Goodison Glory

Quote from article: "Using smarterscout, which gives players a series of ratings from zero to 99 relative to either how often a player performs a given stylistic action or how effective they are at it compared with others playing in their position, we can obtain a general overview of Broja’s natural attributes. The pizza chart, powered by smarterscout data, highlights Broja’s directness with the ball. Such verticality appealed to Ralph Hasenhuttl, whose core principles are centred on getting the ball from A to B — Broja excels in ball carrying and dribbling volume (84/99), which made him an attractive proposition. Broja’s bustling style is conducive to generating speed over short distances"

Until last month Gavi (at Barca) had a release clause of around £40M. Now he would never ever join us and my position is same as yours in that I don't want us to sell Gordon but Gavi is a few years younger than Gordon and also right up there with the best emerging talents in the world, and arguably already better than Gordon, My point being, there are multiple players with release clauses in their contracts that make you scratch your head and think "wow that is an awesome deal". Halaand is not an exception in my opinion.

1. Ego bigger than talent 2. agitates for moves constantly 3. oh and he was quoted as saying he idolises him. so examples of going on = speech, behaviour and mentality

Yeah instead of talking to Balotelli, which is probably who he idolises based on the way he goes on.

Actually you brought up Keane's numbers first. prior to that he was only referring to Tarkowski's numbers. "Out of interest, would you have said the same about Keane when we signed him who had similar numbers when he was at Burnley"

Ok. I interpret it differently but that's the beauty of statistics. I think we are ultimately agreeing on one thing just for different reasons - Mina should leave the club before Keane.

Couldn't get the sexy donut wheel that the Athletic produced but I put both sets of data side by side. Mina better in almost every area. Keane significantly better in moving the ball forward. So conclusion - Mina = better defender but mostly injured. (50% of something (Keane) is better than 100% of nothing (Mina)

I am going from memory, but my overriding memory of DCL/Dom/MagazineBoy is that whenever he was through 1 vs 1 over the past 2 years....I just never thought he would score and I recall he rarely did. Richie.....not basing it on anything but my memory is of him being better than DCL but not top class or anything near. Seriously...Shukes was talking about beating a man vs. scoring a goal. All of my statements have been based on DCL through 1 on 1 vs the keeper.

My understanding is that it is a score, so I guess rating would be the best way to describe it. Here is the site. You can sign up for free access, but you can only do 5 searches a day unless you have paid membership. The Athletic (another paid site, but very good/cheap) does a good job of analysing the data, which is where I got the Mina/Tarkowski info. They also did one on Townsend vs. Gray. https://smarterscout.com

The scale is 0-99. and it is based on the benchmark of all players in that position in a chosen league. The data is based on video from hundreds of football games every week, recording what happened, which players were involved, where it occurred on the field, and when. the analytics also accounts for minutes played and gives confidence levels for the data. statistically speaking anything over 950 minutes played has a high confidence level. hope that helps.

Ok my bad. 73 mins per game may be ok (pushing it) but playing 45% of all possible minutes is still shocking value....and for that reason he needs to be first on the list of CBS gone.

No way Dom is better than DCL at 121. Maybe one of the statos can confirm. im the same as you, I'd rather have Dom than Richie for several reasons but 1on1s is not Don's forte.

And Mina won't leave and won't play any games

Here is a smartscout comparison of Mina and Tarkowski. They both offer the same attacking threat (headers etc) but look at how much better Tarkowski is at disrupting play and winning back possession. "It’s clear the former Burnley and Brentford man loves defending. He’ll head anything that moves (aerial duels quantity 99 out of 99), frequently make defensive actions (e.g. tackles, blocks, clearances) out of possession (disrupting opposition moves 69 out of 99), and is active in getting tight to his man (defending intensity 87 out of 99). On the ball, he has been used to playing long (progressive passing 95 out of 99) without too much regard for keeping possession"

In case anyone was in any doubt about how unreliable this guy is...an hour per game on average for those games he actually plays...and only 25% of all mins played since we bought him. #shocking

Could've been he was promised things would be different this time around. So he signed a new contract.

I feel like DCL is one of the worst in one on ones. Maybe I just remember the misses more vividly but I'd rather have Richie in 1v1. First touch shooting/heading in a crowded box...that's my memory DCL .

That's the US model for NFL shirts.

Loads of speculation going on here!

Like I said I like it. Looks better on a more athletic type (Godfrey) than Gordon...so I guess it's gonna look shite on me then

The mods don't hang around moving threads of departed players...wow!

