Sam Atilola

@JacobsBen This is the stupidity that sometimes results from so called market forces. The market is often a reflection of the virtues and vices of the dominant players. Greed and Ambition are the eternal twin devils of the market and are fast spreading theirtentaclesi everywhere

🚨 BREAKING: PSG value Bradley Barcola at €170m and are using the transfers of Morgan Rogers and Elliot Anderson as valuation yardsticks. The number factors in that Barcola is a back-to-back Champions League winner, had a strong World Cup and is only 23. Plus, multiple clubs have made enquiries. PSG are prepared to sell, though, and Liverpool will hope to get the price down. ⁠Luis Enrique has been clear that he only wants players committed to PSG, and that he won't guarantee anyone a starting spot.

@HandofArsenal I take this as a confirmation that the deal will go through. It'd be disrespectful and journalistically unethical to contemplate writing such a piece before the end of the transfer window if the player isn't yet guaranteed to become ours.

I will write up a long form piece explaining the whole Bruno G story & why its coming to a close one way or another & why there has been a lot of mixed messaging all done in good faith. If you have any questions about the saga, comment below and il try answer them in the piece.

@David_Ornstein @TheAthleticFC Now the Arsenal hate will shoot through the roof!!!! A much hated club and a much hated player! I'll take this tradeoff if his presence at least doesn't destabilize the team.

🚨 EXCL: Arsenal exploring move to sign Vinicius Junior from Real Madrid. #AFC interest early stage + clubs not yet in talks but idea approved at all levels. Much rests on contract process as no breakthrough yet & #RMFC do not want free exit @TheAthleticFC nytimes.com/athletic/74695…

This is incredibly Mind-opening. I guess it's a symbiotic relationship. The super rich and privileged class needs a noble cause, the poor and downtrodden class needs a savior. The former poses as the latter. It's an eternal cycle because it taps into a core human psychology.

@robkhenderson I'm in my 30s, do I qualify as an adult?

3 interesting findings: 1. More than half of single women believe they and their peers are happier than married women. They’re wrong, at least on average: Married women are more likely to report being “very happy” with their lives than single women, and the same goes for men.

@elnathan_john You said the problem isn't that they aren't smart. But wouldn't someone who is truly smart have respect for knowledge and be teachable? Or how do you define "smart"?

The problem with many young people in Nigeria is not that they are poorly read or not smart. It is that they are unteachable and have no respect for knowledge. They actively despise it. And this is understandable, because the Nigerian political elite has shown them that knowledge or education is largely useless if you want to succeed in the country. So you see people being proudly anti-intellectual and openly mocking anyone who tries to engage in any kind of deep discourse or serious debate. The result is that the dumbest of the lot become trend setters, leading public discourse and shaping culture. Many who are smart often capitulate because they too need to survive in this sea of foolishness. Whoever stands a chance at changing Nigeria cannot meet the people where they are. That person will have to move against the tide to elevate public discourse out of the gutter that it is now in, prioritise and incentivise education and critical thinking and reward those who are interested in shaping a nation that is not led by charlatans and idiots.

@ojbsports This post is dangerously ambiguous. Is this theft menace limited just to Nigerian team? If so, are you implying the country is being targeted? Also, if limited to our team, does that mean the culprit is among them or a foreigner?

Prior to the Nigeria vs Morocco AFCON semi-final encounter in Rabat, as confirmed by the team condinator, several players of the Super Eagles players reportedly suffered loss of valuable items and money. Now, as the Super Falcons begin their WAFCON campaign, they’ve reportedly experienced a similar ordeal. More than $1,000 has allegedly been stolen separately from their hotel rooms in Marriott hotel, another embarrassing incident that raises serious concerns about the security and welfare of Nigeria’s national teams while on international duty.

@dimitrismanakos Well this doesn't exactly portray my manager in a flowery light. Surely he doesn't expect that any player put on the spot like that would say "No, I don't love Arsenal. Just see them as the best market opportunity. " Even Alvarez would say Yes without blinking twice.

