Another game where the result was positive but so many variables that leave a mixed taste in your mouth. Disasi and Badiashille were fucking massive today. They can share MOTM.

23 years old, over 150 professional games played, and he’s taking lessons from something that shouldn’t be happening whatsoever after about 50 professional games. The way he totally loses his composure when frustration creeps in is his biggest flaw aside from staying fit. It’s like he doesn’t fully understand just how important he is as a player. I use to joke that our entire attack flows through him because he’s a literal game changer but then the more he played the more that joke became a fact of life. So, sure, Malo Gusto playing next week isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s clear how much Reece ups the levels when he actually plays.

At the end of the day, Newcastle showed more fight and intensity despite 3 games a week and an injury crisis than we did. Their distinct gameplan was to attack our left back, to play long balls over the top. It was also to disrupt our shape and solidity and it worked in part due to the extreme lack of discipline shown by our players. We made it far too easy for them. That was one of the worst 2nd halves I can remember us playing and we were lucky to only have one player sent off. So much stupidity on our part everywhere you looked.

Btw, our former Academy POTY right back playing extremely well out of position at LB whilst our £64 million LB had another shameful performance was especially noticeable and depressing.

Calling our errors today schoolboy errors is an insult to schoolboys.

All Cucurella has to do is run hard and he’ll trick half the fan base into a redemption arc. He’s still a bad defender.

Jackson has played less than 70 professional games. I don’t understand why our fan base screams be patient with Mudryk but Jackson has to be replaced in January and he’s not our level. Double standards are crazy. We should be more patient with both.

All I can think about is how Sam Allardyce lost the England job because he exposed how transfers are really done behind the scenes and the FA didn’t like it. If we go back through every Premier League club’s transfers since 2008 and really break it down, you’re going to find over half of them broke the rules or found loopholes at least one time.

Take solace in the fact that Jackson is missing big chances because our last strikers never got in positions to get them

It’s absolutely frustrating to see our misdeeds continue to be lumped in with Manchester City who have over 100 charges related to financial doping. Whatever we appear to have done according to reports doesn’t appear to be as bad as whatever Manchester City have done.

Not saying we’re completely innocent or anything but there’s a reason these stories continue to pop up and we continue to ignore Manchester City. And it’s not just us either. We’re going to hear about Everton again soon. And Newcastle’s Saudi links again. Sometimes these stories are just simply planted. Some journalist is going to do a large piece about how football is financially broken and use Italy as the prime example and never mention Manchester City once.

Just going to quickly editorialise here, but I have no idea why you’d tell on yourself like that

He says as he’s writing an entire article that have Chelsea linked to a bigger International scandal that the Premier League would have undoubtedly found out about anyway and triggered an inevitable investigation.

Didn’t take him long to adapt to Bayern’s methods of approaching transfers

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.