zequist

Wasn't it Arsene Wenger who said something 2 or 3 weeks ago to the effect of, if everybody knows how much money I have to spend then every player we inquire about is going to cost three times as much? I know it was one of the coaches at one of the big money teams. Edit: Yeah, I found it. It was Wenger. "Considering transfers and the money available, the less you talk the better it is. Let other people talk and you do what you want....If I tell you I have £250m, every player I call will cost three times more."

aka you may be right, but being the annoying little bugger that I sometimes am I'm not quite gonna declare it over yet. What are the connections?

Report is that the parent company lost 42.6 million last year, even as the club itself made a profit of 10 million. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901

No, not Eccleston. It is a UK actor, though - you guys have been on the right track with that from the first guess.

Oooooo... Malcolm McDowell is not the person I'm looking for, but he does connect the person to one of these things (there's a big clue for you right there) Keep working at it.

Funny, there was an article only a month ago reporting that Park was about to sign a four-year extension at ManU and quoting him as saying he had no desire to leave "the best club in the world".

Agreed, but game breakers don't always have to come with a massive price tag. A big part of it is smart scouting and being ready to pounce on opportunities at the right time. For instance, you mentioned Fabregas. He signed with Arsenal from Barcelona on a free transfer at 16 because he didn't foresee much playing time at Barca in the near-future. Smart play by Arsenal - they saw an opening, swooped in and grabbed him. They also grabbed Van Persie on the cheap, for less than 3 million in 2004. Similarly, Cristiano Ronaldo was picked up by Man U when he was only 18. They paid 12 million for him, which is not cheap, but still a bargain considering what he's become - it's less than what we paid for Fellaini. And if they'd been over-cautious and waited another year or two, he probably would've cost them twice as much, if they'd been able to get him at all. Of course, the best superstars are the ones who come through your system, that you don't have to pay for at all. That's Gerrard with Liverpool, and John Terry with Chelsea. We had one of those with Rooney and had no choice but to let him go, but if we keep going the way we've been going, we'll have a much better chance of keeping hold of the next one.

He's not the GM anymore, and in fact most of those moves you're talking about were not his fault. It's really much too complicated to get into in any detail here, but basically there was a major power struggle going on for most of the last year with Mullin on one side and Robert Rowell (the team President) on the other, and Mullin lost. Most of those dumb moves you're talking about were Rowell's decisions, often in opposition to what Mullin wanted to do. The team officially let Mullin go a few weeks ago, but he's effectively had no power anyway since last fall.

1) look at who they had spending those pennies - Keane and Sbragia are practically schoolboy managers compared to the likes of Mancini (if that rumor is true) 2) they didn't have a Premier League monopoly on the entire northeast before (which will be a big advantage in attracting sponsor dollars versus someone like, say, West Ham, who will always be at best the sponsors' 4th or 5th choice team in London, or Bolton, who's stuck fighting with Wigan for the leftovers after Man United and Man City have gotten what they need). I'm not saying they're any kind of sure thing. People thought Newcastle was a sure thing after Ashley took over and hired Allardyce and greenlighted a bunch of spending, and look what happened to them. What I'm saying is that right now they appear to have some things going for them that, if they manage them correctly, and if they make the right hires, and if this new owner is more Randy Lerner than Mike Ashley, add up to things that could help them finally start going places. But yes, those are a lot of ifs that they'll have to answer.

No, the even lowlier Warriors. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know, so I hate most Los Angeles teams just on general principle (LA and the Bay Area are big sports rivals), but with the Lakers it's just that much more so because they're always so good and the Warriors are always so damn pathetic. And now you also know why I've watched exactly six NBA games (specifically, the six against Dallas in the '07 playoffs) in the last 15 years.

I'm going to say Lakers in 5, but I hope that jinxes them because I HATE the Lakers.

Is anyone else looking at Sunderland and seeing the potential for a sleeping giant in the making? 1: They're the only team in town, and for the moment the only PL team in the whole damn region, which means that they've got a big edge in attracting the regional business dollars, if they're smart enough to take advantage of it. 2: They have now the third-largest stadium in the EPL after Man U and Arsenal, and even in a crappy, relegation-threatened season like this one they still drew over 40,000 a game, so if they ever get good they could probably get it up closer to 50,000. 50,000 fans per home game is a lot of extra money coming in every match day. 3: Wealthy new ownership=probably more investment=potentially better players 4: And now the rumors of hiring a proven, big-name manager like Mancini (who won three straight Serie A titles with Inter) With the inherent advantages they already have in 1 and 2, this is starting to look to me like a club that could make some big strides forward in the next several years, IF they get the right manager, and IF he spends the new owner's money wisely.

