Hightown Phil

Well you can if you've got space in your squad and you're able to make a case that you need one. If you decided two goalkeepers was fine the Premier League would likely tell you to go f*** yourself.

They both went to be second choice which is a step up from what Adrian is doing. But that isn't the point of what I'm saying anyway. We have 25 players, swapping one keeper for another means we've still got 25 and would need to create space anyway.

Unless your solution was to not have a third choice goalkeeper that would have changed nothing.

If Saul signed today I wouldn’t expect him to play a great deal until after the September international break anyway so I don’t think it matters too much personally.

Selling people at a reduced cost now is panicking which surely we can all agree is a bad idea. If you absolutely have to do that you do it in a month (I think Minamino leaves on loan and we’ll sell Phillips eventually) but if you create a situation where you physically can’t register players you put yourself on the back foot in any negotiations moving forward. If we signed an English player who was to take Phillips’ place tomorrow I would say you’re instantly halving his value. And you might not care but the club clearly do.

He is, but hardly like he’s in any way relevant to anything squadwise.

There’s more chance of me walking on the moon than there is of Karius being considered as someone to be registered in our squad.

Feels a bit like how the 6th man in basketball plays 30-35 minutes a game that though even though by definition they aren’t in the starting five.

It would be yes, but we've got two.

No. More like accept that we aren't owned by Oligarchs or a Wealth Fund so can't behave like we are, and that we aren't going to take on debt to buy footballers when there isn't a clear path to how that debt would subsequently be paid off, unless you're happy to sell players to pay the debt off which I suspect people wouldn't be.

Chelsea yes I'd say although they're trying to be a bit better but stuff like last summer looks a lot like sticking two fingers up to the rules, United no. United are just going further and further in to debt. Not sure that's something we should be doing to buy footballers myself.

Well no, because they're cheating and doing things that we can't unless we start cheating too.

The only people our way could possibly not compete over the long term with is oligarchs and wealth funds, so if the rules are enforced we'll be absolutely fine. If it can't reasonably be expected to work we may as well dissolve the sport because it's finished.

How do you think they're affording it?

Depends within what parameters you're trying to operate surely? If you've taken a loan out or you're happy to take on a load of debt, or you're using the money of a sovereign wealth fund or an Oligarch, it's going to be different to if you're a self sufficient football club who isn't doing any of these things. This is also without even considering that it's pretty difficult to buy players to improve a squad like ours, which is very good.

Yeah I know. What I'm saying is we're basically one in, one out regardless of nationality at the minute even if we forget Karius exists. So as an example, if we'd signed Ben Foster instead of Adrian, we'd still need to move a player on to sign someone anyway.

You've listed 8, so if we maintain 17 non homegrown, we'd hit the 25 man squad through the 8 homegrown players? I agree on Phillips, don't really see the harm in keeping Davies, but you name the squad after the window closes and if we have more players than we can register we won't get what's mooted because they'll quickly realise we need to sell and just lower their bid.

I hadn't even considered that we're currently in a position where we couldn't register a homegrown player without a sale.

Reckon he'll end up on loan somewhere to, but you can't really just not register someone. You're reducing their value to pretty much zero.

Robertson is 16, Shaqiri is 17.

Cos they'll own him next summer. Wouldn't have thought there's any reason why they couldn't pass the registration on to us if they wanted to.

The Saul one seems to not be going away. Feels a little bit Thiago in terms of how it's circulating in the Spanish press. I also can believe the Chiesa one having had a look at some stats. He's really similar to Firmino in terms of his attacking output and if you wanted a direct replacement then I suspect that kind of fee is what you'd have to pay for one, given the real lack of general options in that position. Bar an obvious 5 or so it doesn't feel like we're in a great age of central forwards so you could argue Chiesa would be to a large extent the transformational type of signing we're happy to pay a big fee for. (I know he isn't really a central forward by definition before someone says it).

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Yep. Just had a look and he's done about 2200 minutes in total in his time here in Premier League and European Cup. Which is about 7 full games a season which is broadly speaking pathetic.