighth place last year (Derby) was fifteen points off the autos, that is absolutely not acceptable for the amount of money we've spent.