I think someone didn't double-check that summary list you're quoting when they put it together. I clicked over to the 2001-02 list on that site, and it has us in 10th that year with an average of 34,004. Which makes more sense, because if you look at the list of teams in the league that year, the majority of them didn't even have stadiums that could hold 38,000, so if we'd had that many there's no way we could've been 15th.

Yes, it is seeded. According to the website where I usually go for information on these things, any team with at least 25 European points is guaranteed a seed in the 4th round (the cutoff could and probably will be a bit lower, since upsets do happen, but it can't get any higher than that) - we have 35.899 points, so we exceed the minimum by a comfortable margin, as do the majority of the teams I listed. Frankly, I hope it does go lower than that, because there are a few teams sitting right around 24 points (Bilbao, Metalist, Levski Sofia if they bust out of the CL) that I would rather not see on the unseeded side of the bracket. I don't remember if the 3rd and 4th qualifying rounds of the Champs League are seeded or not, but the major change is that they are now subdivided. For those two rounds, league champions will only play other league champions, and non-champions will only play non-champions. So a mid-level champion like Wisla Krakow or Maccabi Haifa, instead of potentially having to face a juggernaut like Arsenal or Lyon to make the group stages, has a better shot at a more manageable opponent like an FC Copenhagen or Partizan Belgrade.

Of the 13 leagues in Europe who get an automatic qualifier into the Champions League group stages, only Romania is still undecided. The rest have settled all of their CL and EL entrants. The highlights of our EL competition from those leagues (not including other English teams, since we wouldn't see them before the knockout rounds): 2nd round qualifiers NAC Breda (Holland) Galatasaray (Turkey) 3rd round qualifiers Athletic Bilbao (Spain) AS Roma (Italy) Lille (France) Hamburg (Germany) Sporting Braga (Portugal) PSV Eindhoven (Holland) Fenerbahce (Turkey) Metalist Kharkiv (Ukraine) Club Brugge (Belgium) Fellow 4th round qualifiers Villareal, Valencia (Spain) Lazio, Genoa (Italy) Werder Bremen, Hertha Berlin (Germany) Zenit St. Petersburg (Russia) Benfica (Portugal) Heerenveen, Ajax (Holland) Hearts (Scotland) Trabzonspor (Turkey) Among the teams we could see in the group stages IF they bombed their Champions' League qualifying: Atletico Madrid, Fiorentina, Lyon, Stuttgart, Sporting Lisbon, FC Twente, and Celtic Some of those teams (Bilbao, Genoa, Hearts) have few enough qualifying points that we could potentially see them in a 4th round match, but after four straight draws against tough qualifying opponents, we're well past due for a nice, easy draw against some no-namers from Sweden or Hungary or something.

Carlo Ancelotti was let go by AC Milan today, which everyone assumes is the first step towards him taking over Chelsea. And there's a breaking report just now that Roberto Mancini, the former coach of Inter Milan, is telling people he's been offered the job at Sunderland. If both of those come true, the first Chelsea-Sunderland match of the season could be an interesting one.

Nah, she doesn't have any connections to any seaside Kent towns that I'm aware of. You are looking at roughly the right level of "well known-ness" with the Stargate and TNG guesses, though (but I'm not saying whether or not you've hit the exact show yet ).

Was she on a US science fiction series? It must not have lasted very long.

More lower division clubs with major problems. Now Accrington Stanley have been hit with a winding up order over £300,000 worth of unpaid taxes and insurance contributions, although the CEO thinks they'll find a way to survive: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901 Only 1,415 fans per game? No wonder they're having problems.

True and true, but her connection is to Essex, not Kent. Thanks for giving me an excuse to look her up again, though!

If your brain is hurting too much from trying to figure out Jimmy's beastly question at #14, try mulling this one over for a while. What person connects a seaside town in Kent, a well-known American science fiction TV show, and the BBC miniseries "Our Friends in the North"? Good luck!

American tycoon Ellis Short, who already had a 30% stake the club, just purchased all the rest of it. http://goal.com/en/news/9/england/2009/05/...l-of-sunderland And still we sit and wait to see if there's a buyer out there for us...

Scored a cracker of a goal against Hull last weekend too. I don't think SAF is going to let him leave that easily.

Berbawuss is scared to take another penalty kick. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...gue&cc=5901

Agreed on both statements. But after that Colombian player was murdered for scoring an own goal against the US in the '94 World Cup, no amount of supporter extremism will ever surprise me again. Unfortunately.