wokinginashearerwonderland

Kind of felt we might catch up with the OF a bit with the money we took in for Cosgrove, McKenna, Ramsey and Ferguson but they have made a helluva lot from their own inflated sales of Patterson and Bassey and their UEFA cup money. Hopefully the European runs for both are short and sweet this season.

Aye Bates has made a real arse of it. It appeared that his stock had risen a bit being in Germany and getting a cap or two for Scotland. If he had played well last season he would be getting touted around for a fee of a couple of million now but he'll probably end up at Port Vale for £80,000 now.

If you look at the bare “data”, Ferguson looks a cracking buy considering his goals/games/caps/age. Hopefully another sell on clause goes in and he might make us another few mill in a couple of years time. Will be interesting to see whether he goes on to bigger and better things or fades away. Good luck to him if he heads over to Italy, great opportunity for a young player.

Interesting to know whether we are a bigger draw than united for a potential signing at the moment. Would you rather play for Goodwin or Ross?

Tottenham agree a deal to buy Richarlison from Everton for..................£60m! That's like four Alan Shearers

Wonder how long until Conor Barron starts to think he is in a foreign country when he turns up to training

You been editing wikipedia again BigAl Love the opening sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojan_Miovski

Marcelo retiring got me thinking. He retired as Real Madrid's most decorated player with 25 trophies won including 5 Champions Leagues and 6 La Liga titles. I don't remember anyone mentioning his name when talking about "great players". Must be the luckiest player.

Look, every signing is a risk and of course you can buy shite players from anywhere but it's all about minimising risk when making a signing. If you buy someone that you know about, you maximise the possibility that that player will be a decent signing for your club. That was what happened in the late 80s and early 90s with the Snelders, Gillhaus type signings. These were established proven players so the chances of them being a success were higher. Finances now dictate that we are essentially taking a punt whenever we go into the foreign market so as Rico said in his post, we simply don't know how good these players are compared to the ones in our own league. Then, if they do turn out to be of the correct standard you have the headache about whether they will settle in the country, be able to cope with the freezing nights in Perth and Motherwell, deal with being hundreds of miles away from their family etc etc. It's not to say that you won't get one right eventually, but the odds of it working out, in my opinion, are far higher than signing a player from a British or Irish team.

Totally agree and it is because of the market we are shopping in nowadays. When we signed Snelders and Gillhaus we were buying top notch players with proper pedigree and there was little risk. If it didn't work out we could have sold them on. I think I am right in saying Gillhaus played in the European Cup final so probably the equivalent of us signing someone like Origi or Miramino from Liverpool in today's world who cost them £10M and £7.25M which shows how much the world has changed in the last 30 years. We are just in a completely different market now because of finances so anyone brought in from abroad is an unknown quantity as we cannot afford the proven ones.

As I said in my first point, the foreign guys are either not good enough or do not settle. Ramirez is a fine example, most of us never thought he would come back at all this season. He was great for a few months and barely made an impact after the turn of the year. We've hardly had a proper foreign player since the dutch guys in the Alex Smith era. Out of the players you have listed none had much longevity about them apart from Heikenen and Paatelainen, both of which were already with British clubs before we took them so we knew what we were signing. The rest of those players I would guess played no more than about 50 games for us, so a season or so and I cannot remember us making money from them when they left either. The Hernandez signing was sold to us as being an investment that we would sell on for millions and he couldn't settle. Nothing against signing Irish players as I said in my first post, we have had a few crackers in the last few years. It's not the same as signing someone from the continent.

So which foreign players have we signed in the last 30 years that you would class as a success, Panda?

Defence looks all over the place. That’s us played four games in about two weeks and he’s changed the central defensive trio every time and used three different players at right back. It’s like he does not really trust any of them enough to actually stick with them.

I take your point BigAl, I just don't think foreigners generally work for us at all and we need a core of British/Irish players. The last few signings from abroad have been a mysterious right back costing a fortune, a yank who has hardly kicked a ball yet, Ramirez who looked great for six months then disappeared and the dutch winger who the jury is still out on. Even the few foreigners that have been successful over the years never seem to stick around for much longer than a season. So many of these guys either cannot adapt to our style of play in this country or climate, language or whatever. My last post was pretty ranty. I just think after so many years of absolute crap we finally got our club back for six or seven years there and now we are heading back to the days of appointing dodgy managers and signing dud players. I'd far prefer we took a punt on a promising player from a Championship club than gambled on some dude from Albania. Hope that does not come across as racist as that is not the intension.

