Keith Bond

@matthew_j194 @mattormond_ I wouldn't read anything in to that. It's the sort of remark that someone could make if they're being shouted at.

@mattormond_ Paraphrased I can’t lie. Someone shouted: ‘I hope Palios doesn’t pay you back’ He replied: ‘well if he doesn’t then I own the stadium and I’ll turn it into a housing estate.’

I don’t really know how to word this interaction on Twitter but here goes… Smurthwaite was getting a bit of grief from some of our fans an when giving it back said, ‘If Palios doesn’t pay me back I own the stadium and I’ll turn it into a housing estate’.

I was really looking forward to this series but it's poorly done with a poor script and poor plots. I'm bailing out after two episodes. #scarpetta

@SirBylHolte Managed to get half way through second episode as I was hoping it would improve but it didn't.

I just tried watching “Scarpetta” on Amazon Prime—so you definitely don't have to! Prime hates men, Patricia Cornwell over-empowers her female characters, so expectations were low. Sure enough: Kay Scarpetta smokes cigarettes on the way to the crime scene, because nothing says AGENCY like giving yourself cancer. At the crime scene, her Hispanic cop ex-husband shows up to demand that she spend more time with her mixed-race niece/daughter. They bicker of course, because who wants to see happy marriages anymore anyway right? She orders him off the scene. Then, because it’s 2026 and no one can tell linear stories anymore, we jump back 28 years to a similar case when Kay was a young Chief ME. She gets called to another crime scene, but looks in on her young mixed-race niece before leaving. Then she lets her FEMALE holocaust-survivor babysitter in and leaves. Driving to the crime scene Kay smokes more cigarettes, because even health professionals can never have enough cancer, right? She immediately confronts a young white male officer at the scene for not having gloves. He tells her he’ll “do better next time for sure.” The murder victim was a FEMALE SURGICAL RESIDENT. Her husband is only an actor. Kay chats with the young HISPANIC detective who she will eventually marry. After looking at the body, she leaves and smokes more cigarettes. Back in the present, a FEMALE judge administers the oath of office to Scarpetta. She’s given a OLDER FEMALE assistant. Back in the past, the victim’s husband smokes cigarettes too, making me wonder how much production money came from Big Tobacco. Cut to Young Kay listening to a tape of the interrogation of the husband. Because he's an actor, he quotes Tennessee Williams. The young Hispanic detective says “wasn’t he a fag?” Kay hears that and goes ballistic: “please don’t ever use that word in my presence ever.” Back in the present, the elderly female assistant walks in on Kay in the shower, leers at her TWICE and says "marvelous how you've kept your figure all these years." Next, we visit the cemetery where her mixed-race LESBIAN WIDOWED niece Lucy is talking to the headstone of her wife Janet. We don't know it yet, but the niece is also a tech-savvy computer programmer/hacker, former FBI agent! Meanehiler, her white mom and white aunt bicker over song lyrics in the background… …and that’s where I turned it off. Becuase I cannot do all this female misery, gratuitous quarreling, and identity bullshit in place of story! Nicole Kidman is very robotic and her face looks like fragile plastic. Honestly, the most intersting thing about this FEMALE-POSITIVE show, is that the victims are also women, and the producers do not flinch at showing the brutality of the murders or the autopsies. Verdict: watch at your own risk.

@henrywinter I'd have him in my squad.

Trent Alexander-Arnold plays right-back for Real Madrid. Started home and away against Manchester City. He won the Premier League and Champions League at right-back with Liverpool. He’s used to dealing with pressure. He’s taken a decisive tournament penalty. He’s played in the World Cup before. He has occasional defensive deficiencies but he brings a long-range passing skill that few possess. Are England that blessed at right-back that they don’t need Alexander-Arnold? That he isn’t amongst the best 30 outfield players available to Thomas Tuchel?

@FerryLad 31. Thought he was older.

