Daweii

Probably. I don't think Garde was as tactically inept as he looked. He was about as tactically inept as Sherwood looked and I refuse to believe both are as bad as they appeared. The thing they both shared in common was the same lot of players. I think had Garde been given a chance to swap out some of the poorer players he may have done better.

Money cannot change the mindsets of those that consider Championship to be below them.

These are all pitfalls of relegation and take overs. If all goes to plan a lot of the managers will rue the day for turning us down in our darkest hours when we are a desirable Top 6 club again. I hope that Xia is keeping a note of every manager that could realistically take the job that turns us down in our time of need, if we're not worth their time now then they don't deserve to manage us when we're on the up and up.

Whether he is or isn't he's still 100x better than any player at Villa right now. If Moyes somehow enticed him to play in the Championship we'd win the league without trying.

Depends. I mean I assume we turned them down, how many people are happy to be a clear second choice? Depending on the character of the person heading the takeover they could easily be like "so now you're interested in our plans?". It may not be as easy as just going back to Oracle and accepting their terms after already discarding them.

So basically Samuelson appears to have been made the fall guy by Reading fans all because the guy he lined up bailed, something he likely had no hand in. Sounds to me like shooting the messenger almost, the club wouldn't have had financial support without Samuelson's contacts and the second it failed for whatever reason he's the one to blame not the guy doing a runner? Seems like Samuelson has a reputation of being dodgy that may be based solely on petty fan accusation more than anything.

I had heard that but also heard nothing of it since. Our takeover happened so quickly after relegation that we are very much in pretty uncharted territory. Maybe there is work happening behind the scenes, but we have heard nothing in the media about it since hearing it was meant to be a join thing. I personally think the FA have just left it up to the powers that be in the Championship.

@John I think because it has to be carried out by the Football League it won't happen until we are technically a Championship club. This won't occur until the Championship season has ended which is on May 28th when the play-off final has taken place. So I'm assuming they will start on Monday 30th May and assuming all is well it will happen pretty quickly after that.

What is there to judge? Just watch any game from last season to see what we're working with. As has been stated in the manager thread it was apparently suggested by Moyes that he would need to build three squads to hit the target of promotion, premier league stability and european domination. It's not a huge secret that our squad is beyond repair so I wouldn't be surprised if we actually spend more than £50 million getting a squad ready and it will start happening before pre-season. Moyes or Pearson or RDM will know our stronger players and our beyond shit ones just from watching a few of our matches last season, they won't need pre-season to judge 80% of the playing staff. Our main issue is finding buyers for the ones that have to leave because they are a negative influence and/or so bad they should never wear our shirt again.

I'm just gonna trust in Xia and hope we don't crash and burn. Not much else to do at this point. I think Xia has all the right intentions and the intelligence to see it through, I just hope that Villa achieve great success. Samuelson makes me nervous but at the same time this club may do well with someone that isn't as clean cut, we've been beyond honourable for decades and it gets us nowhere.

Makes sense. Hollis had already said that it was Xia's outlook and plans that made him the better option. Xia wasn't just about improving Aston Villa but improving the greater Aston area. If you add that to the fact that China would be a far more welcome host to us with their aspirations to be a great footballing nation and Xia wins hands down. Yes Oracle has absurd amounts of money but that also only gets you so far in English football before you run foul of FFP. Couple that with the fact that football (soccer) is not a very popular sport in the States and the overall deal looks less appealing.

Moyes seems to make friends with his players, not in the way that makes him weak or easy to take advantage of, but in a way that makes it very easy to get said players to always consider playing for him. I understand part of Fellaini's draw was playing for Man United but another part of it was following his boss, wouldn't surprise me if we are linked to and get quite a few former Everton guys even if they have to come down a division.

So from Garde/Black to the former Man United boss and one of Everton's best managers in their history in Moyes. Not only that but we have money something even Moyes isn't really used to having in abundance, could be one hell of a match.

I think Xia understands the reputation his country has he was likely hoping he wouldn't have to prove himself, but seems open to do so. I wonder how many people in our PR department if we even have much of one are getting fired, much of the doubt was fuelled by the official site making claims that were wide of the mark. Without that FT likely wouldn't have carried out an investigation the fans wouldn't have had such a horrible few days thinking he was a con artist, all of this links to the official site statement and nothing more.

He's our saviour!!!

It's also currently how much he has to use in this country. I'd assume that him knowing buying Villa was a real possibility he would make sure it was paid into a global account rather than into a Chinese one. That said a share of £400+ million is very tasty though before anyone tries to get negative and say "it's not as much as I thought we'd get", like I said this is likely usable funds that don't require bypassing Chinese laws there is likely more to come over the coming years if needed.

China have very strict foreign exchange laws. Unless Xia already has lots of funds outside of China he would need a way to get them out of China to do anything sizeable here. Samuelson may just be the right amount of dodgy to be Xia's underground money changer.

Reading that made me smile so much. This guy is legit it seems and he has cash and doesn't mind spending it. Samuelson is still a slight concern but maybe Chinese laws on money leaving the country is what he's there for, maybe he's just the right shade of dodgy that he's fine acting as a go between to get large sums of money out of the country. Underground money changing is a very common way to circumvent the strict foreign exchange laws, maybe that is Samuelson's whole reason to exist in this deal.

Unfortunately he's going to Barcelona. His talk of how much he knows about Champions League football has got around and clubs are impressed. He'll be going there on £450,000 a week with steep appearance bonuses and a 20% bonus every time he mentions the Champions League on Twitter. There is also talk that he is going to be groomed to be the next Messi and while some may think he's too old for that you have to realise his skill is on another level.

Likely won't be as big a deal depending where he's getting his finances from. If it's from internal business funds it may limit how much he wants to spend a bit, but Lerner's issue with or without the recession was he was using personal funds. Even if the recession never happened he would have cut funding eventually as no one likes to see their funds decreasing especially not their own personal wealth, he saw it going down fast and panicked.

Yeah also may have been a bit of ass covering after he realised he likely shouldn't talk about funds in an interview every club can hear. Make it as vague as possible is likely the best idea there.

It is "our" tournament as we're 5-time champions we're a dominant force in the tournament and it's a testament to how consistent our academy actually is at producing talent. Sure many don't go on to have insane senior careers, but at this level there are few clubs better than Aston Villa U21.

No one knows to be sure but you don't buy a football club and on the global news stage spout plans of football world domination if you don't have a lot of cash. Someone of modest wealth would come in and make modest claims of stability and hopeful success, not we'll win the Premier League is 5 years and be the biggest team in the world in 10 years that just doesn't happen. I mean we are in the Championship a league where the transfer record is like £10 million, most teams get promoted spending about £10 million in a transfer window. Xia basically said the equivalent of "we can spend £20, £30, £50 million or you know whatever the manager wants to spend". Even those in the media have said £30 million is absurd in the Championship and we could be spending £50 million+ so he has plans and money, not sure where the money is coming from but he has it.

Just putting this out there if I had no money the last thing I'd think about buying is a football club.. Xia has money regardless of where it is coming from.

Just gonna put a bit of positivity out there.. Xia made his bold claim of almost global domination with Aston Villa on the world stage, there isn't a football fan on Earth that hasn't read that he wants us to be a top 3 club in the World better than Man United, Barcelona, Man City, Real Madrid. If he turns out to be a colossal liar and a bit of a chancer he may be unknown now but he'll be damn well known for all the wrong reasons. Have some faith it's not like he said this to some kid on his apprenticeship for some small time blog or something that even Villa fans would barely see, his words were global and repeated by several news networks around the World.