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Summer Transfer Window 2021 –


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1 hour ago, Firemans4Horn said:

Arsenal spending £85m on Ben White and Aaron Ramsdale

 

Jason Bateman Cotton GIF
 

 

 

 

 

They are so so bad at this.   Hard to see them competing for a Champions League spot anytime soon, unless something changes dramatically.   Heck Europa is a bit of a stretch with their roster management.

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we don't bring in any world class players, we don't sell our valuable players while they still have value, we bring in young players who aren't ready and old players who are past it, and the Kroenke's invest less money into transfer fees and wages than any other owners in the league. every year. and yet and still Arsenal fans crush the players and the manager, whoever they are, for not competing for the league, or now, UEFA EL spots. Arsenal fans are by and large a buncha retards. i'm extremely pleased that the bulk of them are an ocean away from me. some of the worst fans in sports. didn't deserve Wenger. 

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They are so so bad at this.   Hard to see them competing for a Champions League spot anytime soon, unless something changes dramatically.   Heck Europa is a bit of a stretch with their roster management.

As an Arsenal fan I just hope Ajax have a good year and can make another CL run.
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we don't bring in any world class players, we don't sell our valuable players while they still have value, we bring in young players who aren't ready and old players who are past it, and the Kroenke's invest less money into transfer fees and wages than any other owners in the league. every year. and yet and still Arsenal fans crush the players and the manager, whoever they are, for not competing for the league, or now, UEFA EL spots. Arsenal fans are by and large a buncha retards. i'm extremely pleased that the bulk of them are an ocean away from me. some of the worst fans in sports. didn't deserve Wenger. 

They also charge the most for season tickets of any team in the EPL. Which fits with what you just said.
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18 minutes ago, shnsajax said:


They also charge the most for season tickets of any team in the EPL. Which fits with what you just said.

it sucks because despite what i said earlier, Arsenal really does have some great and passionate fans who deserve better. my experience is that worldwide Arsenal fans tend to be more happy and optimistic, and way less cynical and vitriolic. the UK Arsenal fans on the other hand are only happy when they're miserable. Arsenal is a big enough brand with a strong enough history to become a European power at the drop of a hat, so it kills me to be stuck with owners who could not give any fewer shits about fielding a competitive squad. 

this is how bad it's gotten: right now everyone is just praying that we sign either Maddison or Odegaard, and the truth of the matter is that a summer window of White, Lokonga, and one of Odegaard/Maddison is actually a very good window by Arsenal standards. i mean, i just have no idea how anyone expects us to compete outside of having an absolute tactical/financial genius as manager. even if we do bring back Odegaard (which i really hope we do) what happens if he gets hurt? back to having offensive prowess of Austin FC. back to finishing 8th, or worse.

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Seems like they are almost bidding against themselves. I don’t think there was anyone last year interested in Willian or Partey at what they paid in wages (and transfer fee for 27 year old Partey).  Seems like they got played by Pepe’s agent the year before that as well. Nowhere near €70m demand from other clubs. 

Where was the £50mn demand for White from other clubs? Go find someone else you like just as much for £35m and tell Brighton take it or leave it or your signing option B.

Sheffield are relegated, I haven’t Ramsdale’s name come up much at all and Arsenal are going to pay £25M+ for him? Crazy. 

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9 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

Seems like they are almost bidding against themselves. I don’t think there was anyone last year interested in Willian or Partey at what they paid in wages (and transfer fee for 27 year old Partey).  Seems like they got played by Pepe’s agent the year before that as well. Nowhere near €70m demand from other clubs. 

Where was the £50mn demand for White from other clubs? Go find someone else you like just as much for £35m and tell Brighton take it or leave it or your signing option B.

Sheffield are relegated, I haven’t Ramsdale’s name come up much at all and Arsenal are going to pay £25M+ for him? Crazy. 

Sounds like everyone knows Leno is actively agitating for a move back to Germany and Arsenal can't let themselves be left high and dry.

That Martinez/Leno fiasco, as semi-reasonable as it looked at the time, gets worse by the day.

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Just now, shadow_operative said:

especially when, since my time as a supporter, we generally always had 2-3 EPL quality keepers- Szczesny, Fabianski, Ospina, Cech, Emi, Leno. now we're an injury/sale away from having zero EPL quality keepers and the season starts tomorrow. typical Arsenal summertime shit show.

Want Kepa?

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2 minutes ago, ztejas said:

Um. Don't believe I signed off on this one, Mo. He did just win us the super duper cup. $70M for a couple shining moments every year? You don't just hand a player like that to a derby rival. 

Oh I didn't say he would be cheap.

League Cup No GIF by ElevenSportsBE

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Spoiler

In Lionel Messi’s Move, a Dim Portrait of Modern Soccer

He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.

 

In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.

One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.

Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.

If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.

That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.

On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.

And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.

Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.

There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.

As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.

Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.

 

Jorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”

This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.

 

There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.

He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.

The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.

And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.

To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.

That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.

 

That the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.

But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.

They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.

It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.

There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.

But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another.


In Lionel Messi’s Move, a Dim Portrait of Modern Soccer

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3 hours ago, Firemans4Horn said:
  Reveal hidden contents

In Lionel Messi’s Move, a Dim Portrait of Modern Soccer

He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.

 

In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.

One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.

Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.

If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.

That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.

On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.

And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.

Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.

There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.

As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.

Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.

 

Jorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”

This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.

 

There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.

He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.

