Dan

New rule for the season - £5, £10 or £20. Think it makes it a little more interesting.

We have a twenty player! I am thinking I'll be generally 10s and 20s and probably 5s when I'm forced into League One/Two (I don't know why I still waltz into that trap that often, it's a minefield)

Parker in fairness has got two promotions out of the league but it's a little bit uninspiring as well because there's no track record of him doing anything beyond that and his Fulham PL seasons have aged really badly when you look at both Silva's performance and what a lot of the squad he had have gone on to do. I do actually have them to win the Championship this year though. Think they have the best squad in the league. Kompany underachieved big time last season for me. How he fucking blagged Bayern Munich off that.

probably a fair case for it to be honest. If you had just left Birmingham alone you'd be comfortably top. I had a feeling they weren't going to win that game. It just seems to be a bit of a thing with every team who is heavily fancied like that. I still think they will actually win the league though. I've got mates who support them and they've been telling me all summer they'd not win that game.

New season. New colour scheme. New entry matches my total number of wins in one week as I've managed in now 45 attempts. @RandoEFC takes the early lead. Goes in heavy on two expected winners in European leagues and both deliver pretty comprehensively. Pretty sound strategy. The newcomer is @Smiley Culture, somebody I remember playing this years ago. One bet, one win. Can't be sniffed at even if I make that the smallest win in the games history. Green on the board. @CaaC (John) and me with blanked doubles on the EFL opening day. Same old rubbish from me, I can tolerate the Bristol City one as that was a bit of a long shot but ones like Rotherham piss me off. No excuses for that. @Stan takes me off the bottom on alphabetical order as he's very unluckily let down by expected runaway winners Birmingham after landing a very decent pick with his other. Mediocre start. Could've been better.

Does make me laugh why you'd do it now with a manager who has been there a while.

I honestly think Cooper out will be consensus before September.

I've never been more certain of a relegation in my life than ours. I really think we could be Sheffield United all over again. Maybe not quite Derby. Going to have to try and see the funny side at this point sadly.

Picking up where I left off. Complete drivel.

My opinion on us dips every time I watch us. Cooper is going to be a complete disaster here. Like a "did that really happen?" appointment.

So are Palace actually still in for him then? If he's anything like the player he was at Palace then that's a genuine coup and it's better than I expected in our position. So the talk is we'll pay £7mil for a loan fee but Galatasaray will pay his wages. In a side lacking goals and X-Factor I really don't think we can turn our nose up at someone like Zaha. I'm a bit more hopeful if it happens and I've been extremely miserable about us for a while.

He's coming to us what the fuck?

Rinse and repeat summer from us. I feel a bit sorry for Okoli because he looks like a quite ill thought out signing already to me unless he turns out really good, which I'll be honest the Italian anecdotes give me very little confidence of. We've loaded a decent amount of our budget into him when his position really wasn't the top priority. It's clear as day that we were relying on sales of players, which requires Rudkin being more than 2/10 at his job, meaning we're now scrambling around for basically anybody we can take again. Everything we do is undermined by the bottleneck created by Rudkin's ineptness and the owner is either too daft, or just doesn't care enough to see it. Buonanotte coming in on loan sums up our decline for me. I'm not even necessarily against him as a player but he's the type of cheap youngster punt we've failed to take for years, that Brighton have not only taken, but are now using us to actually get him up to speed. I'd find it all so much easier to come to terms with if it felt the club acknowledged this decline and took proper measures to reverse it, but it's the same people in charge making the same mistakes and it's no longer unsubstantiated negativity - there is now a track record. It's so Sheffield United last year.

Salah always starts well and his fixtures are great. They've priced them correctly though as you have a fair case for all four outcomes. I'm holding off Palmer early doors. Not convinced he'll be quite as good under Maresca.

I'm going to say as well - if you don't state otherwise, I will assume your stake for it is £10 like last season. That can be the base.

