M_Afro

Openda looks similar in style to Brennan Johnson. He is physical and quick and pls with his head up most of the time. I think he would do well in the PL (all based upon my extensive research, I.E. a 10 mini YouTube video!)

I think we may be waiting for a few to go out before signing any more new players. It sounds as though Sanson, Nakamba, Coutinho, Davis and Dendonker may all be on the move fairly soon. I think you could probably add a few more to that too who we may wish to move on permanently or on loan. Once the decks have been cleared things may start to speed up again. We’ve had a great start to the window with our two incoming players. We just need Monchi to start working his magic with the outgoings now.

We’ve come so far. Getting two current international players, from tier 1 nations, who are both approaching their peak years is pretty much unheard of for Villa. Hopefully their signings will ease the passage for other top players. We are going to be rocking next year. UTV

You have absolutely no idea of whether it will happen or not! Why be so forthright? This thread is becoming quite unpleasant to be honest. For what it’s worth, I think there’s a good chance we will spend that amount of money, on a single player, within this transfer window……..Just a feeling though and I could be well wide of the mark. I certainly think we would be prepared to spend that for the right player but convincing them to come will be the difficult bit.

There seems to be a lot of unbelievable negativity around villa fans at the moment. I really can’t quite understand it. Why on earth are people so agitated? Most villa fans have never had it so good. Anyway. Here’s a bit of shameless positivity. Signing Youri on a free is easily the best bit of business that any Premier League team has done so far. Up the Youri. Up the Villa.

I like the shirt. I agree that it could be better but it’s still pretty cool I think.

It was always going to be difficult for us to get our top targets this summer. We will have to be patient. For once though, I totally trust us to make good decisions and if that means we wait, then that’s exactly what we should do.

For years we’ve had decent managers and average players representing England. Now we’ve actually got some really great players and we’re stuck with Safegate. It’s absolutely infuriating. I just can’t even be bothered to watch anymore. What a waste.

I agree so long as the fee and wages are reasonable

Man Utd last away game of 23 and first away game of 24. Sweet. Get to beat rat face twice in quick succession.

Wilf has proven that he can still run in the last 6 months.

I doubt little Phil will fancy Saudi unless the cash on offer is ridiculous. I kind of want to see him succeed at Villa but do accept that if he moves on, it may be good for all parties. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I think that Unai has 4 main targets. We have already secured Youri and I think the other 3 that he really wants are Williams, Goncalves and Pau Torres. I would have thought that we would have to shell out £130m In transfer fees to secure the other 3 but I really hope that we can do it. Those are 4 big players who are next level to any of our previous NSWE signings.

We need to be careful that we don’t rely too heavily on Unai. You never know what’s around the corner and we have to ensure that should Unai leave, for whatever reason, succession to the next person is seamless. I do trust NSWE to have that covered though and I’m just going to enjoy watching Unai for as long as possible (hopefully decades).

The five years of Purslow as CEO were the only time in my 40 years as a fan that Villa have been run effectively as a professional, ambitious club that realised its importance in the football pyramid and didn’t take a backwards step. He will get some stick and he was far from perfect but our football operations over the past 5 years have improved immensely. He has achieved a good deal in that time. I do trust NSWE and expect that we will continue to move forward but Purslow deserves our respect and gratitude. We have a season ticket waiting list of 30,000 now. That was unthinkable 5 years ago.

This is all a bit unsettling for a Monday morning. Why can’t we just have a boring off season for once! Oh well. In NSWE we trust!

An amazing signing. He’s a really good player. If we’d signed him for £40m last summer we’d all have been ecstatic. Getting him on a free now is quite unbelievable. Kudos to Unai and NSWE. He really is a good all round midfielder. He can do all of it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was our POTS next year. Unai will have him flying. A few more players of his quality coming in and we will be well set.

He’s a classic David Moyes recruit. He will be ok most weeks but never achieve anything other than that.

He currently lives in Leicester mate. I should think that he’ll be bloody delighted to shift across to sunny Brum!

I don’t think we are even interested in signing him but if we are, he will almost certainly choose us over Roma.

I’m not sure he was even that bad this season. Leicester fans are just really annoyed about what’s happened to them. According to Whoscored, he had the 90th highest average performance rating of all players in the PL. His rating, 6.80, was the same as John Stones and Silva, who most would consider as having good seasons. It’s also, only 0.01 behind our very own captain fantastic. I think he’s a good player who would be a very smart signing for us. He needs a fresh start and I’d back Unai to turn him back into a £50m midfielder. Having said all of that, I don’t think we are even interested;

I know but we have to consider ffp. Part of managing that is selling players at the right time. That’s exactly what we did with Ings and I suspect there will be other similar outs this summer. I think that Diego could be one of those along with Buendia. We need to operate intelligently. That means selling some decent players along the way.

I’ve got a feeling that Diego may leave this summer. We are likely to sign a starting centre back which could potentially push Diego back to fourth choice. I suspect he will not be happy with that and I also feel that it’s not a good position for the club to be in, having such an expensive resource so far down the food chain. They’ll maybe want to sell him before his value totally plummets. It’ s also much better to have Chambers as fourth choice. He is likely to be more accepting of that position, he offers cover at right back and centre mid too. He is also fairly low value and won’t suffer from a vastly depreciated transfer value like Diego. I obviously don’t know anything but I also think it’s odd that he didn’t get hardly any game time after his injury. Unai said that he was ready but never played him. If he was in the plans, I’m sure he would have been used a bit more often. It just feels like a good time to cash in.

I agree and If we get the right players, they’ll be plenty of times where Unai will step away from 4-4-2. He’s used 4-4-2 this season because it was the best fit for our current squad. I expect much more flexibility in formation next season.

This news has totally destroyed my focus and laid to rest any hope of me actually achieving anything positive this morning. If we do sign all of these players, I won’t be able to afford to go and watch them at this rate, as I’ll almost certainly be unemployed!