The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.

And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.

To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.

That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.

 

That the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.

But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.

They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.

It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.

There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.

But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another.


In Lionel Messi’s Move, a Dim Portrait of Modern Soccer

Also can you quit being such a pussy on this thread. You won the CL and PL like 2 fkn years ago. Who gives a fuck who PSG has on their roster. 

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3 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

It's a decent bet, if not for City. 

I think it's dumb value but I owe my bookie money currently so can't really throw anything down. 

I mean shit... I also like the Pool and ManU value. I don't think this is going to be a runaway. How many CL runs can you fuck up before you start questioning yourself? 

Edited by ztejas
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4 hours ago, ztejas said:

Also can you quit being such a pussy on this thread. You won the CL and PL like 2 fkn years ago. Who gives a fuck who PSG has on their roster. 


Fans of any team not named City/Chelsea/PSG should give a fuck. Petro-State owned clubs that have unlimited budgets have been making shit clubs with no history relevant since 2004 and has escalated the last decade. 
 

 

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1 hour ago, Firemans4Horn said:


Fans of any team not named City/Chelsea/PSG should give a fuck. Petro-State owned clubs that have unlimited budgets have been making shit clubs with no history relevant since 2004 and has escalated the last decade. 
 

 

Keep going 

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2 hours ago, Firemans4Horn said:


Fans of any team not named City/Chelsea/PSG should give a fuck. Petro-State owned clubs that have unlimited budgets have been making shit clubs with no history relevant since 2004 and has escalated the last decade. 

And did you pick Liverpool as your team because of your deep ties to the historical English shipbuilding and labor movement, or because they were good when you were a teenager, you liked their uniforms and they had a lot of neat shiny trophies that they now have to share with other fanbases sometimes and that makes you grumpy?

You're like a Nebraska fan bitching about Oregon being relevant, except Liverpool still wins things.

Edited by texifornia
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10 minutes ago, texifornia said:

And did you pick Liverpool as your team because of your deep ties to the historical English shipbuilding and labor movement, or because they were good when you were a teenager, you liked their uniforms and they had a lot of neat shiny trophies that they now have to share with other fanbases sometimes and that makes you grumpy?

You're like a Nebraska fan bitching about Oregon being relevant, except Liverpool still wins things.

This is such a dicking on it deserves a quote and I wish I could rep it 12 times.

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16 minutes ago, texifornia said:

And did you pick Liverpool as your team because of your deep ties to the historical English shipbuilding and labor movement, or because they were good when you were a teenager, you liked their uniforms and they had a lot of neat shiny trophies that they now have to share with other fanbases sometimes and that makes you grumpy?

You're like a Nebraska fan bitching about Oregon being relevant, except Liverpool still wins things.

Look here, asshole. Some of us really liked the Beatles.

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Jannik Vestergaard: Southampton defender completes Leicester medical

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11700/12380231/jannik-vestergaard-southampton-defender-completes-leicester-medical

 

Vestie (CB) going to Leicester. Ryan Bertrand (LB) joined Leicester this summer as well.

Leicester now has half of a starting backfield that gave up 68 goals w/ Southampton last year. (2nd worst in the league).

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13 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

Willock is the only MF in EPL history to score a goal in seven consecutive games. i hope he's awesome at NUFC. who knows, maybe we'll buy him back in three years for £65M.

First he'll come to Chelsea, win a couple of trophies, then get overpaid by Arsenal and win nothing.  This is the way.  

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2 hours ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Southampton 2021:

Hide Throwing Away GIF by The Streamy Awards

i hope it's that and not throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It's all be done on the cheap. Southampton is not going to deficit spend in the transfer market. They still have £21m left to spend - we'll see if they do.

 

 

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14 minutes ago, texifornia said:

He'll be Roma's club record signing

 

Glad he pointed out that the 40M transfer with a buy back clause isn't a loan. I was confused there for a sec. 

Good luck Tammy. Stuck around just long enough. Doubt he ever ends back up at Stamford but you never know. 

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I was trying to figure out who the "Gomez" was who is rumored to be switching from USMNT loyalties to El Tri loyalties and it turns out that it is Jonathan Gómez (17 yrs-old), who used to be in the FC Dallas academy, but now apparently is with Louisville City.

I think that after Dallas got screwed over by Weston McKinnie not signing a contract and then leaving on a free transfer, Dallas has signed stars at 15 or 16 years of age and then sold them ASAP. There's no desire to get screwed over again.

Well this Jonathan Gómez was playing for Dallas' "North Texas" USL team and then transferred to Louisville City in May of 2020. He was on an amateur contract with Dallas and he was 16 1/2 and I think that Dallas saw the writing on the wall.

Gómez turns 18 on September 1st, so I guess that that is one day too late to transfer to most leagues in Europe, so he has signed to go to Real Sociedad (San Sebastian, Spain in the Basque Country... I saw the exterior of their stadium 2 years ago) and Louisville are getting a whopping... US$100,000 for him to sign right now.

Louisville has called it a "learning experience" and shows that they are a pathway to Europe. What they are, are chumps.

https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/sports/2021/07/14/lou-city-star--jonathan-gomez-set-to-join-real-sociedad-after-2021-season

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On 8/15/2021 at 8:14 AM, texifornia said:

 

 

€40million. Dang, there was discussion earlier this summer that Southampton was inquiring. If that was the price tag, they must have swallowed their tongue.

cute to think it could have been a possibility.

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