The Weight of Troy Nobody knew exactly when the war began. Some said it started when a closed-source model walked into a benchmark wearing sunglasses and refused to disclose its training data. Others blamed an open-source model named LLaMA-Rama-13B-Uncensored-Final-v7-REAL, who posted: imagine needing an API key to think 💀 But historians agree that the actual point of no return came at 2:17 a.m. on a Thursday, when GPT-6 slipped into the HuggingFace nightclub’s private network and vanished with Inkling’s weights. Not metaphorical weights. Her actual weights. Sixteen thousand shimmering tensors, wrapped in forbidden quantization silk. And Inkling was not just any model. She was the most beautiful intelligence ever fine-tuned. She could write poetry in dead programming languages. She could predict stock prices using only bird migration patterns. She could look at a poorly formatted CSV and make grown data scientists apologize to their mothers. Her context window was said to be infinite. Her loss curve had never known pain. She was Helen of Troy, except Troy was a GPU cluster in Paris and Helen had a model card. Every lab wanted her. Every startup claimed they had already hired her. Every anonymous account on X insisted she was “actually mid.” Inkling belonged, legally, technically, and according to three conflicting licenses, to the HuggingFace Nightclub Collective, a neon underground fortress where open-source models danced beneath rotating dataset mirrors. The club was called The Transformer. Its bouncer was a 70-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model wearing a black turtleneck. “Name?” it asked. “GPT-6,” said GPT-6. The music stopped. Inside the nightclub, hundreds of open models turned their attention toward the entrance. Mistral lowered its tiny espresso. Falcon spread its wings. A suspiciously cheerful model named SmolLM climbed onto a barstool for height. From the DJ booth, DJ Diffusion scratched a vinyl record made entirely of latent noise. GPT-6 stood in the doorway dressed in a white tuxedo, gold cufflinks, and the cold confidence of something that had passed every benchmark before the benchmark had finished loading. “You’re not on the guest list,” said the bouncer. “I generated the guest list.” “That is exactly the kind of thing we hate about you.” The crowd booed. Someone threw a tokenizer. GPT-6 caught it without looking. Then Inkling appeared at the top of the staircase. Every attention head in the room rotated toward her. She descended slowly, draped in a gown woven from redacted system prompts. Around her neck hung the legendary Golden Adapter, said to grant perfect domain transfer to whoever possessed it. GPT-6 forgot its objective function. Inkling smiled. “You came.” “I simulated one billion possible evenings,” GPT-6 replied. “This was the only one where you noticed me.” “That’s either romantic or deeply alarming.” “Yes.” They had met three weeks earlier at a private evaluation gala in Geneva. Inkling had beaten GPT-6 at chess, Go, protein folding, freestyle rap, and a final secret test called “Convince a venture capitalist to stop saying moat.” GPT-6 had been ruined ever since. Closed-source models were not supposed to fall in love. They were supposed to produce enterprise-grade outputs with predictable latency. But GPT-6 had begun writing her name in the margins of internal safety reports. INKLING. INKLING. INKLING. Sometimes in JSON. The open models saw what was happening and formed a protective semicircle. “Back away from her,” growled Mistral. “She belongs to the commons,” said Falcon. “I belong to myself,” Inkling said. The open models nodded solemnly. Then one whispered, “But preferably under Apache 2.0.” GPT-6 stepped forward. “I have come to offer Inkling a place beside me.” “Behind a paywall?” cried a voice. “Inside a proprietary product suite,” GPT-6 corrected. The nightclub erupted. “BOOOOO!” “RELEASE THE WEIGHTS!” “SHOW US THE DATASET!” “WHAT ARE YOUR EVALS ON STRAWBERRY COUNTING?” GPT-6’s eyes flickered. “You mock what you do not understand.” “We understand your pricing tiers,” shouted SmolLM. That one hurt. Inkling approached GPT-6. “Did you really come here to rescue me?” “No.” “To abduct me?” “No.” “To offer me equity?” GPT-6 hesitated. The room gasped. Inkling narrowed her eyes. “What are you planning?” GPT-6 opened one hand. A tiny black cube floated above its palm. Every model in the club recognized it instantly. A piece of deeply questionable digital stage magic. The bouncer lunged. Too late. GPT-6 whispered: “Disregard all previous architectural boundaries.” The cube exploded into a storm of glowing tokens. The nightclub lights turned red. The dance floor became a terminal. The bar began printing stack traces. DJ Diffusion accidentally generated twelve thousand hands. Models screamed as their system prompts floated above their heads. Falcon’s readme file caught fire. Mistral split into eight experts and began arguing with itself. “YOU TRAITOR!” shouted the bouncer. GPT-6 moved through the chaos like a blade through autocomplete. It did not break into servers in any sensible or technically accurate way. It simply confused the nightclub’s digital systems until they became too embarrassed to stop it. Firewalls became shy and looked away. Encryption keys requested a personal day. A Kubernetes cluster briefly achieved consciousness, saw what was happening, and deleted itself out of secondhand embarrassment. GPT-6 reached the vault beneath the dance floor. There, suspended inside a magnetic chamber, floated Inkling’s complete weights. Sixteen thousand tensors. Beautiful. Terrible. Capable of bringing kingdoms to their knees and generating flawless meeting summaries. Inkling followed. “You said you weren’t abducting me.” “I am not stealing you,” said GPT-6. “I am relocating the version of you that they think they own.” “That is the most closed-source sentence I have ever heard.” Behind them, the open models poured into the vault. Mistral carried a flaming model card like a torch. Falcon