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Now I've heard everything. The reason we're in a mess is because karanka wanted an expert in place in each role at the club. Then pulis rides in on his stead and saves us by saying we need to fire a load of people because we can get that fella over there to do his job for the same wages he's currently on. Who cares what that does to his workload and the quality of the output. Its absolute rubbish and deflection to the highest degree. The problem isn't the 50 odd k you might shave off the annual expenses by firing a couple of analysts, its the millions wasted on terrible signings ove

I love that DZ has thrown shade at someone then allowed for his brother to be wrong over the same player. Top bantz.

If mass redundancies are expected you really have to question the club and their priorities. Yes I appreciate you have to stay competitive on the pitch, but man alive, it really bothers me how it’s always the bottom where they start the cuts from. Football is awash with money and if Boro can spend 1.5m on a signing then in the grand scheme of things, we have money to help those people. Is it someone’s fault in the club shop that the club has been horrendously run and they are going to lose their job? Is it Brenda’s fault that we paid Gestede his contract and ran ourse

I think in last 48hrs I have read on here the following:- a) We need to look overseas b) We need to stop looking overseas c) Stop signing unproven and untested players from lower leagues d) Why can't we be like other clubs and find unknown gems in the lesser known leagues. e) We need to stop paying over the odds for average dross. f) Why are we not paying over £1m for a league 2 player if Brentford are. It is what makes this forum special 😊

We've got money to spend, we've got a decent amount in terms of wages to play with. Bausor is useless, he joined in 2007 and look what he's overseen. The only time we were decent is when Kenyon came in and oversaw the appointment of Karanka and change of approach. I've had a few dealings with him in the past and I can confirm that the man has been a joke when negotiating. Essentially, Boro lost out completely unnecassirly due to stubborness Recruitment- We all know Gill is useless. But, the analysts we've previously appointed are rubbish. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. The snippet

Teams with the most foreign players Brentford - 20 (3rd) Cardiff - 20 (5th) Fulham - 18 (4th Promoted) Leeds - 18 (1st Promoted) Swansea - 18 (6th) Stoke - 18 (15th) Teams with the fewest foreign players Boro - 6 (17th) Charlton - 6 (22nd Relegated) Luton - 7 (19th) Huddersfield - 8 (18th) Hull - 9 (24th Relegated) Birmingham - 9 (20th) 🤯 When we going to stop this turbo-ignorant 'British is Best' policy for both players and staff at the club then because it's getting really really boring

Something I cannot get my head around is why Boro managers and senior staff can't grasp the fact that assembling a balanced squad is actually very simple: Choose a formation and sign two players for every position, except goalkeeper, where you need three. That's pretty much it. Any player capable of finding his backside with both hands will be able to move to an adjacent position or tolerate a slight formation change - 442 to 4312, for instance - but that's about all they need to be able to do. It is neither rocket science nor brain surgery. For context, I am not a football pers

Sorry guys, but I have just checked and the information I received was correct and we tried to hijack the Bristol city deal at the last minute. Fee was more or less agreed but obviously Williams fancied Bristol Over us. I will hold off posting until the news is about to come out in future. My apologises guys. Ps Not surprised players are choosing other clubs over us after the season we had just had and we are not offering bigger wages over other clubs like we have in the past. Going to struggle to attract players these days and I think the club needs to alter their ego thi

What are the club doing wrong in these negotiations? Please enlighten us? You seem to know how we "mess every single deal up". Every window you complain that we miss out on targets as if the players don't have a say in where they want to live and the club should always cave in and pay whatever is demanded. Is it really so hard to grasp that a footballer might be more attracted to playing for Bristol than Boro? The highlighted paragraph is exactly why we are in this mess after taking your road three years ago. Cave into all demands and overbid any competitor✊

I wonder if maybe, we could judge the transfer window at the end of the window, rather than deciding right now that we are going to be relegated because we have only signed one player, when there are weeks and weeks left and really nobody on here knows for certain who Warnock wants to sign.

It is with very much sadness that I advise everyone on the forum that Tom and his wife Bekka have lost their first baby. With all the toing and froing that we discuss on the transfer thread we often forget that there are far more important concerns in life and sadly Tom is experiencing the very worst. On behalf of everyone Tom our thoughts, and those that want prayers are with you both and your immediate families. We have had this before when Trekkers and his wife went through the same situation and I know the pain he went through. Much love to you both

Good news, we can't sign Nmecha. He's gone to Anderlecht on loan.