Strong rumours 🤔

@nationaltrust @jaysto29 That's an excellent example of how not to answer a question.

@jaysto29 Hi Jeannette, we're sorry to hear this. The local team will be best placed to look into this for you and respond directly. You can reach them at calkeabbey@nationaltrust.org.uk. We hope this helps, thanks.

What's happening at Calke Abbey @nationaltrust today? No-one can get in but your website states "open".

@liam_carson6688 @lennyb1983 New manager has to work with current squad but Crosby was backed and allowed to sign players on contracts and loans. On paper some looked like good arrivals but they have seriously under performed. Palios has his faults but the players need to step up and stop the rot.

@lennyb1983 Though I agree Palios is a problem that performance was on the players. They allow players to walk past them multiple times with ease none one of them put a tackle in that’s players downing tools

Wonder who the MP arse lickers will blame when we go down this year? #trfc #swa

@LStevelawrence Ironside needs dropping. Patrick is a luxury player that we can't afford to carry at the moment so also needs benching. 3 at the back should also go. We have a very basic level of players so need to play a basic system. 442?

Will be an interesting team on Saturday, Ironside needs to be dropped as do a few others, I think Patrick is off at end of season so his attitude is an issue, AC probably right to leave him out tge other week

Once again, game after game, it's clear when opposition have the ball they look to move forward. Our players, far too often, play passes along back line or towards our own goal before the inevitable 'hit and hope' long ball for a lone forward to try and get his head on it. #trfc

@israel_ajoje How can clubs justify paying these sort of salaries? It just seems completely out of control.

In January 2018, Manchester United signed Alexis Sanchez from Arsenal. No transfer fee changed hands. It was a swap deal with Henrikh Mkhitaryan going the other way, so United fans celebrated what felt like a free signing of one of the Premier League's best players at the time. Here is what it actually cost them. Sanchez's base salary was reported to be £391,000 per week. On top of that, he received a £75,000 bonus for every game he started, plus a £6.7 million signing-on fee. United also paid £5 million in agent fees to his representative. By the time United paid him £9 million just to rip up the final two years of his contract and make him go away, the total bill for a player who scored five goals in 45 appearances came to over £66 million. The "free" transfer ended up costing more than most actual transfers. That is part 3 of many, and that is exactly what we are unpacking today. The wage bill. Are you with me? Good. The transfer fee of a player is never the full picture. Not even when you add it to the base salary.. When you read that a player earns £200,000 a week, that figure is almost always the gross amount before tax. Premier League players pay income tax at 45% on all earnings above £125,000. But it is not just the player paying. The club carries employer National Insurance contributions on top of the gross salary, currently at 13.8% with no upper cap for high earners. So a £200,000 per week salary is not a £200,000 per week cost to the club. It is closer to £228,000 per week once employer NI is factored in. If you run that across a full year and over a year, you have added over £1.4 million to the cost of one player's salary before a single bonus has been paid. The country a player is in makes this even more complicated. In Spain, for example,  the top income tax rate sits at 52%, which is why Real Madrid had to pay approximately £600,000 per week just to put £288,000 per week in Cristiano Ronaldo's pocket during his final years at the club. The player takes home less than half of what the club actually spends on wages. This is one of the structural reasons why clubs in France and Spain have historically struggled to match Premier League offers pound for pound. The tax environment is not just the player's problem. It is built directly into the competitive landscape of every league. Clubs suffer it too. Now let us get into the extras, because this is where the real money hides from the headlines. Sign-on fees are paid upfront, sometimes before the player has kicked a single ball for the club. They compensate for the absence of a transfer fee in situations of free transfer , or simply reward the player for choosing one club over competing offers. Signons are usually huge. They sometimes are as high as transfer fees. Over the course of his four and a half year contract at United, Sanchez was expected to earn £108 million in wages alongside a reported £20 million signing-on fee. That is a combined commitment north of £125 million on a player who arrived for “free”. Then there are appearance bonuses, which clubs use to incentivise performance but which can spiral out of control when a player underperforms. Sanchez  reportedly received a £75,000 bonus for every game he started at United, on top of his base salary of £391,000 per week and an annual signing-on fee of £1.1 million for every year of his contract.   When you give a player such a contract and he is underperforming, what you are basically doing is paying for presence, not impact. And when a player of that calibre delivers five goals in 45 appearances, every single one of those appearance bonuses feels like money poured directly into a drain. Let us do the full cost calculation of a transfer together. I want to show you something. Take a £50 million signing. He demands £150,000 per week. That is about £7.8 million per year in base salary. Add employer NI and you are at roughly £9 million per year. Over a five year contract that is £45 million in wages, already almost matching the transfer fee. Add a £8 million signing-on fee, realistic appearance bonuses over the contract totalling maybe £3 million, agent fees on both sides of the deal at roughly £6 million combined, and you are already past £110 million on a player whose headline cost was £50 million. The number in the press was less than half the story. This is why the clubs that win long term are not always the biggest spenders. They are the ones who read the full cost of every player before a single decision is made, not just the fee, but the wages, the tax environment, the bonus structure, and the five year total commitment attached to every name on the shortlist. Part 4 is next. We will be getting into agent fees and commissions, who really pays them, how they are structured, and why the same agent can legally represent both the player and the buying club in the exact same deal. It will be up by 12pm WAT today. Don’t miss it. 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.

