Dave Meehan

I set this photo as my profile pic. #SunsetInTheSunset

@Math_files Pythagoras Theorum

See it once, and you never forget it. 📽️ H. Joachim Schlichting

You guys should start a new podcast series together

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@dineen20dineen I remember those. Don’t know if we ever got anything with them though

Did you collect the green shield stamps got a few pots and pans and household items

Jessie Buckley closed the 2025 awards season with 42 awards for Best Actress for her performance in “Hamnet”.

Feeling... lucky? Us too 😘 It's now easier than ever to get from the Bay Area to Ireland 🇮🇪 with 6 nonstop flights a week from SFO ✈️ DUB via United & Aer Lingus ☘️ Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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@CarlowWeather What’s the difference between equilux and equinox? Never heard of equilux before

Today/tomorrow depending on location marks the Vernal Equilux for Ireland where we hit the point of 12 hours equal day and night and from here onwards daylight gets longer. Clocks spring forward Sunday week with sunset almost 8pm. The Equinox is Friday. Better days are coming!

This one is a football accounting gem. I promise you will love it. In January 2023, Chelsea signed Mykhailo Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk for £88.5 million. The deal was jaw dropping on its own. But what really made the football world stop and stare was not the fee. It was the contract length. Eight and a half years. The longest contract in Premier League history at the time. Journalists questioned it. Rival clubs complained about it. And most fans had absolutely no idea what Chelsea were actually doing. But let me tell you. They were not being reckless. They were doing math. Very clever, very deliberate, very legal math. And the tool they were using is called amortisation. This is part of what football insiders consider during transfers. Are you with me? Good. Here is the simplest way to understand amortization. When a club signs a player, they spread the accounting of the cost of the transfer fee over the period of the contract signed by the player. So for example, when Harry Maguire signed for Manchester United in 2019 for £80 million on a six year deal, that did not show up as an £80 million expense in year one. It worked out as an annual amortisation cost of £13.3 million per year. That is the entire concept. Think of it the same way you think of a mortgage. You do not pay the full value of a house on the day you move in. You spread it. Football clubs do the exact same thing with players, and it is not a trick or a cheat. It is standard accounting practice used across every industry in the world. Check it. It's International Standard 38- used for accounting for intangible assets. The reason it matters so much in football is because of Financial Fair Play and Profitability and Sustainability Rules, which regulate how much clubs can lose in any given period. Amortisation costs are added to the profit and loss account each year, so the lower your annual amortisation figure, the healthier your books look. And here is where contract length becomes a weapon. Now let us do the math together. By using amortisation to complete Mudryk's transfer, Chelsea were able to record his £80 million fee as just £9.41 million per year for UEFA's FFP calculation. Had they signed Mudryk to a four year deal instead, his fee would have been recorded as £20 million per year. Same player. Same fee. More than double the annual accounting cost just by changing the contract length. That is the power of what Chelsea figured out. They did the same with Enzo Fernandez, signed for a then-British record of £106.8 million on an eight and a half year deal, which translated to an annual amortisation expense of approximately £13.4 million. And Moises Caicedo for £115 million on eight and a half years. And Wesley Fofana for £70 million on seven years. Repeat this across an entire squad and a billion pounds of spending starts to look manageable on paper. Did you get that? Now let's look at another part of amortization- the book value piece, because this changes how you think about every transfer you have ever watched. Book value is the difference between the transfer fee spent on a player minus what has already been amortised. For example, after two years, a £50 million player signed on a five year deal has a book value of £30 million. Any sale above £30 million is recorded as a profit. Anything below is a loss. This is why clubs can sell a player for what looks like a loss and still report a gain in their accounts. Take this example: a player is signed for £40 million on a five year contract. He is not a success and is sold two years later for £26 million. At the point of sale, his book value is £24 million, meaning the club actually books a £2 million profit on the deal. Fans see terrible business. The accountants see a gain. Same transaction, completely different reality. Manchester City lived this with Robinho. He was bought for £32.5 million on a four year deal in 2008, with annual amortisation of £8.1 million. He was sold after two years, leaving a book value of £16.3 million. City sold him for £18 million and claimed a £1.7 million profit on the sale. Supporters spent years calling it a disaster. The finance department called it a profit. There is one more trick worth knowing: contract extensions. If a player signs a new contract during their existing deal, the remaining unamortised value is spread over the length of the new contract. So if you bought a player for £60 million on a five year deal and after two years you extend his contract by three more years, the remaining £36 million book value is now spread across five new years instead of three. That reduces the annual amortisation cost and can reduce FFP losses by millions per year. Extending a contract is not always about keeping a player happy. Sometimes it is purely a financial decision dressed up as a vote of confidence. Back to Chelsea. Other clubs eventually complained loudly enough that UEFA had to act. UEFA amended its Financial Sustainability Regulations in July 2023, introducing a rule that limits the amortisation of player registrations to a maximum of five years, regardless of how long the contract actually runs. The Premier League followed in December 2023, when shareholders voted to apply the same five year maximum to all new or extended player contracts going forward. The loophole was closed. But crucially, the rule could not be applied retrospectively, meaning every player Chelsea signed on those long contracts before December 2023 continues to be amortised over the full contract length. Chelsea were already finished with their biggest spending windows by the time the door was shut. The timing was not a coincidence. As I conclude, always remember this- the contract is never just a contract. It is an accounting instrument. And the clubs that understand that are always three moves ahead of the ones that do not. I hope you enjoyed this. Tomorrow, by 7AM WAT, We get into the wage bill, and why a £50 million transfer can quietly become a £150 million commitment before you have blinked. Thanks for reading. My name is Ajoje. I am a FIFA Licensed Agent and International Sports Lawyer. I write on the Law and Business of Football, a lot. Repost and Follow if you want to read more posts like this.

@nickimoraa Et tu Bruté

I told someone to “Beware the Ides of March” today, and they looked at me like I was crazy. 😖 please tell me other people know what I’m referring to??

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@JohnDugganSport Saturday morning I had no expectation that Ireland could win the #6Nations but damn we were two minutes away

The best ever Six Nations Championship?

Just turned on the F1 in time to see the start and WTF happened to the two Maclarens??? #f1 #ChineseGP

Darcy Graham😂 Ireland 43 Scotland 21

Did you know? NASA only uses 15 digits of π for calculating interplanetary travel. At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that'd fall off by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. π Day 2026

You won’t hear me saying this very often/ever but CMON ENGLAND!!! #Ireland #TrippleCrownWinners #6Nations #rugby

@volcaholic1 From memory?

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899 862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028 4102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271

@dineen20dineen Forty coats and fifty pockets

Did you tune into forty coats and co on RTE 1 1980s

@LeoForde You forgot to say asking for a friend

Which SuperValu please?😉