More PMO language there Matt

I like the shirt. Not really arsed about the sponsor. Would I prefer Apple to be on the front, yes, but do I think it looks crap. Nope.

From the Athletic. It's a pay site so I'll post here rather than the link (subscription is only $1 per month at the minute) The Premier League, Everton’s losses and a row that won’t go away Like apples, mattresses and racecourses, when talking about deadlines, firmness is everything. There are things that simply must be done by a certain time, and everyone knows it, and there are other things that should be done by a certain time but probably won’t because the significance of doing said thing at said time was not nailed down or mutually agreed. Examples of the former would be getting through airport security, defrosting a turkey on Christmas Day or filing your annual tax return; examples of the latter would be most of the pieces I write. The trick to dealing with deadlines is knowing which is which. Everton are up against a deadline this week but its firmness is uncertain. Talk to some in the Premier League (or those who were recently there) and they will tell you the Merseyside club must sell at least one player for a substantial profit by close of play on Thursday, June 30, or the sky will fall in at Goodison Park. But talk to others and that deadline gets softer. Sure, they say, it would be helpful if Everton could sell a player or two but if it happened on Friday, or even three weeks on Friday, it would not be the end of the world. Direction of travel is the important point, they say — which is also what I tell my editors. Everton look set to sell Richarlison to Tottenham, in a deal worth up to £60million, as reported exclusively by The Athletic. But do they really need to flog him, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and perhaps even Anthony Gordon by Thursday evening or face the prospect of swapping places with Burnley in the Championship? Or can they turn their phones off, make Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy et al sweat a bit and proceed with their player-trading plans at a more orderly pace next week? According to one source, they must sell at least one of them, and a significant sale is in their forecast for the financial year. Others at Premier League clubs are deeply annoyed about Everton’s profligate spending and wonder if transfer bans, fines or even points deductions are in order. Sources closer to Goodison Park, however, point out that the club have been talking to the Premier League about their troubling accounts for a year, there are no surprises in there and there is no requirement to sell by Thursday. If there was, they say, why isn’t Everton holding a fire sale? Let’s establish some facts. Everton have lost ludicrous amounts of money over the past three seasons.Their pre-tax losses for 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 were £112 million, £140 million and £120 million, which comes to a total of £372 million. Sure, there is a pandemic in there and almost every football club on the planet has lost money as a result, but Everton’s losses are £150 million worse than the Premier League’s next biggest loss-maker for the same period, Chelsea. Under the league’s financial fair play regime, clubs are only allowed to lose a maximum of £105 million over a rolling three-year period, which would appear to put The Toffees in a sticky spot. However, because of the aforementioned pandemic, the league has allowed clubs to treat the two affected seasons — 2019-20 and 2020-21 — as one big season, with the financial result being an average of the two and the rolling period now being four years, instead of three. This helps Everton as it enables them to use the loss they made in 2017-18 in their 2021 FFP calculation. A good return on player sales that year meant they only lost £13 million overall. Furthermore, the league has said it will let clubs discount any losses directly caused by COVID-19 from their FFP calculations. And, as always, clubs will also be allowed to strip out any costs related to community work, infrastructure, the women’s team or youth development. As Everton have already spent significant amounts on their new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, the infrastructure exemption is particularly significant. Long story short, these caveats and deductions bring Everton’s FFP gap for 2021 down from that whopping £268 million to a figure that might just creep inside the £105 million limit, depending on how generous you are feeling. That is certainly Everton’s take, anyway, and — to be fair to them — it is one they proactively took to the league last year when it became clear just how close they were to becoming the first Premier League club to breach spending rules. But crucial to this story is Everton’s claim that it got a worse case of COVID-19 than any other club in the country. In her foreword to the 2020-21 accounts, club chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale writes: “The pandemic has had a profound effect on all of us and these accounts show the scale of that impact on our club from a financial perspective. “Losses of at least £170 million are attributed to the impact on the club of COVID-19, with a further market analysis indicating that the figure could be as much as £50 million higher. For the year covered by these accounts, £103 million of the losses are associated to the pandemic.” If that sounds like a lot of money for a club with match-day revenue of just £14.2 million in 2018-19, the last audited season before the pandemic struck, it is because Everton are also counting the cost of the rebate clubs had to pay broadcasters for the interruption to the 2019-20 season, a reduction in commercial income and the impact coronavirus had on the global transfer market. Everton are not the only club to make these points — they are just the only club to put such an outsized number