jamiemaher85

Our wage bill has increased drastically over the last few years. This is where the money has been going.

Sunderland is sell to buy just like us. They may well have spent £18m this window. But they have sold £18m worth of players. There in the same boat. And their owner has said this is the last time he's willing to take on any more debt levels.

Not as much as other though. Almost every club is going into further debt. And almost every club has a sell to buy policy in place. It's just that every other club is now shifting the dead weight in their squads. We don't have much dead weight in our team so don't have the same level of squad turn around that others do.

Well you just have to deal with it. We can all long for money to come in but in my eyes about 75% of the new owners coming in at the moment are more trouble than they're worth. People say alot of Lerner, for example, being a good example of how a new owner can work out. In the past four years he's put £80m debt onto the club and takes £5m management fee's from the club. United's and Liverpool's problems with the owners putting crippiling debts onto their clubs is well documented. Pompey have screwed up, Leeds screwed up, Hull almost screwed up. The guy mooted to buy Blackburn has just been announced as actually bankrupt. Sunderland and Brum both have new owners but who knows what lies around the corner for them? The "vast majority" as you say, are spending money, which I don't think is entirely true, the spending in the Prem is down £200m over the last few season and if it wasn't for City it would be drastically less. Alot of people are saying about how Sunderland have spent highly this summer, and it's true that they have invested £18m on new players, but they have also sold £18m worth of players. Arsenal's net spend is only £4m but they have taken 20 players off their pay bill this summer. Brum have invested but have also had to shift 14 players off their books. Fulham was sell to buy. Liverpool was sell to buy. Spurs have been very thrifty considering the revenue boost they will recieve this year. I'll accept what is going on with the club as we are ensuring that we are living within our means. More clubs will start hitting much harder times soon and people shouldn't think that the world is full of generous arabs willing to plow untold fortunes into a club. City are the exception. Not the rule. By the way, this is not an apology for BK. I'm not an aplogist before I get labelled it by some. I'm just trying to look at the bigger picture here and take in the facts and figures with other clubs.

Perhaps selling their story to the paper will help them pay for a baby sitter next time

Considering West Ham had a £6m bid turned down for Yak I don't see how they can state that "£5m would have got them Yakubu". Lazy journalism. As per usual. Their interest in Yak ended a long time ago.

If Huddersfield had, for example, scored a late winner, their fans would have gone mental. This could have caused a risk to the baby. Both with physical contact and also because of noise. Moving them to the safer area makes full sense to me. It's not like she was booted out the ground or anything. IMO she shouldn't be taking a 4-month old child to a night game, especially an away night game. Just doesn't seem right to me.

Not really sure to make of that one. I am inclined to side with our stewards. Taking a four month old baby into a crowded stand for a night game is hardly great parenting is it?

I wondered what he'd been doing since Genesis. Didn't realise he was such a good driver.... oh wait.

The club can never win. If we lost Arteta or Rodwell or Cahill or Baines the club would have been slated by the fans. We do this yet most are still unhappy. It's signing or securing the squad we have. For better or worse we are not running the club into the ground with debt and over spending on the faint hope of a champions league spot. When the big money men get bored you'll see that our thriftiness hasn't been such a bad thing.

It's ludicrous. I read one blog about this where Lokomotiv fans starting writing in to defend it saying, "It wasn't racist, he had a terrible season which is why we are happy he has gone". To which one WBA fan asked "Well why have you got a picture of banana on the banner?". To which they stopped responding!

He's all sorts!

One thing that hasn't really been mentioned is that the paperwork required to give Arteta British Citizenship would take around nine months to go through. Another reason why is just doesn't make sense.

I'm not debating the cuntishness of 'Arry. He's a prick of the highest order.

Common- Be Class album

Just to warn you. He is fast in body, but slow in his mind. Plus he can't tie his shoe laces properly and sometimes kneels down during an attack to recitfy the problem, like he did against Man United and cost us a goal

Well he was on a salary close to £5m a year. So there's that to think about. Plus having a player who just played in the World Cup final just sat around doing nothing for a year could cause morale problems. If a team can afford to spend £80m on one player, taking a £10m loss isn't really such a big deal. Plus the player cost Real £10m, they sold him for £8m. Not really a terrible loss in the grander scheme of things, especially for a team like Real.

It's the Premier League not the FA that verify the deal by the way. The FA are guilty of many things but this is not them, for a change.

Bayern, or whichever team it was, did agree a fee of £18m for him last week. The player agreed terms but the signing hinged on Bayern selling another player in order to raise the funds. This sale fell through so the whole deal fell through. Real had no plans to keep him in the team and he wouldn't make the 25 so they needed to get rid, nobody came in for him so the price kept dropping. That's why the fee was so small. It's still wrong though the Premier League verified the deal after the window closed. Not surprising though.

http://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/news/articles/van-der-vaart-deal-confirmed-010910.html? What a suprise.

sadly will be true. I can see Spurs being allowed to register VdV but West Ham not being allowed to register Jacobson. The Premier League and FA clearly have certain favourite clubs. Spurs are one of them. I hope they stick to the damn rules.

1- Chelsea 2- City 3- United 4- Arsenal 5- Liverpool 6- Everton 7- Spurs 8- Villa 9- Birmingham 10- Newcastle 11- Sunderland 12- Blackburn 13- Stoke 14- Fulham 15- Bolton 16- Wolves 17- West Ham 18- Wigan 19- West Brom 20- Blackpool

Jeffers left us in 2001 and has scored 16 league goals since then. That's why he's available on a free. Hilarious.

There is a nigerian journo who was speaking with Yobo all day about this and said that he'd burned his bridges with Moyes and that if he can't sort a move out then he could be in trouble. Something to that effect. I'll try and find a link.

Fair enough.