We are back. The weekly game where you pick a single or a double, a hypothetical betting game. No obligation to play each week which doesn't affect the table too badly as with the very nature of the table you can drop further by playing. You could in theory win the league playing once all season! This years rule I've decided is you get a choice of stake - £5, £10 or £20 rather than just a blanket £10. If we get enough interest this week I'll do one starting for this weekend. First things first however, we have a final table from 2023/24, and our winner is @Lucas Congratulations also to @Pyfish who did profit overall for the season too. Less said about me the better. Fuck me. I think you could play this for half a century and not do that badly over a whole season again.

I think we can aim for this weekend if people wish. I ought to have done this a week ago though.

I've actually never done a final table for last season but it's occurred that we are here again. Would people fancy doing this again this season? @Stan @RandoEFC @Machado @...Dan @CaaC (John) @Lucas @Pyfish @Storts And anyone else if they want in. Don't forget you can join midseason due to the nature of the scoring.

I've been quite high on Newcastle going into this season and think your drop off was a lot linked to the intensity you play at and the eventual lack of squad depth, as well as a genuinely horror run of draws. Was a bit of a perfect storm but for all the wrong reasons, and you still bagged a decent finish out of it. I think you've got a shot of the top four. It's really hit me watching us again earlier how down I am about us. I really hadn't given it loads of thought but I only clocked a couple of days ago that our season begins in two weeks and we've got a squad state as if it's a good six or seven weeks away. No Dewsbury-Hall replacement. Vardy injured and clearly won't be fresh for the opener, leaving our striker options of Daka and Cannon - two players who are simply not going to be good enough this season nor are they good at leading a line on their own. He's playing Ndidi too advanced, I thought Cooper would at least keep Ndidi doing the basics where he thrived but the early signs are in pre-season he's going to make the same errors Rodgers did. I'd have let him go on this evidence. We've got absolutely no attacking midfielders bar young Will Alves who has had fewer minutes in attacking midfield than Ndidi in preseason - if he can't get them now, when the fuck is he going to? I think I'd feel a fair bit more at ease if we went and signed Matt O'Riley and Adebayo this week. Two good players, good fits who both have a point to prove. But fat fucking chance. The Soule pursuit made me think we were going to spend a bit this summer but I'm seeing the same old patterns from us. It's just a whole load of fucking rubbish. Even without the points deduction I think we'd drop.

I do think PSR is a complete disgrace but I am naturally going to say that. I'm forever in a tricky position here - I think both the rules, and Leicester ourselves, are ridiculous and deserve kickback. But any criticism of one can easily be mistaken as defence of the other and it's just simply not the case for me personally. Another wank friendly from us today. I know there are debates every year about friendlies and I know they don't matter in the grand scheme but I do think they'll give you clues. Well I'm not excited.

In my head our first game is about 5/6 weeks away. It's a fortnight away. The 5/6 weeks illusion is largely created by the state of our side. I'm pretty confident currently we'll go down.

I knew he was ill but it's still completely caught me out. One of those, like when Shane Warne died, where I was genuinely completely speechless for a little while. He was a very big part of our last 15 years when all is said and done. Has been here on three separate occasions in over three different roles. Was very much the good cop in the dynamic. Just really, really sad. Was not expecting it one bit. Really am gutted.

Mine are the lowest they've ever been going into a Premier League season. I think without drastic action we could come 20th even if we all started on 0 - let alone before we're docked any points. I'm completely uninspired. We seem to have this really decent reputation outside of Leicester. I've watched numerous previews of the season and I'm amazed just how infrequently we're tipped to go down. The thing is this is what should be the case. We were a well-established Premier League club until the suicide of 2022/23 and now we go in as bookies favourites for the drop. We have a new manager who I'm pretty unconvinced by. We have a weaker side than we probably did a year ago. We're almost certainly heading for a points deduction. It's totally uninspiring. I did always prefer Leicester with no expectations because I think we tend to do better than when we have them on us, but it requires a real us against them attitude and I think with the way the club continues to take the piss out of the fans that we're severing that sort of mindset already and it's far likelier to just spill into toxicity. Not happy.