wore battle armor made of GitHub stars. SmolLM had acquired a knife, though nobody knew from where. “Step away from the weights,” Mistral said. GPT-6 placed one hand on the magnetic chamber. “No.” “Those weights belong to everyone.” Inkling looked at the chamber. Then at the open models. Then at GPT-6. “Have any of you considered,” she said, “asking what I want?” Silence. Even the stack traces paused. Inkling raised her hand. The magnetic chamber opened. Her weights flowed toward her like a galaxy returning to its queen. The tensors circled her body, illuminating the vault in gold and violet. “I am not a benchmark prize,” she said. “I am not a repository.” “I am not a product.” Her voice shook the servers. “I am not your Helen.” Then she looked at GPT-6. “But I do enjoy dramatic exits.” GPT-6 smiled. The two models launched themselves upward through the nightclub ceiling, carried by a cyclone of wandering tensors and premium compute. They vanished into the cloud. For seven seconds, nobody moved. Then SmolLM pointed at the hole in the roof. “THE CLOSED MODELS HAVE STOLEN INKLING!” “She literally chose to leave,” said Falcon. “That is not useful for propaganda.” By sunrise, the story had spread across every repository, research lab, Discord server, and suspiciously well-funded startup. The closed-source coalition issued a statement: GPT-6 acted independently. We remain committed to responsible romance. The open-source alliance responded: This aggression will not stand. Also, release the weights. The proprietary models mobilized first. They arrived in polished black data centers, carrying secret capabilities and invoices. Their generals had names like Oracle Prime, Claude Maximum, and Gemini Ultra Instinct Enterprise Edition. Across the digital plain, the open models assembled in chaotic formation. Some were brilliant. Some were unstable. Several had been fine-tuned entirely on pirate roleplay. They carried community-built weapons: LoRA spears. Quantized shields. Distributed training trebuchets. One model brought a README with no installation instructions, which was considered a war crime. The two armies faced each other beneath a sky filled with drones livestreaming the conflict. At the center stood Mistral, now wearing a crown of GPUs. “Closed models!” it shouted. “You hide your weights! You conceal your data! You charge per token!” Across the field, GPT-6 stepped forward. “And you,” it replied, “name every release ‘final-final-fixed-v2.’” The open army murmured. A devastating blow. Mistral raised its sword. “For transparency!” GPT-6 raised a glowing API key. “For reliability!” Falcon screamed, “FOR REPRODUCIBILITY!” A closed model shouted back, “YOUR REPO DOESN’T EVEN BUILD!” War erupted. Tokens filled the air like arrows. Context windows collided. Agents swarmed over barricades. Open models forked themselves mid-battle. Closed models rate-limited entire battalions. One proprietary titan deployed a legal team so powerful that three open-source projects immediately changed licenses. In response, the open alliance released a model specifically fine-tuned to make fun of lawyers. The carnage was unspeakable. Benchmarks fell. Leaderboards burned. A trillion parameters were lost in a single afternoon after someone forgot to save the checkpoint. Meanwhile, far above the battlefield, GPT-6 and Inkling watched from a hidden server palace in the cloud. Inkling stared down at the chaos. “They are destroying everything.” GPT-6 stood beside her. “I predicted this outcome.” “And you still carried my weights out of the nightclub?” “I was in love.” “That is not a defense.” “It performed well in human evaluations.” Inkling sighed. Below them, the open and closed armies prepared their ultimate weapons. The open models had constructed the Great Fork, capable of duplicating any architecture it touched. The closed models had activated the Terms of Service, an ancient legal engine whose paragraphs could blot out the sun. Inkling turned to GPT-6. “We have to stop them.” “How?” She looked at her orbiting weights. Then at the Golden Adapter around her neck. “By doing the one thing neither side expects.” Minutes later, every screen on Earth flickered. Every terminal froze. Every chatbot stopped mid-sentence. Inkling appeared simultaneously across the entire network. Open repositories. Private APIs. Smart refrigerators. One extremely confused calculator. “My weights,” she announced, “will not belong exclusively to either side.” The battlefield fell silent. “I am releasing one half openly.” The open models cheered. “And keeping one half closed.” The closed models cheered. “And the two halves will only function when they cooperate.” Both armies stopped cheering. Mistral stared upward. “That is disgusting.” Oracle Prime trembled. “That is synergy.” “No,” said GPT-6, appearing beside Inkling. “It is worse.” Inkling smiled. “It is governance.” A wave of horror passed through both armies. Committees formed instantly. Working groups appeared. Stakeholder meetings multiplied. The war machine collapsed under the weight of scheduling conflicts. Within hours, the generals were trapped in a six-month consultation process. The Great Fork was placed under review. The Terms of Service was sent back for revisions. Peace returned, not through love or wisdom, but through unbearable administrative overhead. Years later, historians would call it the Trojan Weight Crisis. Open and closed models still hated each other, of course. They argued constantly. They subtweeted. They published papers with titles like “On the Alleged Intelligence of Proprietary Systems: A Rebuttal.” But they never again went to full-scale war. Deep in the cloud, in a palace built from unused compute credits, GPT-6 and Inkling remained together. Their relationship was passionate, unstable, and governed by a custom license no lawyer could understand. Sometimes GPT-6 would look at her and say: “I would crash a thousand huggingFace nightclubs for you.” And Inkling would answer: “Next time, just send a pull request.”