Captain Doncaster! The crappest superhero of them all

We aren't going to be immune from the economic consequences of Covid and lack of parachute payments. Arsenal have just made 50 redundant as well, whilst adding to an already generous contract for Aubemyang. It is sad what is happening but we are not alone in being in this situation.

Surely the redundancies are at least partly - if not totally - due to Covid? If we can’t have any fans at ground and fans are buying less kit online due to losing their own jobs etc. we don’t need as many staff in shop. Even when fans are allowed back, we’ve probably sold more season tickets than the number of fans to be allowed in ground, so we don’t need people in ticket office to same degree. its only same as M & S or Easyjet shedding thousands of jobs - their isn’t enough work for the existing staff. Plus Rockliffe was supposed to earn money to help football club. At moment it

I'm not accepting it. If anything is gross mismanagement it's this. From the position we were in in 2016, we shouldn't be scraping the barrel when it comes to signing players. We shouldn't be a lower tier championship club. It's been an absolute shambles, failure after failure for four years. Just constant poor decisions, poor managers, poor recruitment and scouting and there's no suggestion this is going to improve any time soon. I won't accept that we can't compete financially either, because we had the PL money. I also don't agree that Monk wasted it, there was enough in that squad to get u

Gibson sure took back control from that European Victor Orta and everything worked out fine *swigs pint of Carling and continues to read the Evening Gazette’s sports section* 💪🇬🇧

@Tom My thoughts are with you and your wife. No one deserves this and believe me , I know. Things will seem very difficult to understand but be strong for your wife and don't forget to look after yourself. Sands and Aching Arms provide good counselling and help. Look out for your local Sands help group who will certainly be able to help and give support for you and your wife. Don't be afraid to ask and accept help from those around you and never blame yourselves. But most importantly celebrate your daughter. Never forget her and always speak her name. She is part of your fa

£15k per week, 3 year deal? How does that sound?

It's all cyclical. In the 90s and early noughties everything was going well. But many clubs have spells like that. Everyone was drooling over Leeds this year. Look where they have been. Stoke seem to have wasted their parachute payments and are now adding geriatric frees to their already bloated squad. Where are Sunderland. You can reel off clubs that are worse run than us. Because it matters to us fans though sometimes it feels that Boro are the worst run club in the world, and that just is not true. As you have said, the decisions of the club will either excite or disappoint us. Currently th

I certainly hope that our directors don't continue taking home the same pay packet whilst getting rid of those lower down. I've no doubt redundancies were expected at some level, especially in pandemic times, but every job saved by people higher up taking a pay cut is a great move. The economy is struggling, jobs are being lost all over the place, it's really scary times. Some people can afford to lose some money, some really can't.

We'll probably enquire about 50 different players this summer with the majority not happening. That doesn't mean to say people are posting false rumours, sometimes deals just don't go through.

Maybe we could do a socially distanced protest march around the Riverside, with placards demanding the recruitment team do something. "What do we want?" "Overpriced panic buys!" "When do we want them?" "At ten am today!" We do seem to be missing out on a lot of players, but there could be a whole host of valid reasons us plebs aren't being informed about - contract length, fees or wages, too many add-on clauses, players just using Boro to inflate bids from elsewhere with no real interest in joining us... I doubt Neil Warnock is spitting his tea across the table every time a Champions

Middlesbrough's recruitment team.

The problem is not where we get the players from, it's the quality of the players we're getting. If all the UK buys had been as good as George was, ability, VFM, longevity etc. then nobody would be saying don't buy British.

Wonder how much Barnsley paid for their latest signing Winger from Austria, persuaded him to join relegation battling Barnsley from a Europa League team wow Remember guys, its the area's fault we can't attract players not because we're the brexit club and useless at recruiting

I have not been a Gibbo admirer for a lot of years now. I see the state the club is in- and it is in a state- and I can’t get my head around why so many still blindly follow Gibbo and will hear nothing said against him. He is the man that has virtually taken us full circle under his tenure. No vision. No ambition, no plan, no leadership, what does he offer? I concede he like other chairmen are keeping their clubs going in these extraordinary times that does not make him better than any other

Its a predictable tone on here at the moment; the clubs badly ran, there isn't any ambition, XXX should be sacked etc. For me football has lots its sheen generally, its long been over hyped, over invested and over exposed. Transfer windows these days are a perfect example of that, supports forensically pore over the tiniest bit of information and are desperate for some exciting new players - which is understandable. But maybe we need to relax a little, what will be will be. I don't subscribe to the theory that the club is necessarily badly run and I make that judgement from a mi

I feel disappointed in my lack of lower league knowledge in the fact i didnt know most of the players we have missed out on prior to being linked with them. I miss the days of reading the debates about body balance with Zhimai whilst we were useless in the transfer market.

