They can financially dope all they wish, but the players still have to perform, the manager still has to do a job. Money doesn’t buy competence or success.

I’m not sure if anything substantial will wind up happening mostly because Clearlake have been upfront with the Premier League and self reported potential infractions.

BUT if this leads to significant punishment down the line, it will taint Abramovich’s legacy as owner. He will no longer be known as strictly the serial winner who took us to a household name. It’s not my place to adjudicate nor am I naive enough to think his image was totally clean before all of this. It’s just something to ponder. Potential punishment on top of the two transfer bans we were handed? It skews the measurements.

You do have to question this entire piece of journalism considering it’s not telling us anything new or groundbreaking. We already know as fact that Clearlake have reported secret payments that were made under previous ownership to the Premier League months ago when going through the club’s finances. I don’t suppose Bruce Buck or Marina are around to face questioning?

I swear it’s like a new publication gets to write this exact story every couple of weeks (coincidentally the last one came during the last international break aka slow news cycle).

Next they’re going to tell us we paid Andreas Christensen’s dad as a scout or that we paid Bertrand Traore’s mum - both of which we’ve already served two transfer bans for btw.

Club specific clauses do not exist. If this clause exists, it’s more just his general buyout that anyone can trigger. Not something that only works for Madrid.

Genuine hall of shame performance from Mudryk.

Brilliant from everyone else. Worked for each other. Never stopped working.

Gallagher MOTM. Disasi also very good.

Tbf, what competition? Trent? Okay fine. But Southgate has proven he won’t call up anybody new or trust anybody new. He won’t play Trippier over Reece James (at RB anyway). This is just posturing.

A draw would have been the most fair result considering how the game actually played out but Madrid just had that one spark of brilliance to get the win. I can understand his point. On another day, maybe that was a Barca player scoring the winner.

Ajax and Lyon are great case studies into why football has devolved into a broken sport masquerading as bad business. The elite aren’t the elite because they have some grand masters behind the scenes (some do, most don’t). Majority of football clubs are run exceptionally poorly. It’s a grand combination of luck, basic planning, staying the course and opportunity. Ajax wanted to make serious changes after last season and got someone who was regarded as a smart mind. Then he starts attempting to tear everything down so he could do favors for his buddies. John Textor bought Lyon and tried to run it like Clearlake did with Chelsea but without extreme investment. Their situation is exactly where Chelsea would be if it weren’t for ownership ceding control to the directors they hired.

So many bad transfers happen in football because of ego, ulterior motives, vested interests, favours, an absence of planning, arrogance, panic, injuries, doing transfers just to please a rabid fan base in an age where the transaction has quickly become more popular than the actual sport. But it’s made especially worse when the egos involved are too volatile and act like they know better because, well, they got in their position somehow so clearly they’re the geniuses and we don’t know more than them.

It’s why it always kills me when people idolize managers or sporting directors. As if they’re infallible human beings as opposed to flawed humans like the rest of us trying to do what their version of right is.

Mind you, Steve Parish green lit his club paying Max Meyer, former wonder kid from Germany, £180k/week 5 years ago. If anyone took full advantage of the early benefits that came from the Premier League blossoming into the world’s most commercially successful league, it was him. He contributed to the problem and is now looking to put a cap on it because it doesn’t benefit him anymore. He misses the days where his club could spend £32 million on Benteke and that was as expensive as the flops use to be back then.

Btw, while Steve Parish is the topic. He proposes we put a cap on the women’s game. The investment required to make the Crystal Palace women’s team competitive is comparatively small compared to every other aspect of running the men’s team. When they talk to the fans, he’ll happily say things like we need to spend to take the next step. But the same logic isn’t applied to the women’s game. He doesn’t get it and doesn’t even want to attempt to get it.

He picked up our injury struggles by merely verbally agreeing a transfer. Unlucky.

but that speaks more to decision makers in the FA being a bunch of incompetents than it is an indictment on the foreign manager.

Every time Billy Gilmour does something good, I go numb

Most of our engagement is purely because Tuchel was sacked, Mudryk’s official announcement, Enzo’s official announcement, Lamaprd’s return, then Lavia/Caicedo announcements.

A world class manager departure, the club’s best ever player returning to manage, then high profile transfers that included beating two rivals to their signature in expensive deals