Swello

Imagine it happening now - celebrate madly for 3 seconds, notice the referee has his finger to his ear, stand about for 5 mins before it's disallowed.

And for good reason. I did an ill-advised run down the slippy as f**k steps from one of the back rows - I'm still paranoid that the three times I saved myself by grabbing onto random folk is on video somewhere.

And in a lovely twist, Sweden will have refs in Germany

They could just have gone for 50 sequential shots of punters mouthing "fer fucks sake Shaw" and put it to music.

I think this is spot on. You're better to move as a Turnbull, Johnston or Wee Al with a track record in the bank which allows you to actually get a first team game somewhere. We're more than decent at getting young players to the point they can play first team football (with us) and we can get that type of player a decent move when the time comes- but the record of the players that have moved with little or no first team experience is pretty stark in comparison.

I can only assume that was it. It will be a more interesting debate in the summer if/when he gets paid off by Groningen and is floating about looking for a club with his stock way lower than it was (I'd still be in the "no" camp BTW).

Agree - debt is debt. We've got one very soft loan from the Scottish Govt but it is still debt repayments - I wouldn't fancy us taking on any more. We had soft loans to Les Hutchinson and John Boyle that we were still paying back up to a couple of years ago - and that was all money that couldn't be spent on the fun stuff. Given the effort to become free from expensive debt was a huge battle since Admin - I would really take some convincing that we would ever go that way again (new stadium mortgage aside I suppose). As you say - Hearts are a poor example for us to look at. They are fan-owned but they are getting £5m/year a pumped in also and commercially are in a different league to us. Killie and St Mirren will always be the best example for us to compare against. I'm not convinced that either of them are doing anything radical compared to us - Bowie has put some money into Killie but nothing silly - they both just seem to be well run and have good football managers in place at this moment in time. Weird KVV signing aside, I'm not getting the impression that either of those clubs are fishing in a different pond to us for players/wages (St Mirren's top striker is Mandron, which is a very similar thing to Bair for example) and either of those clubs' squads could conceivably be ours. When clubs are very close in terms of size, it doesn't take much to tip the balance and the stark fact is that us paying for *all* the managers at the same time and filling our squad with all sorts of random, un-needed pish over the past few years has had a far bigger effect on our "competitiveness" than Saints or Killie spending a few quid or lunatics pumping money in the Dundee clubs. I honestly wonder how much making up for a fairly incompetent couple of years is behind the suddenly urgent push for outside money/a legacy project.

The Well Society aren't selling any shares - the new magic shares that will be created just make "ours" worth less - so we can all bask in that fact as we enjoy the extra 2 and a half players we've added to the squad.

Fully agree - but even though the governance is wrong (with non-WS directors being in the majority on the exec board) I think to do what they need to do to bring a new investor in (basically dilute the shareholding of the WS by issuing new shares) - they can't just wave that through on a one person, one vote basis at a normal board meeting - it would at least need an EGM.

Was thinking about this recently - how would the Exec Board go about driving anything through even if they were that daft? I presume they can't issue new shares without the say so of the majority owner. I could easily imagine a situation where they would want to disregard the wishes of the 'Well Society - but I'm not sure how they could practically do that.

Aberdeen and Celtic merit a mention for their 1000 year stints in the one league - Motherwell about to hit 40 years is another crazy long stretch. Aberdeen, Celtic & Motherwell have consequently got the fewest Challenge Cup appearances at zero each

Yep - I've always found the "that thing that you've done well for 10-15 years might suddenly stop working because reasons" argument a bit self defeating. We've consistently sold players for decent fees and/or development compensation, which has basically allowed us to be competitive with clubs that are able to generate more revenue from other stuff. We've done this both with players we've brought in and developed and via our academy - and we've done it as well/better than other clubs our size. To flip it around, I'm not really sure what model (other than "rich man gives you free money") people would suggest for a club with limited support to make a profit if it's not based on player trading?

Aye - it's been quite interesting/depressing to see so many zealots replying to "this is ruining the fun" type of points with "offside is offside". Once again, I'm convinced it's folk that don't actually go to games who generally hold these views. There seems to be a constituency of non-attending fans who get their main pleasure from transfer chat, contrived controversy and VAR decisions - who seem to have no conception of what it's actually like to be there to witness the sort of stuff that Coventry were doing yesterday (or even what Aberdeen almost did on Saturday). These are the folk that shite talk radio, clickbait drivel and pundits arguing with each other are aimed at.

''Sake! I was waiting for the big reveal for that one

It's nice that they put Theo in the place they keep for Motherwell players in the TOTY