on it. Clubs with huge match-day revenues in normal seasons, like Arsenal and Manchester United, have also put notes in their accounts about how much the pandemic has cost them, but it still cost Everton more. Central to Everton’s case is that claim about the transfer market. “With less certainty and less income, clubs across Europe and the world became increasingly reticent to spend and, in many cases, trade,” explains Barrett-Baxendale in the accounts. “As such, the value of departing players decreased and our flexibility in the market was significantly hampered.” When you have bought as many duds as Everton have over the last few years — and paid them as handsomely as they have — not being able to sell players is a problem. The only solution was to ‘fess up, agree to a tighter budget and lean on their very generous owner Farhad Moshiri once more. And that is what Everton did. Big earners like Bernard and James Rodriguez were moved on, spending last summer was reduced to a wafer-thin £1.7 million and, even when faced with the very real prospect of relegation, they largely balanced the books in terms of January transfer window activity by selling Lucas Digne to Aston Villa, a domestic rival. All that said, Everton have so far only accounted for “crystallised” pandemic losses of £82 million. This was probably enough to keep them on the right side of the league’s FFP watchdogs last season, with the remaining £140 million of claimed pandemic-related costs looking more like a bargaining chip for future assessments. Which brings us back to June 30, the end of the current financial year, when 2017-18 drops off the FFP equation and the two plague seasons become “T-1” in the parlance. According to The Esk, a well-connected Everton fan who blogs about the club’s finances, the Premier League side are expected to make a pre-tax loss of almost £80 million in 2021-22. The Athletic has heard it might be a bit better or a bit worse. Either way, it means the total loss for 2018-22 total will be north of £300 million, which means, even after the usual deductions and Everton’s “crystallised” corona costs, the club is looking at a Richarlison and “DCL”-sized gap between their FFP number and the permitted limit. The number that is doing the rounds is £50 million. That is not a £50-million fee, by the way, it is a £50-million player-trading profit for Everton. Some much-needed black ink in a ledger full of red. But does that gap really, really need to be filled on Thursday? Or is that deadline a little softer than relegated Burnley or any of the clubs who want to take advantage of Everton’s financial embarrassment would like it to be? Well, again, it depends on who you ask. Some say Everton promised the league they would bank a big player-trading profit in the 2021-22 books. Only Richarlison, Calvert-Lewin or Gordon have the right combination of book value and expected transfer fee to deliver that, but neither the club nor league will comment on whether such a commitment exists. Burnley think it should and they and Leeds United threatened Everton and the league with legal action for, respectively, breaching the rules and failing to enforce them. But, in time-honoured fashion, Leeds’ interest in a legal row appears to have waned since they avoided the drop, while Burnley, hardly the most popular kid in class, no longer have a seat at the table. That is not to say that Everton are in the clear. Far from it — never underestimate the power of self-interest in football. Burnley might find they have some unexpected support in London at the moment, and it would also be fair to say that some clubs have “kept receipts” in regards to Everton’s strong opposition to Project Big Picture and the European Super League. The Merseyside club hit out at the “preposterous arrogance” of the rebel clubs involved in the damaging breakaway in April 2021, denouncing those who signed up as conspirators “betraying the majority of football supporters”.Barrett-Baxendale led calls for swift action in the emergency Premier League meeting and Everton chairman Bill Kenwright was still manning the Super League barricades in his foreword to their last accounts. He might, perhaps, have been better advised to stick to his own club’s troubles. But Everton believe the league is happy with the cost savings they have already made and those that will be realised when the likes of Fabian Delph and the unsellable Cenk Tosun come off the wage bill on Friday. The club also think the league will not force them to take a time-sensitive price for their best players when they can get better prices next week. After all, moving the club back to something resembling sustainability is what the league wants. There is also an element of fairness at stake, in that enforcing what Everton believe is an arbitrary deadline will weaken them relative to their competitors. Some of you will read that and shout, “Tough! They shouldn’t have kept giving fading stars, with no resale value, Champions League-level salaries then!” And you would be right. But then the clubs you support will be thinking, “Yeah, but they’re going to be in a relegation battle again next season, Moshiri has lost hundreds of millions and is trying to sell the club, and it could easily be us one day, so let’s leave it… it’s only Burnley, after all.” And stuck in the middle, as ever, is the Premier League. It hates rows between its shareholders and is terrified of jeopardising Moshiri’s sale — or even just Everton’s recovery and move to its new home. But it is equally worried about setting a precedent that says its spending limits are closer to guidelines and its deadlines are soft.

@Hafnia I posted a (rather long) article in the Lukaku thread that you might enjoy reading. From The Athletic about everything that led to him leaving Chelsea and rejoining Inter. Good read regardless of how anyone feels about him, but does validate some of your personal sentiments.