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.

@ATTTMPod If we win on Tuesday it's a good point away from home. Lose and the pressure increases.

Get your thoughts in #TRFC

Many mobile thefts are snatched when someone is using phone and they speed off on bike. Surely phone manufacturers could enable phone to detect sudden movement and disable phone.

@Jsize18 Why?? I'm sure there must be coaches in Spain.

Very stupid question here but that's very obviously their team bus not a coach branded. How do they get them over?

@plinketyplink2 Years ago saw Elkie Brooks in Liverpool. She did a stunning version of Lilac Wine & ended song arms outstretched bathed in a spotlight. Silence. Nobody cheered. We were just gobsmacked. Then after a moment someone shouted 'bloody fantastic' and the cheers started. A great night.

Lily Allen live in Liverpool: Scouse girl shouts “Tell him to fuck off.” 😄

@shimritby Thanks for replying. Have sent a DM.

@trfc_1964 Can you share more about what's not working for you? Please DM if you prefer!

We’ve heard your feedback that you want more control over the type of results you see when searching in Google Photos. To address this, we’re starting to roll out a new experience that puts you in the driver’s seat, letting you choose between fast classic search and intelligent Ask Photos results. 🔍 We’ll lead with the results that best fit your query, but you always have the control to switch views to help you find exactly what you need.

@tvukzone Would be better played on consecutive nights. Doing weekly means you forget who contestants are.

If you missed it: #TheFloor with Rob Brydon will return for a second series on ITV next year. More details: tvzoneuk.com/post/thefloor-…

@ATTTMPod Do I have to?

Get your thoughts in #TRFC

@Google @googlephotos Can you just improve the facial recognition so it actually works.

Have you tried Ask Photos or the new Ask button in @GooglePhotos yet? ⬇️ Here are some of our favorite ways you can use it: 1️⃣ Ask Photos can find a picture from your library, then you can use the Ask button to get information about what’s in that photo. Like, for example, the name of a hiking trail or mountain range featured in the background. 2️⃣ Get suggestions based on your pictures. Zero in on your favorites — like that hiking trail — and have Ask Photos suggest what other trails you may enjoy based off of it. 3️⃣ Find similar photos in your camera roll. Use Ask Photos to find pictures that evoke a specific feeling or look similar to reference photos in your gallery. 4️⃣ Transcribe text from photos. For frequent recipe collectors or text screenshotters, the Ask button can transcribe on-screen text for you. Then, you can easily turn them into lists, directions and more.