MessiWillSignForVilla

West Brom with 24% possession, 4 shots and 1 on target today... They may be winning but I find it baffling that anyone would want Pulis to be our manager and be forced to watch that tripe week in week out.

I thought this initially too, then when I saw the grooming charge, I assumed it must've been a technicality due to him admitting he knew her age but that it was still consensual (as consensual as doing stuff with a 15 year old can be), wasn't quite expecting the texts that have come out that seem as if he has actually groomed her and took advantage of her. I just can't fathom why he'd do it. Scumbag.

Considering he's 28, and with some of the stuff that's supposedly being brought up in the trial, I don't see him coming out at an age where he can realistically play professional football at a high level.

He was never this bad, he'd have scored 5+ for us if we'd given him this many chances.

Benteke having a shocker and massively out of form atm. Guaranteed goal at the Holte end on Sunday then...

I was thinking more when we blew our 2-0 lead at Leicester...

Just now on MotD, "They've never been 2-0 up this season" Errr, yes we have! I remember cause it's so rare!

I don't think that style of football is sustainable at the higher ends of the table, as soon as Leicester's confidence goes I can see them drop like a stone playing how they currently are, whether that be this season or next. Ultimately in football you need the ball to score (as the cliche goes, "the best form of defence is attack") and we showed under both Lambert and McLeish that 9 times out of 10 you're gonna be at the wrong end of the table playing that way. You can't let the opponent just have the ball for the entirety of the game and hope you can steal a goal or 2 on the counter, most of the time it just doesn't work. It's fine if you want to scrape to 40 points each season but if you want to work your way up the table, you need to dominate games more. Leicester are a bit of an anomaly really, they're the perfect mixture of pace, confidence, form, discipline and luck, they might be able to sustain it until May, but I doubt they will stay near the top of the table for long unless they adapt their style a little bit. So for us moving forward, I'd prefer to keep plugging away at what we're currently doing, it's more satisfying to watch than most counter attacking football and I think long term it's more likely to take us towards getting back to the top half.

Wrong thread.

Only in recent history, Gabby isn't even in our top 10 goalscorers of all time, him being our top Premier League goalscorer is just a testament to how bad we've been in the last couple of decades.

Idiot

play on you numpties!

This is the problem, surely the point of a takeover is that day to day running will be affected so that we are run better, to do say in football's current climate requires money, a lot of money. So it is possible for the fans to take the club over (though I have doubts about stumping up the required capital for the initial bid) but it won't change anything, instead of the blame lying at Lerner's feet it would lie at the feet of the 50,000 or so fans that own the club. As for football being a business the same as every other one, it really isn't. Football is a money pit, no owner can ever expect to make money off of a football club like you could with regular businesses, in 2013 over half of Premier League clubs made losses, and have only been making profits recently thanks to the TV money, but with the way transfer fees are going I can't see it being long until most clubs go back to running losses. There's a reason that most Billionaires don't invest in football clubs, because they aren't like other businesses and are bad investments unless you're willing to piss money away.

They were just educated guesses, hence putting the "~" in front of the figures. Obviously the cost of buying a club is going to depend entirely of assets, but League 2 clubs are not often bought for higher than £10m. Most League 2 teams have a yearly wage bill of between £500k - ~£2m, so perhaps my estimate for running them was a little low, though not too much so, however FFP rules determine that wages must account for 55% of Turnover in League 2, so that leaves 45% of your Turnover to be spent on general upkeep and transfers, so the need for fan investment isn't all that high. As for Villa, of course we don't lose £300m per year, that was my highest estimate of what could be expected to be paid in the first year of ownership if the club was sold for £200m + my highest estimate of upkeep costs. Villa are currently spending £65m on wages, our 2014 accounts stated that we made a £4m loss (with a £52m loss the year before) and we have a Net Debt of £102m. That debt will need to be paid off for a start (assuming that it isn't taken care of with the sale from Randy), so that money would need to be stumped up. So if the fans could stump up the cash to buy the club and get rid of that debt, with some shrewd accounting then the fans could buy the club and run it at it's current standard. But I thought the whole point was our current state isn't good enough and we aren't spending enough as a club currently? If the club is making just £4m losses and still hardly spending any money, how can it be expected that it would be any different under fan ownership? We need significant investment if want to get back to just mid-table, imo, roughly £50m-£70m in the current climate of the Premier League and how much other teams are spending, and that's assuming we somehow stay up this season, it's gonna be even more if we have to get out of the Championship too. Unfortunately, football is now a multi-£1B business now, which requires owners to invest significant amounts of money if they want to compete in the Premier League, amounts of money that regular fans just do not have, the idea of a top level, fan takeover in the current climate of football is absurd.

Because those two teams play in League 2, where it would cost no more than ~£10m to buy them and the yearly upkeep would only be a couple of million. We're talking about a club that is up for sale for £150m-£200m, and has a yearly upkeep of ~£75m-£100m. Can the fans stump up ~£225m-300m just to run the club for one year?

Why would you let him take a third after he smashed two on to the crossbar? Argentina deserved for him to miss the third for that.

I bet Lawrenson is ashamed that fans of his club are throwing football back to the dark ages!

Lol, Liverpool fans having a go at Benteke for not attacking a cross about 5-10 yards ahead of him.

He played once for Barcelona, and that was off the bench, so yeah, he wouldn't play for Utd.

They're not even in the play-off places...

Could be, but it seems to me that our midfielders aren't confident when getting in the box. We have a very lightweight midfield and it's almost as if they realise they're not gonna leap above a CB for a header or out-muscle someone for a tap in, so they don't bother. Garde needs to make them realise that just being in the box is helpful as they force the defense to do something under pressure, so might make a mistake you can capitalise on. It's not a problem just Garde has experienced though, Gil and Veretout never really did it under Sherwood, and Westwood never really did before either, the players we had that did do it were players like Cleverley, Delph, and El Ahmadi did a bit, and further back Milner, Downing, Barry etc..

Thought he was really good today, much improved from earlier in the season. My only complaint with him currently is he doesn't get in the box anywhere near enough. It's as if he feels that he can't compete physically so he shies away from the box, but just being in there would help as at the very least he's a nuisance for the defense. Garde should show him the chance he had v Leicester, where he tries a scissor kick, and tell him that's what happens when you get in the box, chances fall to you, one will eventually go your way. Not just a problem with Westwood though, the same could be said of Gil and Veretout too.

Sign him up! We need a striker.

At least we get to see a good thumping every so often.