RandoEFC

Predictions - Azerbaijan Grand Prix Deadline is qualifying on Saturday. @RandoEFC @Stan @MUFC @Tommy @nudge @Whiskey @Dave @Coma @DeadLinesman @OrangeKhrush Pole Position - Which driver will post the fastest lap in Q3? [INSERT DRIVER] Podium - Which drivers will finish the Grand Prix in the top three positions? 1. [INSERT DRIVER] 2. [INSERT DRIVER] 3. [INSERT DRIVER] Random Driver - Predict the finishing position of this week's random driver, Ollie Bearman. [INSERT POSITION] Bonus Question - EXCLUDING the Kick Sauber cars, who will qualify last on Saturday? [INSERT DRIVER]

Results - Italian Grand Prix Finally getting up to date here. Qualifying was the most successful session of the weekend across the board, with everyone apart from championship leader @Stan bagging 5 points for another Lando Norris pole position. Nobody predicted a victory for Charles Leclerc and Ferrari. @Tommy was closest to doing so but has to settle for 2 points for putting Leclerc in 2nd place. @RandoEFC, @Whiskey and @OrangeKhrush also bag 2 points for having Leclerc on the last step of their podium. Surprisingly, only one person was able to nail any podium positions this weekend and that was @MUFC who put Piastri in 2nd place. It's 5 points for him, and 2 points for @Stan, @nudge, @Dave and @Coma who missed his finishing position by one. Everyone picked up 2 points for Norris finishing 3rd, having either predicted a 1st or 2nd place for the British driver. Most people backed this week's random driver Alex Albon to do better than usual at Monza, but nobody quite nailed his finishing position of 9th. @RandoEFC, @Tommy and @Dave were one position short and would have taken the full 5 points if not for Kevin Magnussen's time penalty, but have to settle for the 2 consolation points. @Tommy is the big winner from the bonus question though, as he was the only person to back Albon to win Formula B this weekend. He therefore gets to hog 5 extra points to himself and finishes the weekend as the comfortable highest scorer. The lead changes hands in both championships this weekend. @Stan's joint worst score of the season sees him lose top spot to defending champion @RandoEFC, while top scorer for the week @Tommy bears down on both of them. A lukewarm run of results has seen @OrangeKhrush slip into the chasing pack, with in-form @MUFC and consistent @nudge yet to be ruled out of a late charge for the championship. @Dave also overtakes @DeadLinesman in the midfield. Red Bull were this weekend's top scorers leading to yet another change in the lead of the Constructors' standings. Mercedes also made ground on previous leaders McLaren. Aston Martin remain just about in contention with Ferrari running out of races to make up the distance to their rivals. Azerbaijan predictions will be up tomorrow.

Saturday 14th September, 2024 AFC Wimbledon 2-2 MK Dons, 12.30 Millwall 1-1 Luton, 12.30 Como 1-2 Bologna, 14.00 Marseille 1-0 Nice, 16.00 AZ Alkmaar 2-1 Heerenveen, 20.00 Sunday 15th September, 2024 Los Angeles FC 1-3 LA Galaxy, 03.30 Hertha Berlin 2-2 Dusseldorf, 12.30 Girona 1-3 Barcelona, 15.15 Trabzonspor 0-2 Besiktas, 18.00 Monza 0-2 Inter, 19.45

£10 on this this weekend. Haven't had long to look at the schedules.

RB Everton.

I'll get Italy up today if I can but it might have to wait until Monday.

Results - Dutch Grand Prix The return of Max Verstappen to the predictions field saw a lot of people back him for pole position on Saturday, but the points went to @RandoEFC, @MUFC and @Tommy who were the only three people to successfully back Lando Norris to take another pole position. @RandoEFC and @MUFC were the only ones to back a win for Lando Norris as well on their way to the biggest scores of the weekend, with the rest of the field picking up a couple of points for putting the British driver in 2nd place. @MUFC was the only person to nail Verstappen's P2, with everyone else putting him either 1st or 3rd at his home Grand Prix. @Coma was the only person to put Charles Leclerc on the podium at all, and he nailed the position as well for 5 points. This weekend's random driver was Valtterri Bottas, and nobody was pessimistic enough to predict his 19th place finish, meaning that @Dave picks up the 2 consolation points for going as low as 18th. This week's bonus question was a success, with a variety of accurate picks. @RandoEFC, @DeadLinesman and @OrangeKhrush all backed Russell to beat his championship position of 8th, and he did so by one position. @Stan and @MUFC backed an Alpine driver each, with Ocon finishing 2 places ahead of his championship position in 15th, and Gasly securing one of his best results of the season with 9th. @Tommy and @Whiskey took the sensible option, with Bottas sitting in 21st in the championship prior to the race, simply making it to the chequered flag was enough for him to clear the bar. @nudge and @Dave saw Albon deliver for them despite being disqualified from qualifying. Unfortunately, @Coma missed out by one position, with Nico Hulkenberg only able to match his pre-race championship position of 11th. Double figure scores for @RandoEFC and @Tommy sees them make progress but @Stan still leads the Drivers' Championship. @MUFC's top scoring weekend propels him into the top half of the standings. @Dave ekes closer to @DeadLinesman in the battle for 7th while the rest of the field cancel each other out. Another lead change in the Constructors' standings sees McLaren reclaim the lead from Red Bull. Mercedes bagged the highest score of the week and in doing so overtake Aston Martin to go 3rd, and now sit just 11 points off the lead.

