The Saudi's clearly bought in with the plan of spending, but their timing was terrible - no sooner had they got the club, the City Group got pulled up and the cheat-codes got removed from the Prem. I'm not sure they know what to do at the moment. They thought winning the league cup and getting into the Champions League would put them over the top to attract players, but learned a sharp lesson when Isak decided there were better places to be. It's like Cole going to Newcastle - the difference is, this time they didn't go out and buy Shearer, they got Waltermade and Wissa - as much as I hate Shearer, you'd take him over the two of them put together.
The stadium... It's the new trick. Hard to understand how many seats a club can sell these days. The Mags only have about 30,000 season ticket holders, because they want to keep 20,000 seats to package up at inflated prices. They could probably sell 50,000-60,000 season tickets if they had the seats, so you can understand why they would relocate.
Sunderland board are beginning to make noises about completing the upper tier at the Stadium of Light, specifically so they can keep selling tickets to home supporters. If we finish the bowl it comes to about 64,000 and will look amazing. If it's full of 'real' supporters, rather than the 10,000-15,000 tourists a lot of Prem clubs have these days, it'll be a fearsome atmosphere. Just so long as we don't get used to being half-decent!
