Redslo

What if he would rather put up?

which might be 13m.

Why would you think this finishes our summer business. We still have two squad openings (three if Martina goes because of this signing). There is no reason to think they will be left empty with all the games we have this years.

Not sure why I am set to UTC, but thank you for explaining things.

I guess I am confused. It looked like a tweet at 10:40 pm and a post at 9:41 pm. Maybe I have accidentally set something for one time zone west of England. Is there a way I can fix that?

I am confused. Why is the time on the tweet later than the time of the first post in this thread.

http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/31/manchester-united-weighing-up-transfer-move-for-jose-fonte-6040739/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football/1531887/everton-boss-ronald-koeman-wants-to-reunite-with-jose-fonte-but-manchester-united-are-also-interested/ http://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2016/07/31/report-mourinho-considers-raid-for-southampton-star-jose-fonte-a/ http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/manchester-united-transfer-target-jose-8535608#1dXqFCfGrVK0Rbzq.97 The only one that quotes a price is 9m offered by Everton. That seems too low to be worth accepting. It would make more sense to let the contract run out and keep him for two more years. Also, I am not sure what benefit it is to Fonte to skip Europe to play for Everton this year. On the other hand, crazy Manchester United money might be worth accepting. Fonte would get a big raise and we would get more than enough money to replace him. Of course, there is a big risk in losing the defensive leader, but he was the leader under Koeman who is gone. Given his age, we have probably seen the best of Fonte (and Puel has not really seen anything of Fonte) so if we want to sell him for good money now is the time. He would sell for virtually nothing next year. Who knows, maybe VVD is lined up to be the new captain already.

That is at least an answer, but I am not convinced it is realistic. What proven quality can we buy that would actually improve our squad given that we cannot win a bidding war with the richer clubs either in terms of transfer fees or player salaries. For that matter, I am not even sure that it is possible to reliably identify proven quality in a way that makes it a good buy when compared to good potential. I suspect that Austin is the closest we can come to buying proven quality.

Still a weird post to resurrect right now.

Batman is underestimating the scale of the problem since we sold Juanmi too. Of course, it is ambition. These are players that a few years ago would have been kept on lower pay further into the contract thereby increasing the chances that they would have had to be sold and for less money. It shows an intent to keep the team together or make the richer clubs pay more money to break it up again. That more money can (and probably will) be used to sign better new players. There is no guarantee that any particular model will always work but this model seems like the most plausible model to work for a club in Southampton's position. I am puzzled as to what the people who think we should show more ambition want to see. Sure, Ms. Liebherr could put 10 to 15 million pounds of her money into the club each year which would allow us to buy one more player in our price range each summer, but it doesn't seem like we are hurting for one more such player (except in 2014-2015 when it would have been nice to have one more goal keeper). With Gazzaniga out on loan, we have 4 openings in the squad. Given our 6 guaranteed games in Europe, it seems unlikely we will go into the year with that many openings and without a qualified back up at goal. However, unlike last summer, we have three rather than eight games before the end of August, so there is less of a rush to buy new players right now. Signing current players to extended contracts once we know they meet the approval of our new manager is a perfectly reasonable higher priority. I don't think he was ever the top earner. The quoted tweet says "a top earner". Since goal scores tend to be better paid I would guess that Austin and Long are the two top earners--remember we had to kind of over pay Long just to get him here because he had just signed a new contract with Hull before we bought him so he is now two raises beyond what Hull had to pay him to move from West Brom. Plus we got him cheap so there was more money for him. Something is certainly being inferred even if it was not intentionally being implied. But there is still the unanswered question of how the club should being showing ambition in a realistic way that it is not already doing. The only suggested answer I saw was to get more creativity into the club with an acknowledgement that there were still 30 days to do it. Does anyone have a better or different answer?

Me too--except I knew that wasn't happening.

How about a 4-5-1 where the 5 is in a V shape.

Yoshida was a mistake. I don't know how he go dropped from the list he was in the earlier drafts of the article. I will fix that. Of course, it changes my numbers so that will be a pain. You are also right about Backary. I think I got mixed up and forgot to treat him as B list eligible when I was not sure he was association trained. I know that makes no sense. As for Olomola, I misread the clubs official web site which to be fair to me, is unclearly written here. I should have checked my information against your post.

True I used to do it every year on Football Manager. That is the system in all of the professional team sports in North America although, in some cases, the players are often not college players. Another factor in North American sports is the no trade contracts are not the rule so clubs can trade players to another club more or less at will. And that is not possible under financial fair player. Frankly, I am skeptical that Everton will have a net spent of 100m pounds this summer or even this season. But in North America the bigger clubs advantages are not as significant. The salary caps are generally real and equal for all clubs. The unionized more restrictive contracts allow players to be underpaid for a number of years compared to what they would bring on the market and no trade contracts are rare so most players can be traded against their will. Also, it helps that there is not competing league for most of these sports unlike in football. If you want to play baseball, basketball, ice hockey, or American Football at the highest level, you have no where else to go.

And why would Manchester United have chosen Luke Shaw as the one and only MU player to send a letter? Do they have a tragedy department that sends out exactly one letter per tragedy and they randomly choose which player will sign it (or perhaps they rotate them)? Or maybe it is Shaw's agent who does that? Or maybe Shaw hired a PR person to do this, in which case he is responsible for it. Or maybe he noticed it himself and asked someone to help him write the letter. Or maybe he wrote it himself. Why is this something to complain about? That being said, this is my 2000th post and I want to thank the Saintsweb community for generally being so welcoming to an American who, out of the blue, starting blogging about your football club. (This message of appreciation suggested and written by my PR guy.) For those who care, I apologize for not blogging more often but I am self employed and my work schedule has been crazy this year. For those of you who don't care, I apologize for mentioning it.

I am pretty sure it is a job requirement.

I just posted "Southampton 2016-2017 Premier League/European Squad/Roster Summer Update One" http://redsloscf.blogspot.co.uk/ http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/

Possibly he is suggesting that our depth is the best--i.e. our sixth midfielder is better than anyone else's sixth midfielder. Possibly, our fifth as well.

He already has. He said so in a post game interview.

That might be a bit much. Let me think on it.

combine these two ideas and have the emotional pleas delivered by their own children.

How can you possibly know that Reed will go missing when things do not go well since that hasn't happened yet. For that matter, how can you know why (or even if) we rejected Pellegrini. Maybe he wanted full control over transfer decisions. Maybe he wanted to redesign and rebuild the training facility. Maybe he wanted too much money because Russia was willing to pay him a lot more.

So that people can start reading this thread at the beginning without feeling like they missed anything.

Or maybe he wants bets to be placed on a sure lose to shift the odds so that he bet on the winner will be more profitable.

We would appoint Dave Watson before that happened and he would probably be pretty good.