Nkounkou makes St Etienne move permanent

Why couldn't we do this with Coady, for fuck's sake??? Buy him and sell him to Sheffield United or whoever for £8 to £12M. I'm sure Coady wouldn't have minded as he would have got 2 signing-on fees!! It's not rocket science, is it?

I see Dyche has got £3M for keeping us up. £2M in, £3M out.

We don't know if Coady would have stayed if he had been asked to. He certainly wouldn't stay in order to be sold to another club as he will make more money in wages if his transfer fee is acceptable to more buyers.

Brands put a £2 million buy-out clause in there. Laughable, so now they buy him for 2 million and our board will probably bid £8 million for him, LOL.

We could barely put out a squad last season. And the skeleton squad we put out lacked wide players in defence and midfield.

It's hard to believe we're going to be able to buy the players we need to produce even a semi-functional team.

I honestly don't think Kevin Thelwell has a clue of how to rebuild our team!

Yet someone has decided that his French exploits have been insufficient to warrant his return. Surely not Dyche's decision as he hasn't had the opportunity to assess him properly yet?

While we, the long-suffering fans, will never know, nor get to find out, if he was good enough. Certainly a mystery to add to all the other financial hotchpotch that is EFC.

Same problem for young players coming through the academy system like Davies who, with hindsight, should have left years ago if he wanted to become a better player. Signing someone at 21 or 22 often works out better, just finding them is competitive, but like James Garner there are opportunities to do it.

Good luck to him, but he's not what we need right now.

I can't speak for anybody else but the only time I slate a player is when they don't make any effort. We've had our fair share of them over the years, Schneiderlin springs to mind. Sadly many of our players just aren't good enough.
I'm hoping we are now turning the corner and not keeping the likes of Nkounkou and Coady turn out to be the correct decision.

I agree that we as fans are very quick to turn on the players but I think that is just society in general now, everybody seems to want everything right this minute.

It's €2 Million! Not even £2 Million! XD

For someone who has only played in Championship and Ligue 2, that sum sounds okay. If only he could be a bit more versatile (correct me if I'm wrong, both Marco Silva & Don Carlo tried to play him as a left-winger or left-midfielder and they came up empty), he might have had more chances with us.

While the paltry transfer fee sounds like a fire sale and some might point their fingers at Brands and/or Thelwell, we have to be mindful that he only accepted a 1-year extension last summer, so we just have to take whatever cash that is out there.

Added bonus is that the paltry sum will be logged into the books for the Financial Year 2022-23 (alongside the £25 Million sale of Moise Kean & £40 Million sale of Anthony Gordon, Yeah!) – every penny counts and helps.

(Quick tangent: he might not be flawless, but let's give Brands his proper credit. He might have bought Kean for £25 Million and sold him for par 4 years later. But don't forget he ripped off a de-facto profit on Kean via 3 seasons of loan fees from PSG & Juve. We should all thank him for setting the iron-clad obligation to buy on Kean from which Juve couldn't get out earlier this year and had to pay us in one lump sum.)

You're too forgiving mate. The loan fee for Kean doesn't offset the £25 million plus exorbitant wages Brands spent on his long-term target, Gomes. Or the £150k a week for “free transfer” Bernard. Presumably he's to blame for Godfrey too seeing as Carlo said he'd never heard of him.

The fee obviously isn't high but at some point we have to simply wave goodbye to those who aren't showing they are worth holding on to.

There will obviously be some examples but overall I don't think we get it wrong that often when young players are allowed to leave.