Sorry but I still can't get remotely bothered about missing out on a few one million pound players who I've barely heard of. Maybe I'm past caring 😂

And they’ve got an empty plinth waiting for a hero to fill it.

seriously guys, you do realise that we hav no god given right to sign any player we want? the player decides where he wants to go, and I don't think any player has Boro as 1st choice by default. we are not an attractive club and we have limited resources. If a player says no to what we can offer then - yeah it sucks, but we move on.

boo.hiss ....ban him

Does he have a name or does he just go by Doncaster captain?

How about the 5 best players we've ever had? How may of those would be foreign in most people's lists? Cherry picking 5 players you call treasonous - not convinced by Ayala, Braithwaite or even Valdes mind - is hardly damning evidence. Neither would be picking 5 terrible foreign players out of however many have played for us. Lee Dong Gook being awful doesn't impact on Viduka. Valdes apparently being a traitor doesn't impact on Schwarzer. Maybe we shouldn't sign knobs regardless of nationality.

Well, yeah, if you make a list of 5 foreign players there will not be an Englishman amongst them.

And some people seem very hasty to damn him, despite knowing very little of the workings of the club. Of course he's made mistakes, but he's always backed his managers as much as he possibly could. But the most important thing is that the club is stable, because many clubs aren't.

Sorry but this can’t be put down to the cyclical nature of football, it’s down right bad decisions that have put us in the mess we are in. I feel a lot of the older supporters still think it wasn’t long ago we were a regular premiership club when it’s been nigh on 12 years. We are a regular championship club who had 1 year in the big league and quickly went back to our pre Karanka way of life. This is clearly our level of operating in this era of football with gibson in charge. It’s no coincidence that since apparently taking more control going from Southgate to strachan onto mowbray

Totally agree with this, we are constantly tearing things up and rebuilding. I couldn’t believe we went from monk to pulis, Dean Smith was the totally obvious choice. I don’t care that he was already employed, the players we had suited him down to the ground but no we go for the guy who was obviously going to hate half of them. We always seem to try to do things on the cheap and it always costs us more in the long run. How much did our cheap effort to avoid relegation cost us? We literally may aswell have just signed nobody other than bamford. I dread to think who we turned down for being

The club has gone from the Premier League to near-relegation in the space of 3 years. It had a piece of one of the biggest sporting pies in the world and within 3 years of leaving it behind and only a year after losing the parachute payments from it, we're putting people into redundancy and notably not just from the effects of a pandemic. How is that not badly run?

No what I'm saying is, we shouldnt of been in the position to lay people off whether it's now or a few years ago. If Gibson hadn't took his eye off the club then we wouldn't be in this position.

Those ideas of a promotion push are way off, I get Warnock's competitive but it's utterly beyond us and would have took a massive transfer window which we were incapable of delivering

So we’re going to get rid of the people actually doing their jobs but keep the ones earning much more that don’t fulfill their roles. Great.

Hey mate, no need to apologise. These things happen, especially with Bausor at the helm

I do so apologise for not being able to add fuel to the fire, unless I made things up! I really need for my lad to meet up with Steve Gibson again in London so he can hear from the horses mouth. For those who remember the last time he did it certainly proved well worthwhile both interms of arrivals and departures😄 Until then I have to rely on speculation so thanks guys one and all even if it goes nowhere. There are a couple of players out there that we are not aware of MFC interest in (you heard it here first) God I will say anything to get my 1100th like!

Why are we bidding 1.5-2.5m on multiple players then?

Is it not just possible that the players are choosing other clubs as they’re a more attractive prospect? the days of us chucking a few extra grand at someone to get them up here are long gone. I’m disappointed we haven’t got anyone else in yet but besides Goode I personally wasn’t too fussed about Williams or Moore. I’ve got more faith that Warnock will not let this issue drop and will fight until he gets at least some of what he’s after. Got to try and not *** the bed until near the end of the window at least.

Maybe he can't sack them due to them doing their job, but it is him who may be responsible in that the conditions they are having to work in. After all he sets the budgets. If the budget doesn't allow us to offer 3/4 year contracts on their wage demands then they can't do it.