Who do Brighton think they are by demanding Rice money for Caicedo?

West Ham were entitled to demand a huge fee for Declan Rice but Brighton aren’t for Moises Caicedo. That’s one view in the Mailbox. There are others on Kylian Mbappe, Saudi; and more.

Get your views in to theeditor@football365.com.

We have already had some pretty strong retorts to the mails below…

Brighton’s brass neck
I feel like not nearly enough is being made of a couple things.

First, this Caicedo situation with Brighton. Who exactly do Brighton (please, Brighton fans chime in) think they are holding out for anything more than £70 mil?

Look, I get it, a player owes a certain loyalty to a club that developed them. This is perfectly exemplified by West Ham’s firm stance with Arsenal – they took Declan from a Chelsea-reject to…something I hope helps us win the title…sometime soon (please, god, get Stewie to stfu – more on this later).

Brighton bought Caicedo, loaned him to some team I believe in Germany for a year, he came back and was maybe their best player in BY FAR THEIR BEST SEASON OF ALL TIME.

And, yet, somehow Brighton thinks that in order for him to get his dream move to a club that will help him achieve his dreams of winning the biggest trophies (no offense – Brighton never will) he owes them more than roughly £65 mil ROI they would get from selling him for the 70 that Chelsea want? This, my friends, is f***ing BS.

Now, Gerrard/Hendo – who contacted whom first? Recent reports make it seem like Hendo really wanted the move – and any other scenario is crazy. Imagine if Gerrard tapped up Henderson – it’s not like the bid came from nowhere independent of Gerrard doing…something.

Lastly, Stewie. If I had to guess you’ve been reading a lot of F365 lately. Yes, our transfer spend has gone up tremendously in the last 5 years as F365 has duly noted for awhile now. There’s pretty simple explanations for this. First – let me direct you to this chart.

Those numbers speak for themselves. Unless, Levenshulme Blue wants to run in circles explaining how this chart is a lie and this source can’t be trusted and that City’s recent dominance is due purely to being a well-club run (which it is no doubt but…) then I’ll take it that you can all see how this has affected the last decade of the Premier League. Also, United – oof. At least Chelsea won two CLs in the 2010s.

Anyway, slight digression, but the point is what you’re reading on F365 is the numbers from the last 5 years. How else was Arsenal supposed to close the talent gap to City (btw, these numbers don’t even account for any financial impropriety that may or may not have been but probably was going on – also no one brought up the fact United was hit with like 1 charge and City have 115 those situations are not comparable you City fans) if we DIDN’T spend a s***load of money? Hale End?

This doesn’t even mention the fact we had to turn over the squad to shed ourselves of the mistakes made during the late-Wenger regime (you have a point there, always) which we’ve done quite exceptionally I’d have to say. This is why those numbers exist.

Not that you didn’t know that – just saying.
MAW, LA Gooner (100% agree that we have to do something next season. Depending on the health of Van Dijk, no less than 2nd/3rd (if we don’t win the league) and something like the quarterfinals minimum of every cup. I’m honestly hoping we match up with a Bayern/Madrid/PSG/Barca in the CL knockouts – those would be great barometers even in their currently somewhat weakened states.)

Screw ’em, Kylian
I’ve looked on with great amusement at Barcelona the last few years, isn’t it wonderful when a self-entitled club starts to crumble before our eyes and starts throwing their toys out of the pram? It’s why watching United’s relative disintegration after Fergie retired was so great, because when they were the best they were so damn arrogant and self entitled with it. It’s also absolutely why Liverpool have been completely slaughtered over the “this means more” campaign. Basically nobody likes you if you think you’re entitled to be at the top, work hard and dominate by all means, but once you start thinking you belong there and crow about it, that’s when others start to hate you.

Which brings me to PSG. Now obviously they’ve been funny for years, having huge amounts of money splashed on an imbalanced team full of prima donnas. No one is surprised that they can’t beat the really top European teams very often. But this quote from Nasser Al-Khelaifi really brought out the LOLs for me –

“It’s very disappointing because Kylian is a fantastic boy, a real gentleman, and leaving for free, weakening the biggest French club, it’s not him. When I received this information I was shocked and disappointed.”

They’ve got themselves into the situation where the world’s next best player can leave for free, and there’s nothing at all wrong with him doing that, just like Harry Kane if that happens. But claiming that it must somehow come into Mbappe’s thinking that he must consider his own effect on the “bigness” of PSG and question his character at the same time is quite brilliant nonsense. It’s a classic public tantrum from a man who has no control over the situation he finds himself in. It’s completely self defeating because it’s only going to negatively affect Mbappe’s transfer value. Lovely stuff.