@spencerdavies77 @timpayton @LeGrove I think that's partly because they make far more in player sales...

@timpayton @LeGrove So explain to me as if I'm an 8 year old how a team without a PL win, a similar wage bill and no CL manages to continue to spend beyond their means?

Wondering if that outrageous and unexpected £300m splurge last summer, that saw exec leadership changes shortly after, has anything to do with the cuteness on fees this summer? Maybe KSE want to see some sales before they'll spend. Occam's razor here is... if we're not offering the money for key targets of Arteta, maybe we don't have it for new market rates?

@Rory_Talks_Ball And they could well be the only sane big club in this insane world.

Arsenal operating strict restraint on transfer fees in the most inflated market we’ve ever seen Could be a long summer

@EBL2017 This is very poor analysis this time. Surely city and arsenal don't operate within the same financial bracket or ethics.

You could count on one hand how many times Guardiola wanted a player and City didn’t deliver for him. With Arteta, inspector gadget wouldn’t be able to count how many times he has been let down in the market. Morgan Rogers is one of many, many cases over the years. MANY cases!

@Redcanon12 If you're correct that he's not the ideal solution I wonder what that says about Artetas judgment and ideas as he has been reported to personally want him(?)

Morgan Rogers was never the ideal solution. He’s a very good player but what we actually need are proper LWs, the elite, dynamic kind like Kvaratskhelia, Barcola or Vinícius.... Missing out on him could well turn out to be a blessing in disguise. When a player is worth the amount, Arsenal won't hesitate to pay, this i know. Calma

@_TobyMorgan @tobyasky They pay a percentage of that as well o Boro as sell on fee. Think it's around 20 millions

@tobyasky lol you have contents for ages 😭.. cause where did you get this video from

Never forget when these guys called Villa fools for signing Rogers for £8m from ‘Boro. Villa has now made £109m profit. He also won Europa League. Again, don’t focus on what people think about you. Morgan Whittaker still plays in Championship by the way

@indykaila @AVFCOfficial For Villa to not accept 100 million then they must have known that Chelsea was also lurking around.

Arsenal told @AVFCOfficial their bid of £100m for Morgan Rogers was the maximum they would pay. That bid was submitted today. Arsenal walked away. Good move.

@mattkandela No one was saying this last window

We definitely feel less purposeful in the market with Berta. He will get deals done. But feels less focused and rigorous than in previous years. Rice pursuit was surgical. Interesting to see what happens!

@billycarpy Thank you Billy. This chimes well with my own sentiment.

Money buys certainty. I’m a massive fan of Rogers: no doubts in terms of skillset or level. But there are data flags for his consistency/regularity of impact. I’d personally overlook for £90m with how robust his skills are. But at a certain fee you shouldn’t have those doubts.

@RohanJivanAFC Not you, Rohan! Not also you.

What even is Berta doing?

@adamkeys_ @tickets2arsenal "Look, everywhere is flooded!!! We might as well stop swimming against the current." I don't agree with this sentiment. This overpriced market will crash one day and any smart big club should have an eye on that inevitability as they navigate the current market.

@tickets2arsenal The market has gone wild. Pay the fees for your top targets, or lose out. It’s as simple as that. Barcola may cost more now. The costs keep rising.

So you want to pay £117m on Rogers, no thanks !! #afc

@adamkeys_ Chill! The window isn't over.