Sims did more for Saints in his run and pass to Shane Long at Anfield than Mo Elyounoussi will ever do for us.
What! Don't they know that there are several phases before rejection....we haven't been through the puzzlement, mild curiosity, and excitement yet.
Yeah I can't see them letting him go, we would have to bid some ridiculous amount and we haven't exactly got history for that.
It is mad that 25m is apparently the fee for a striker with one full top flight season under his belt I of course have not seen him play But going above 25m for that kind of record seems unlikely for us FM suggests he has the rare combination of both pace, height and power - which potentially explains the potential asking price
Are Everton not likely to be in a similar place to us of needing to shift some high earners off the books? Sandro, Walcott , tosun, Schneiderlin? Fewer i grant you but probably higher wages that will even harder to match than some of ours Or are they playing to different rules somehow ?
This is why I don’t understand FFP We are apparently constrained in our wage bill. Does that not apply to everyone? Is this where the owners can do dodgy offsets on “investment” to get around it Otherwise it doesn’t make a great deal of sense Perhaps they also aren’t as close to the limit as we are
Its not so much the % of turnover that is used on wages (which is a lot), it's more to do with the fact we have 567 First Team players on our books at the moment.
Sims is decent at going forwards, but his positioning and defense are not good. Elyounoussi seems to be good with his positioning and defense, but not going forward. If we bring in a two attackers it is difficult to see other getting much playing time. Oh, and Sims was worse than Elyounoussi. Way worse. You guys look at when Sims does something exciting and then forget when he's not there. Then you hyper-focus on Elyounoussi every second his is on the pitch and nitpick everytime millisecond he does not score. Not to come down hard on Sims because of course he needs time to develop. But after an initially promising start, when he was given lots of pitch time it was pretty obvious he is not PL quality right now. He's really fast so you have to keep half an eye on him. Pretty much once you do that, he can't hurt you. And he always wants to run past everyone so he is negligent in his support duties. I don't think he is selfish, just too excited and not aware if how quickly teans can react and counter. But anyway, yeah he's really bad right now.
Newcastle and Southampton made bids for Mainz and France under-21 striker Jean-Philippe Mateta, 21. (L'Equipe, via Sport Witness)