So go on Kylian, you may be a gentleman or you may be an arrogant asshole, I’ll never know, but after that I request you pull their pants down in the best way possible and cause more impotent outbursts.
Andy, Cheshire

Read more: Kylian Mbappe auction is a neon acid trip where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

Echo chamber
This has been in my head awhile and hoping the best time to vent is offseason but Ive wondered how ppl arrive to this mailbox each day ? My assumption is most of the readership visit not just F365 for thier footy news, but likely traverse several other sites as well. Maybe ppl visit 1-2 sites, maybe two dozen… maybe they visit each site once a wk or maybe they browser refresh them all several times an hr… maybe it depends on the day’s news cycle, a person’s personality / neuroticism, who knows (perhaps the cookies know). Anyway, I imagine most couldn’t be bothered trying to peruse everything out there so I’m guessing we all boil down to the select few we trust and enjoy and just read those.

As a Liverpool supporter I regularly read my local paper (online). Now this publication has been in my daily rotation for yrs, I’ve always reasoned it would be the source closest to the pulse of the club, the “truth in journalism” entity most tied to the club, not to mention why wouldn’t I want to support our local Merseyside journos.

But for some time now I’ve started to feel a daily cringe loading up that homepage, wondering what kind of misleading headline, substance-less drivel, overstretched football theory or redundant old news rehash/ recycle would be in store.

F365 occasionally touches on this phenomenon in their Mediawatch segment, but at times it does feel truly awful to get baited into clicking on empty husks of feature articles where you scroll 3/4 0f the pg just to get to one paragraph of substance, wherein their lies a single dodgy quote from Jose enrique who mightve said something out of context or in passing, and they’ve managed to balloon this into 600 words propped up by an enticingly mammoth headline. What joy.

Is this happening with other clubs and their homebase coverage ? Is it just this Liverpool paper? I suppose I could go look at other clubs’ local and/or their sanctioned media outlets (maybe even visit some foreign clubs’ press with a web translation tool) but I’m lazy and need to fix lunch. So ive just parked it here and asking somewhat rhetorically

Btw the “Chief Liverpool Fc Writer” of this particular publication posts players’ ratings following each fixture. Now I don’t want to be too Proper Football Man about this but often I felt as if we had just been witness to two totally different endeavors. It’s amazing to me how many 7s, 8s and 9s this guy dishes out for 5/6 performances at best, I feel like he’s doling them out in an Oprah voice, just total opposite in spirit and credibility of a Marca or L’equipe, or a metric-based aggregator like WhoScored.

Maybe some journos have real-time relationships to maintain and might run into players down the city centre so don’t want to be too harsh, but then what’s the point really ? This outlet also provides a nifty feature for readers to chime in to rate players as well; by way of a slide toggle you can rate, send it in, and they’ll aggregate results and present them.

Rarely do the reader votes match closely with the “chief writer’s” ratings ( of course the discrepancy only ever skews in one direction). On days where Liverpool have lost and /or lost badly (which was more often last season than any other time in Klopp’s tenure), the readers’ ratings feature would often go completely amiss– as in they’d simply take away that feature and hope none notice !

This became the dreary rant i didn’t want it to become but im just curious if there are other Liverpool supporters that experience this, or supporters of other clubs who find their own club coverage to sometimes be meritless, comical, suspect… or some combination thereof. I’m not talking about an Arsenal FanTV i’m referring more to legitimate journalistic enterprises / publications but then as I go to type this I start to wonder where the line of demarcation is and if there truly is such a thing
Eric, Los Angeles CA (I will say however,theyve a podcast called Blood Red Podcast and their “Analysing Anfield” feature is absolutely top… at its best when it was two ppl called Josh and Dave who were brilliant, Josh still brilliant but Dave moved on awhile ago)

Pre-season conclusions
I tend to not read too much into pre-season friendlies and get carried away; it’s all about getting fitness and tweaking team tactics. Although one cannot fail to arrive at the following conclusions:

1) We’re going to win the league, or come extremely close by winning 2 cups (FA cup and CL) then win the league the year after;

2) Arteta will find the Emperor’s new clothes don’t fit him anymore, gone by xmas and Stewie will tell us he told us so even though he didn’t;

3) City will be lucky to come in the top 10, given they haven’t won any matches since the end of the season – and by the same metric, Haaland won’t score a goal all year;

4) Newcastle will end up mid-table before bringing in Mancini on a “City Contract” and winning the League Cup;

5) Liverpool have selected the weakest preseason opposition known to man, aside from one game (Bayern). They may as well have played Tranmere 5 times, or is it 6. JK is clearly scared and hoping to build confidence in his new-found tactics of playing through the midfield, instead of the tried and trusted hoofing it long. For the love of god, someone tell those boys how to use a parachute payment;

6) Spurs will sell us Kane (see point 1), but still come second. Obviously trying to butter-up Levy here. Spurs will pip Arsenal to 7th.