Fair enough, I'm just not getting good vibes overall. I don't think you read many stories about players getting this upset about being forced to leave though!

Textor has tried to have a fire sale at Lyon by all accounts after they've got themselves into the FFP hot water. He was the driving force behind Mangala's loan to Everton and trying to get Nuamah to move to us as well. I think if you're trying to force players out to this extent you have to draw a line as well. Especially at that age. There's a way of moving players on when it's needed to benefit the club. The whole multi-club ownership model and owners using one club to do another one of their clubs a favour with a player or a loan or a fee to soothe the accounts just doesn't sit well with me overall, even though this one ended up with Fulham instead.

Textor increasingly coming across as exactly the person I'd expect Moshiri to decide is a good person to sell his football club to and not in a good way.

This does need nipping in the bud but I worry about whether there's any individuals or bodies that have both the desire and the authority to stop it from taking off.

I mentioned the wages already. I've provided my evidence. I'm sure Everton took some losses on the likes of Gomes, Tosun and Bolasie but not all of the players you mentioned. We got all of our money back for Kean when Juventus activated his buy back clause. Iwobi and Klaassen we made about a £10m loss on. It's boring as fuck this anyway. Amortisation has become the biggest boner-killer in the history of discussing football. My original point wasn't even that Everton shouldn't have been punished, it was Dan who said us and Forest should get our points back. I've said multiple times that we had a case to answer. My point is that PSR is so flawed on every level and the implementation has been carried out so inconsistently that they need to rip it up and start again. It was also evident the second the Premier League asked for us to get a 12 point deduction that they weren't a good faith operator because that punishment would be worse than the consequence for administration. You agree with me that the rules aren't fit for purpose anymore. I agree with you that an independent regulator needs to be brought in imminently to get English football under control. I just think that within 24 hours of us finding out that Leicester have got off on a technicality where we ended up deducted 8 points (for smaller breaches than them as well) that I have some grounds here to be annoyed, get on my high horse and say "I told you these rules were an absolute joke" after months of being accused of bitter lemons last season.

You can point to individual transfers all you want. Here are the facts of Everton's net transfer spend over the past five seasons, which ENTIRELY covers the period for which we were docked points. I don't really care about the 18+ months before that because they're irrelevant, that's not the period for which we were charged. The only current Premier League team to have made a profit on transfers over the past 5 years. Outspent by Luton and Burnley. Even the likes of Brentford, Bournemouth and Fulham have spent £150-200m more than us in that time period. Everton have had a problem with inflated wage budgets throughout those years which offsets these differences to some extent but not a big enough one to justify calling our dealings reckless or irresponsible. Our financial problems are nothing to do with transfers we made 8 years ago like Sky Sports News and Twitter would have you believe. It's all shitty historical debt and an owner who had his main source of funding removed because of the Ukraine war. All those transfers you mentioned, Everton could afford at the time. We've cut our cloth but we're strangled by interest on loans that go back to Kenwright's early years at the club. The owner has botched the sale of the club three times which is generating more debt. In the meantime, those at the club are doing everything they can to stay in the league and on the right side of PSR until we can get into the new ground, which itself has been a huge financial bell-weight hanging around the club's neck, the funding of which has also been affected by the Usmanov issue. Rules are rules and Everton breached the threshold, but if you want to comment on this, you need to get your facts straight. This wasn't down to a series of egregiously reckless transfer dealings like you seem to want to believe. Nottingham Forest might have "disregarded the rules" by signing 30+ players in one transfer window. I don't know about Leicester. But to level that charge at Everton is unfair. Everton fans won't defend our ownership. Most of us accept that the club had a case to answer, but the Premier League botched it and lost all right to be treated with any respect or good faith. They came after us twice in one season because of their own poor administrative processes and requested that we get docked a total of 17 points in one season. This isn't the behaviour of a good faith actor. To initially give us a worse points deduction than you'd get for actually going into administration was a disgrace, then Forest got a 4 point deduction for a breach twice the size of our initial one which we got 10 points for which was reduced to 6. Now Leicester are getting off on a clumsy technicality. Man City get to set the terms of their hearings while Chelsea's spending completely takes the piss out of the rest of the league.

