Groundhopping Owl

Not that we’ve any chance of signing him, but I’ve read suggestions that Mina might be moving on this summer. Barca have reached their limit of non-EU players and they want to bring in another one, and they seem to reckon that Mina’s performance in the game where they conceded 5 at Levante marked him out as the sacrificial lamb. I suspect he’ll end up going to a mid-table Serie A club on one of those deals where Barca have a buy-back clause in the €20-30m range.

You're gonna make me blush It's been a slightly weird array of games I've been to of late - last few grounds include Cowdenbeath, Brackley Town and Barcelona among others. There were a fair few lads at Barcelona who caught the eye but I'm not sure if they'd count as "overlooked" Main thing I can share is that at Cowdenbeath the bloke sat next to me transpired to have been an ex-youth scout for Wednesday based in Scotland. I asked him about his experience and he wasn't exactly complimentary, said that his reports weren't followed up and the club didn't seem organised or communicative. Said Newcastle were much better to work for. In one sense I found it encouraging that we maintain a scouting network north of the border, but obviously based on the feedback it seems we have a way to go.

Watched him play on loan at Hibernian last season, thought he was OK but didn’t convince me he was good enough to get in our team. Then again he’s at an age of rapid improvement.

Some on here would be more willing to believe the Watergate mastermind than the journalist.

You see my motivational tactics? Put me on the plane.

Have we scored a goal from open play yet?

What is the band’s obsession with playing the soundtracks to particularly miserable days at Hillsborough?

Watching this tonight, I’d love us to be able to bring in Viktor Claesson from Krasnodar, he’s been superb tonight. Exactly what we need on the right hand side.

Nice tangent. To play along for 30 seconds, I’d rather we didn’t. But if I moaned on here about every problem I had with modern Football I’d be typing til my dying day and it would probably be fairly tedious. Maybe I’m a hypocrite, but supporting a football team in 2018 is essentially an exercise in ignoring increasing amounts of infuriating crap, this being a prime example.

Good article that. One of the key points in this outside of all the personal nastiness in this particular saga is the precedent. More and more British clubs are setting up foreign feeder clubs, even L**ds have got one for Christ’s sake. In one sense there’s already plenty of precedent here as Watford have been taking advantage of their owners having multiple clubs for years, but this feels like taking it to a whole new level when you use feeder clubs to circumvent youth compensation rules. Get used to clubs like Girona, Vitesse and others signing players on behalf of the clubs they essentially exist to support. How soul-destroying it must be to be a supporter of one of the feeder clubs, whose entire existence is turned into a means to a foreign end.

The meaning of life is 42 Geoffrey, just in case you were wondering.

It couldn’t work for a club at our level, but in fairness quite a few clubs lower down the pyramid do this fairly regularly. My second side, Bradford Park Avenue, set up a players fund in the run in last season to bring in some loan and out of contract players to help secure a play off spot, which we eventually did. Fans would donate as much as they wanted and the money was ring-fenced to be used on players.

Could you explain how that relates to what I said?

I’ve never been particularly bothered by the George Hirst situation, rarely contributed to the endless threads about him and was resigned long ago to losing him to a Prem club for a mediocre fee. But somehow the parties involved, all of whom should be utterly ashamed of themselves, have found a way to deliver one last almighty kick in the balls. I’m absolutely livid at the way we’ve been shafted here. Just about every major flaw of modern football is encapsulated in this whole sorry saga. Agents throwing enormous spanners in the works of youth academies purely for personal gain, taking advantage of young and impressionable players who then hold the clubs that worked so hard to develop them to ransom. And now the coup de grace comes from owners exploiting entire networks of feeder clubs in order to circumvent any obstacle. No loyalty, no decency and no class. And if I sound like some grumpy old duffer raging against the new way of the world then so be it.

The likes of QPR, Leicester and Bournemouth all ran afoul of various EFL financial rules and regulations, but it didn't matter to them because the transgressions were only dealt with after promotion, at which point they'd already achieved their objective of Premier League football and were swimming in cash, meaning that fines didn't matter to them and the EFL couldn't dock them points. Sadly if we run afoul of the rules I don't think we'll be so lucky.