Sebastián 🇵🇷

The Ebbs and Flows of Unemployment The emotional whiplash that produced an extremely premature writing hiatus

It's been a while. Here's a personal musing on my experience being laid off, and the mix of feelings that have come with it. Give it a read if you feel so inclined :) open.substack.com/pub/sebonthe...

We might have reached the point where Trev Chalobah's played himself off the pure profit machine. Lovely story and a massive fuck you to everyone who doubted him, which includes those who run the club.

CWC final, you will be seeing me.

Lmao, I really just cannot stand this guy.

I think Benfica + Saudi interest enough to get £20-25m on Félix. Nkunku I’m sure will fetch a fee, though £35m maybe too optimistic. Agree with Chilwell though - could easily be a contract termination, like Sterling.

Madueke + Jackson + £20m out for Delap + Estêvão + Gittens would be a nasty downgrade, unless Estêvão lives up to even half of his “next Neymar” hype (unlikely, as talented as he seems).

Current prefictions for sales by the end of the summer:

Madueke £50m
Jackson £50m
Nkunku £35m
Petrović £25m
Félix £25m
Veiga £20m
Ugochukwu £20m
Gilchrist £10m
Chilwell £10m

Everyone else gets a loan or bomb squadded after fetching no suitors.

Also, hope Zac Jones enjoys Buffalo. Guy can play hockey, deserves to get consistent 3rd pair ice time at least, and maybe even QB a 2nd PP unit.

Late reaction here, but really gonna miss Key :( Inconsistent player but one of my favorite characters on the team.

I'll be really sad to see Noni go. He actually looked like an example of the model working (maybe still is in an unambitious sense) but he's not in their club so it doesn't matter, his fate was decided last summer, bit like Gallagher. It's so hard to care about this team when stuff like this happens

And they all cost £30-60m it’s a tough life out here.

We are not on the same boat sir ❌ No Nico Jackson slander in my mentions!

Hey I’ll take it a million times over our last “but why” signing, who coincidentally shares his name.

João Pedro is our annual “but why?” signing. Rate the player but like, why?

Actually West Ham might be a bit generous. Burnley maybe?

Random thought but KDH is so “deadline day loan move to West Ham” coded.

DOBSON TO THE HABS?

To clarify on (2), legacy does matter but past a certain point (imo 6-7 seasons) the longevity argument loses weight. Also, Hazard sadly isn’t in my XI, but would easily get in ahead of Giggs.

Seeing some all-time PL XI discourse. Mine is pretty vanilla I guess but a few hills I will die on:

(1) Cech’s spot is uncontested, nobody comes close
(2) Quality > quantity, so Trent > Neville, Hazard > Giggs etc.
(3) If KDB isn’t in there you might as well stop watching the sport

Out of curiosity, why would you put these two deals on equal footing? Aside from Mudryk’s extremely high physical upside, nothing seems to point to him being an even remotely comparable investment to Gittens now. Don’t love the money but surely it’s an order of magnitude better than Mudryk… right?

Guéhi getting strongly linked to Liverpool now. Wirtz, Frimpong, Kerkez, in for the likes of Guéhi and Ekitiké… man that team is terrifying.

Liam Delap welcome to Chelsea. That is nasty.

If sports analytics paid anything close to quantitative finance, there would be a Dmitry-shaped hole in my office's front door right now

Dfkm European clubs are buying this league’s duds while they keep the best ones these teams are unreal 😭😭😭

(Full credit to Neto as well. Great chop and nice finish.)

Nicolas Jackson that is DISGUSTING.

Missed the Chels. Happy to see them back on my screen.

Having him train with Chelsea wasn’t the braindead decision, it was leaving him off the squad with multiple spots available. The only reason they might have done that was to have him train with Strasbourg.

But now he isn’t even doing that. So there’s literally no reason to have left him out.

I mean even if a club is stupid, you understand why they’re doing something - you just disagree with it. But so often at Chelsea I’m left thinking what on earth was even the thought process behind this decision? I literally just don’t see any way to rationalize this.

This Kendry Páez stuff, I mean it’s very minimal. In a month we all will have forgotten about it.

But is there any other club whose decisions are consistently so braindead?