"Over time" . I.E. When Everton fans were clued up on this 18 months ago and told everyone the rules and their implementation were a farce, and that they were about to become a lot more people's problem, and nobody wanted to hear it, we were right, and now it's been proven. You're admitting now that the rules aren't fit for purpose so why should Everton and Forest not have a gripe with the fact we've been docked points because of them? Everton have been very poorly run but there was a lot of mitigating factors behind our losses and "having no regard for the rules" makes it out to be a lot more egregious than it was. You need to read up on what Everton did wrong. There's this lazy, lazy narrative that Everton have spent recklessly all this time based on a couple of transfer windows in about 2014. Over the past 5 years (this year and the 4 years covering our charges) we're the only team in the Premier League to have a positive net transfer spend (look it up). People accuse us of "cheating". It amounts to our owner being a dumbass and using his money to pay for the stadium when he should have taken a loan because a technicality in the rules means the interest payments wouldn't have counted, and then losing his main source of income from Usmanov having his assets frozen thanks to Russia invading Ukraine. I'm not pretending that Everton don't have a case to answer for or that they haven't been run like a circus for a decade but I'm not the one who needs to come off it. We get done for that while Chelsea seemingly don't even have a case to answer for spending a billion pounds while not qualifying for Europe and selling their hotels and women's team to their affiliates to cook the books, and Leicester get off on a technicality because the Premier League didn't write their rules properly? I'm not calling us angels and the last thing you'll find me doing is defending Farhad Moshiri or his running of the club but we have grounds to be pissed off here.

Forest and Everton aren't the problem with what's happened to Premier League football though. Nor are Leicester. Football shouldn't come down to which clubs are unlucky enough to be sold to lunatics like those two. Meanwhile nobody at the Premier League seems to give a shit about the elite clubs who have monopolised English football, and in the case of some of them, contribute every year to the sheer unsustainability of football by spending unconscionable amounts of money driving ridiculous inflation. All of us fans of the "make up the numbers" clubs shouldn't be wasting our time bickering over who breached PSR by £20m this time. We should all be outraged at the fact that our clubs are held accountable to these rules but if you're lucky enough to have been astonishingly rich before they were introduced then you just get off with it every year. Chelsea and Man Utd are worse run clubs than Everton, Forest and Leicester. I may have some respect for a set of rules like these when they're held to the same standards as us.

Just scrap these awful rules ffs.

Saturday 7th September, 2024 Nigeria 3-0 Benin, 17.00 Republic of Ireland 0-1 England, 17.00 Germany 2-0 Hungary, 19.45 Netherlands 3-1 Bosnia, 19.45 Sunday 8th September, 2024 USA 2-1 Canada, 00.00 Columbus Crew 3-1 Seattle Sounders, 00.30 Chicago Fire 1-1 DC United, 01.30 New York RB 2-0 Sporting Kansas, 03.30 Luxembourg 0-2 Belarus, 14.00 Denmark 2-1 Serbia, 17.00

If @Pyfish used 365 he could have ticked to void the second bet if the player didn't start and taken the 16/1 single winner.

Ten Hag has come out with some shite before and after this fixture. The proper sort of head loss stuff you get with a manager who can't answer the questions anymore so just say whatever they can think of. "We've been the best team after Man City the last two years because we've won more trophies." Okay pal. I know nobody can succeed at Man Utd probably, but even with that taken into account he hasn't impressed me at all as a manager. Their identity and patterns of play are non-existent on a football pitch and they'd be in a relegation fight under his management if they didn't have the best part of a billion pounds worth of talent to call upon. Ineos, Brailsford, Ratcliffe, Ashworth, etc. don't seem to be getting anywhere fast.

I agree on one hand but it also makes me annoyed that under the PSR rules, Man Utd and Chelsea can just spend hundreds of millions on players, pay inflated fees, never make their money back, finish mid table, laugh it off and just try again next year, while 14-15 clubs in the same league could make a fraction of their losses in the transfer market and end up with a choice between selling their best players and weakening themselves or taking a points deduction.

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I don't know how they even finish top half. Their recruitment is surely the worst in Europe and they have so many bang average players in their best eleven. The manager doesn't seem to implement any patterns of play or tactics just like his predecessors. I honestly think it's a case of 1) having expensive players that do actually have moments of brilliance once in a while and 2) teams that could probably beat them giving them too much respect just because it's Man Utd. They're genuinely woeful.

Liverpool will either win by 3+ or end up with a draw or loss where United score from their only 2 shots in the match.

I know Norris hasn't been perfect in the middle part of this season but McLaren dithering over backing him for the Drivers' Championship is putting him on the back foot unnecessarily and it's going to cost them the title. At this point, Piastri should be deployed to play the team game and protect Norris. They should have maneuvered Norris to win in Hungary too if we're being honest. Cost them 7 points there and currently on track to cost them another 10 today.