This is starting to scare me now. Looks like we will be selling the crown jewels in Ramsay and Ferguson and bringing in unknown Macedonians and Albanians. Sorry but this season has got disaster written all over it. If I was to say how do you take a well performing football club and turn it into an absolute disaster, it would be everything that Cormack has done since he has come into Aberdeen. Get rid of the manager who has been successful, appoint a manager with no experience, sell all of the best players............................... Just waiting to laugh at whoever we are going to sign next after we sell Lewis Ferguson to Rangers for £500,000.

Clarke’s undoubtedly got a few things wrong these last few games. Anyone can see Robertson needs a holiday, he should have let him go after the Ukraine game and given Hickey the following three games. Adams is no lone striker. Felt sorry for the boy in the last three games because he has nothing to go on. In Dykes absence, give the Sunderland lad a chance alongside Che. The two Armenia games would have been a great opportunity to blood one of the new goalies because with Marshall and McGregor retired we need to get these younger guys some caps and a bit of confidence so that they are prepared if needed in the future. Also wish Clarke would stick with Stuart Armstrong for more than five minutes. He is a really talented player but is in for a game, then out or else on as sub or subbed off, similar to how Clarke treats Christie actually. On the plus side, McKenna starting to look a bit more composed in the dark blue and Ralston is a decent right back. Have to say that is easily the worst Ireland team in my lifetime. Bar Duffy, McLean and the Liverpool second goalie those names on their team sheet were nobodies. On a different topic, don’t know how they manage it but bloody Wales managed to fluke another good result again.

VAR is getting ridiculous. To give a penalty when there were two reasons why it should not have been awarded is mental. The cock ups they are making after watching the video are worse than the howlers the refs made pre-VAR. Also stunned that Ukraine did not get their penalty against Wales, it was not even debatable. VAR is the worst thing to happen to fitba since the Bosman ruling.

It must be really bothering you Jute to bring up a penalty incident in an England friendly that happened three days ago For what it’s worth I thought at the time Kane clipped his own leg never mind the offside issue.

Watched the interview for the first time the other day. Goodwin talks a good game, it all sounds great just hope he can back it up. Graham Hunter has fair put on the beef. He was so far up Goodwin's backside he is probably still trying to find a way back out. "It feels like I am talking to a future Ireland manager"

Rumours that Ramsay is going for a medical at Liverpool. The more I think about this, the more I think we are getting a crap deal if the fee of £3.5m is to be believed. This is a player they are making us believe is one of the best young right backs in Europe, going to one of the richest clubs yet we are getting about the same fee as Forest paid for McKenna almost two years ago? We should be holding out for a lot more cash. I would have thought the chance of a big sell on from Liverpool will be slimmer that Forest selling on McKenna too.

Dustin Johnson has resigned from the PGA Tour. First proper big name to commit to the Saudi money league. A massive shake up about to happen to the establishment in golf. I am suspecting McIlroy will be wishing he kept his cards closer to his chest now. Wonder what would happen if the Open and Masters announced that these guys would be ineligible to play in their tournaments?

I thought Hickey did pretty well but Robertson looked like it was one game too many this season and needs a good rest. Very uninspiring stuff from us last night overall, got the impression we massively under-estimated how good the Ukrainian's actually were. I think we also got caught up too much in the politics of it all and were a bit too nice in our approach instead of hammering into them. Clarke has been good so far but got a few things wrong last night. Fully expect Ukraine to beat Wales on Sunday. Wales are not in the same league as those guys last night.

Ferguson's replacement leaves his previous job https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61659836

The buying the title thing is an interesting one. Ferguson is labelled a genius for what he achieved at Man U but in those years the financial disparity between United and the rest was ridiculous. Whenever a top player became available they blew the other teams out of the market (Keane, Cole, Ferdinand, Berbatov etc). They basically just bought everyone else’s best player but it never gets mentioned

Pires, Henry and Bergkamp. Pires was a genius, so underated.