YassinMoutaouakil

Hope Paton's okay

I think the horse has signed for St Mirren

I reckon Yengi should be our next Project Bair also.

Livi getting a point is probably good for us. As long as its not too much of a confidence booster ahead of Wednesday.

I think there is maybe an age thing. My first kit was a Zoom airlines one so I just missed out on the peak Boyle years and was barely cognizant of admin while it was happening. Can understand why folk who lived through that are pretty content with just having a Motherwell FC to watch on Saturdays. Maybe I just need someone to come in and say they're going to make us the third force in Scottish football for a bit just to get it out my system.

It'll be funny when we never talk about any of this again after Theo's third tomorrow.

Was the general vibe that the American streaming guy (growing the global fanbase or something?) was favoured over the Australians focusing on player trading? Personally I'm not really sure you're going to attract much international attention to Motherwell even if we are finishing 3rd every season- Wrexham feels like very much a special case due to Disney/Ryan Reynolds/Mac rather than a load of Americans suddenly getting really into League Two football. The Australian mob revolutionising our recruitment and using us as a breeding ground for young players to sell on/loan for £5m still seems... optimistic to say the least, but a bit more of a feasible for how a club like Motherwell might actually progress, moreso than randomly finding 10,000 new fans anyway. I don't know enough about it but it seems similar to how teams like Midtjylland came out of nowhere to start popping up in the Europa League.

Meant to make a similar point but got wrapped up in other stuff. I totally respect anyone who is diehard into fan ownership and refuses to budge an inch. I've definitely noticed on Twitter though that folk have started talking about it as if it's some sacrosanct part of Motherwell FC that we've always done and not something that's still fairly novel and not exactly an unqualified success. You'd think it was like QP turning professional or Rangers signing Catholics.

We'll never have been matching Aberdeen or the Edinburgh clubs' budgets but I'd be very surprised if the relative gap in resources isn't bigger than when they were signing Tim Clancy and Stephen Hughes from us. I'm less concerned about that though as realistically finishing 3rd will always take a combination of us overperforming and the clubs you would expect to be up there doing the opposite. What I think is a bigger deal in the short to medium term is the other clubs around us outgunning us financially to an extent that didn't happen before. It's entirely selfish, and I wasn't really arsed about what St Mirren fans thought when we were taking Sutton or Higdon off them, but I want to see Motherwell signing as good a quality of player and winning games at as high a level as possible. If nothing changes then it seems likely we'll go into most seasons aiming for 9th with anything else being an overperformance. If that's the most sustainable option then so be it, I just don't think we have to be looking at it as binary options of managed decline under fan ownership or handing the whole club over to crooks who'll sell Fir Park and see us in League One by 2026.

For me anyway, for basically the whole time I've been aware of Scottish football we've been part of the pack just behind Hearts, Aberdeen and Hibs- and there usually being a decent chance of at least one or two of them being a basket case in any given season meaning that, if a few things go right, we've a shot at finishing in the top 5. The three of them seem to have motored away from us a bit financially and the most of the rest of the "pack" that I mentioned- the Dundee teams, Killie, St Mirren have all pretty publicly outbid us for players in recent seasons, ostensibly down to external investment. If there's 9 or 10 other clubs in Scotland that are able to spend more money than us every season then it stands to reason that sooner rather than later we'll run out of luck eventually and go down. Obviously all the equivalent clubs I mentioned earlier have been relegated in this timeframe, as well as the likes of Partick, Inverness, Dunfermline and Falkirk. It hasn't been the end of the world for any of them and we don't have any more of a god-given right to be in the top flight than they did. But.. I mean, I'd rather we were. I'm pretty sure I've seen us finish 2nd as many times as I have in the bottom two. Personally I'd rather we explored any sort of serious proposal that keep us on a competitive footing at the level we've been accustomed to for 40 years rather than just assume that Motherwell have to be fan owned even if that means we have to accept a significant step down relative to our standing in Scottish football (I'm not saying it actually does necessitate that.)

Vladimir Weiss was playing for the team Max/Mika bodied last night. I fucking hated him.

Aye I get that. Tbh I mainly just feel bad for Ketts that he hasn't been able to tell anybody about it for almost a year. He doesn't seem like the "vow of silence" type.

The more I think about it's mental just how well kept the Kettlewell thing was. There's usually at least one ITK mention on here before most major Motherwell news breaking but absolutely nobody knew our manager signed an extension last May. I wanted him here next season anyway so I'm pretty sanguine about it but it is wild.

I don't exactly blame Kettleball* for signing Obika- pretty much everyone in Scottish football has an Obika type in their squad and he's probably better than some of the ones around us. He does look absolutely done though. Hopefully he's just taking a bit longer to get up to speed after a rare injury but he's less effective upfront than Bevis right now. *autocorrect obviously but I'll leave it in

Did Obika not just sort of hang about too?

Moving away from fan ownership probably sounds like the "riskier" option but I'm not fully sure it is. Genuinely the way I see it is if we stick with the current setup then most seasons for the foreseeable will be spent hoping someone else does a Livi this season or a 2023 Dundee United until our luck runs out and we go down. Its fair enough to say that we're "due" a relegation and that it wouldn't be the end of the world but also that it doesn't mean we have to just accept it years in advance. Unless we manage to do zero due diligence and hand the club over to the worst shysters in the world I don't think the outside investment route has any more of an obvious downside than the status quo. Best case scenario everything does work out as planned and we're able to punch above our weight/box clever etc. Worst case scenario is what, we end up in the Championship anyway? Maybe League One? Falkirk are the obvious cautionary tale but they're notable mainly for how ludicrous it is for a club with our sort of fanbase to end up in the third tier for this length of time. I'm maybe being naive but for the size of club we are, unless we end up totally asset stripped or something I think most likely bottom out as a midtable Championship team in the medium to long term. Feels like we might as well roll the dice to try and avoid that- with the addendum that if things work out it doesn't actually take that much to go right for us to finish 3rd, 4th or 5th in the top flight.

I have a good feeling about the Australians. We're winning the league.

If they're not going to tell us anything either way then can it at least be a shadowy dictator with loads of money doing it?

Full disclosure that I wasn't at the AGM and I've not thought massively through all the permutations but I can't really see us staying fan-owned and not being relegated in the next 5 years. I suppose the question is whether folk just want to accept that we don't have a god given right to be in the top flight the same as Partick, Dunfermline, Falkirk etc don't or not. Obviously the Taylor Swift option is the ideal scenario but I think anybody wanting to become a majority shareholder without chucking away the "ethos" should probably be at least heard out.

Viva the Ketts revolution

WHAT THE f**k IS GOING ON

3-0 up against the Morecambe globetrotters, Walsall must be brilliant

Loves a tractor

American owner coming in at St Johnstone. We'll surely realistically have at best the 10th biggest budget next season?

Why the f**k is Mandron on pens?