Thoughts?
Garey Vance, MUFC

Johnny as Saudi correspondent 
Would John Nicholson move to Saudi Arabia and write about the Saudi league for £700,000 a week? I would like John to seriously consider the answer to this question and get back to us as soon as possible. I’m genuinely interested to know.
SW

Saudi dough
To Dave, Somewhere. Surely it’s Hendough, Ronaldough, etc.. I don’t know what the world is coming to.
James, Sorry spurs fan

You asked for it
Imagine one day you forget to lock your front door, in fact you left in such a hurry that you left it wide open and then when you returned you found that you have been robbed. Would anyone be surprised? Especially in the UK, nobody would be surprised and it would classed as your own fault for leaving the door wide open.

This is what has happened in football, you all happily left the front door open and in they come to take it all away from you. You were all ignorant to what was happening, you didn’t care, like most of what is happening in the world, you don’t care as long as it benefits you. Let’s not pretend that top level football is anything but a corrupt business anymore, it’s not the peoples game, owners don’t care about you, players don’t care about you, nobody at these clubs cares about you.

I wrote in a few weeks ago stating that I was glad DDG had finally buggered off and was told I should show “David De Gea more respect.” That in itself is hilarious, as if De Gea was there for anything other than the 375k + a week pay cheque, nobody else would have paid him even one third of that. And look at all the clubs lining up to sign him as a free agent! Inter were interested but apparently 85k a week isn’t enough for him as he wanted another 100k on top. Show respect? I’ll respect the people dragging bodies out of burning buildings but to be told to show respect to a bloke earning obscene wages to try and kick a ball? You need to get your priorities in order.

Most of the EPL players are no more than average players from abroad looking for a payday and so are most of the managers. Clubs are unrecognizable from 20 years ago, we now have home grown players from South America and Africa but very few from even the local area. As soon as a different country offers more money they’ll be off and it doesn’t matter if it’s Saudi Arabia as morals and ethics are way down the list when huge sums of money are concerned. Don’t pretend that you, working your 9-5 in accounting earning 30k a year wouldn’t hop on that plane if they offered you even 30k a week.

Taking Oil money is bad apparently, without realizing, and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, Oil money runs the world. Wars are fought because of Oil, without Oil you can kiss goodbye to everything you have and see around you.

The clubs that have been bought using this “bad” money, their fans don’t care and any fan that says they do shouldn’t be anywhere near the club. We all know you are still there and the fan base is growing. To stand and say that you don’t agree with what happens in the country where all this money comes from and that the owners have questionable human rights issues, but ya know what? Stuff that we just bought Haaland and won the treble.

Neville is such a spiteful media shill that he’d rather Oil money than the Glazers, yet according Neville, Oil countries are bad.

You still buy the shirts made in sweatshops by children, where is the outrage there? Well there isn’t any because you are all still buying them.

You’ll by the Nike/Adidas trainers, boots and tracksuits made in sweatshops by children earning 5p a day, where is your moral outrage there? Nope, still buying them.

You’ll all say we need electric cars but hey, don’t mention the kids mining the materials dying, because you are happily going along with the Govt’s ridiculous net zero scam.

It’s all Virtue Signaling which everyone is getting very good at now, pathetic look at me I’m such a nice person, I’m perfect and you are all bad people. Hypocrites, blinded by the media nonsense that says the west is good and everyone else should follow our wonderful example. Look at the state of the west, it’s a joke.

But… you know what, these bad people have money and oh boy, we don’t half like their money. You all watched the World Cup, don’t pretend you didn’t. All the talk about boycotting it and the outrage went out the window as soon as England kicked off. Admit it, you watched it after saying you wouldn’t.

Jordan Henderson, how dare you! Say you support this and that yet then take their 700k a week. Gary Neville and the likes, how dare you! say they are despicable yet take their money, fooling you all that they actually gave a crap in the first place. They say what you want to hear and it just depends what bat shit crazy narrative is currently running in the lie based media, meanwhile they’ll be rubbing their hands as they count their “bad” money.

The door was opened, you allowed their money, you wanted their money, don’t cry when you look at what is happening. Countless clubs are already owned by it, Oil money will own Man Utd, it’ll own the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs one day, it probably has its hands in Chelsea, they’ll have it all and if by some stretch they don’t, they’ll do what they are doing now, offering players “quote me ridiculous” money to go and play there. We might hear about the odd one or two that say no, but mark my words, 10 years time the Saudi league will be attracting the best players and not at the end of their career. Afterall, Oil money owns the planet so it’s only a matter of time for football.

So stop your hypocritical virtue signaling, don’t like Oil money then turn your electric off, better do the gas as well, sell your car and everything plastic, get rid of the TV, PC, Phone and clothes too. Oil money runs the world, don’t pretend you wouldn’t take it, you just don’t like the fact that you haven’t got any.
Hugo