Football

bit harsh on Brighton that, but what a strike from james !! pick that out. Forgot that Lampty had gone to Brighton he looked really bright. I wonder if we have a buy back clause. wish him well as he was just behind James in development and with Dave also in the right back slot its understandable why he left.
werner is quite fast

Daniel Levy spent years making relatively shrewd signings, buying low, selling high, employing a number of managers to push the team a little further up the league. Sorted a new stadium, and then when he finally got a manager who turned them into a consistent, robust team with plenty of attacking threat, he sacked him cos Christian Eriksson didn’t like him (or something) and brought in Mourinho, who despite winning plenty in his time plays a pretty turgid brand football and of late seems to turn every team he manages toxic. Maybe the lost premier league and champions league final came into his consideration, but you’re not even going to get close to them with Mourinho at the helm.

Spurs are fucked, Agent Jose doing a great job...

enjoyed that game. werner and Haivertz will have good seasons in prem.

The above was a rather long-winded way of saying 8/1 for Mourinho going first is decent odds. Especially if they find themselves struggling and losing to southampton and newcastle, neither or which seems improbable. Graham Potter could be an outside bet, 20/1 at hills.

potter is safe unless things go super pear shaped for brighton.

Will the price of English players realign with the rest of Europe any time soon?

A couple of examples from my club - Maguire goes for £80M, Soyuncu cost £19M and is a better player, in my opinion; Chelsea pay £50M for Chilwell, and we spend £18M on Castagne, a Belgium international.

We need a centre half and Burnley think Tarkowski is worth £50M, with players like Tah and Fofana valued at less than half that.

It can't be about being a "proven premier league player" or the home grown quota.

He could get prized away, though.

Why is James Rodriguez playing for Everton?

I used to presume it was the homegrown rule, but has a club ever really fallen foul of that rule?

The homegrown rule only stipulates that you can;t have more than 17 non-homegrown players. If the 8 remaining players aren't homegrown it doesn't matter, you can just have a smaller squad than 25.

So technically you could have a 17 man squad of 100% non-homegrown players (I think).

Cos we’re fucking boss... and we’ve got Carlo Ancelotti... and we’re paying him some probably quite hefty wages.

What’s important is that he’s here in the premier league, playing beautiful football at the right end of the table with the best club there is. You should all be grateful for that.

If it wasn't for your excellent grammar and polished turn of phrase I'd swear Pisti was in the house...

BTW You need to work on your helmets and belms, otherwise top notch effort...

I only had fleeting interactions with Pisti but I recall he didn’t like Steven Naismith and you can never truly trust a man that doesn’t rate Naismith.

Premier League clubs get loads of TV money so they can hold out for bigger fees. Burnley were something like the 25th richest club in the world recently, they don't really need the money.

But he's putting balls just there for richarlison.

@tonts, I would love to see Everton lift some silverware this season to launch them into Europe. Also if Ancelotti manages to get Ciro Immobile from Lazio, then you will have a formidable strike force.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUbM2S1NdtA

But why do clubs pay those fees, given the alternatives?

One game against Spurs does not make a summer, etc.

I was thinking of following up with:
"Lads, it's only fucking spurs"

You should have.

I'm slightly disappointed by the fact that you haven't come up with any transfer fee data to completely debunk my theory about inflated prices for English players

Surprisingly, looking at Covid data in Lambeth is keeping me busy....

I'm more intrigued by stuff like this:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/faculty-of-engineering/computing/public/1718-ug-projects/Corentin-Herbinet-Using-Machine-Learning-techniques-to-predict-the-outcome-of-profressional-football-matches.pdf

#stopfootball

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-our-ai-got-top-10-in-the-fantasy-premier-league-using-data-science-ba88b185b354

Cheers! I’d very much like to see us win something too. Been a long old time.