stanthemanisgod

yes we do and it hurts to watch but what's your point? Truth is like the Norwich's of the league Villa are no longer expected to get results from these games, what difference dooes it make if we have a go or get rolled over, it's a results game and until results get bad enough McLeish's position will remain safe. Generally it takes popular opinion and something else in order to persuade the club to sack a manager, at the moment we dont have the something else, in fact Villa Park is not even that hostile to McLeish.

What amazes me is where your information must come from. Erm how is Lerner trying to recover any of the money he spent, the only way he'll ever do that is by selling the club for a profit. What he is doing is ensuring that our expenditure is in line with income, something all clubs will eventually have to do if these UEFA regs are ever enforced. As far as I'm concerned he didn't piss anything away recklessly he had a plan which in hindsight (which really is a wonderful thing) was always likely to fail. Lookat what we were when he came in you dont go from that to buying world class players overnight, well not without the kind of money Citeh threw at the game and even then it took a few seasons of Robinhos, Barry's, Lescot's before you got the Agueros, Silvas, Toures of the game. Villa is not falling to pieces, even when we were drunk on his spending we were having our better players poached and replacing with inferior or unproven players, we had a manager at least half of these forum boards wanted sacked and were still not regularly selling out Villa Park. We've dropped down a few runs of the ladder, or stood still and let others overtake us but we're not even close to falling to pieces. And as shown in Jan last year when the money is need the money is there, it's just not going to be there as a matter of course because we cant sustain it and not many owners could.

But we have those 2 players and one of them was down to McLeish and the other was considering leaving under Houllier. It's like saying Arsenal are in a false position becuse if they didn't have RVP they's have less points. I agree we probably wont finish 10th, but there's enough points in this team even with McLeish in charge to stay well clear of the relegation zone, fortunately the likes of Wigan, Blackburn and Bolton are so crap it doesn;t really matter what we do we'll be ok. What is hurting and understandably so is our pride as fans, we want more, we want better, we want the seasons where we gave the big clubs a run for their money, but the club for whatever reason isn't financing that so we have to make do, which stings.

Will somebody please look at it from the club's point of view? Right now what is there to sack him over? Seriously? The finances are being managed in accordance with Lerner's wishes. We're still only as low as 10th in the league. On Sunday at least 37,000 people paid for a seat (whether they were at the ground or not is another matter) As far as Lerner is concerned there's no reason to do anything. Yes we're unhappy with the product being sold to us, but hey we're still buying it. I'm unhappy that it cost's me £20 more than it did a while ago to fill my car up, I doubt anybody at Shell or BP is getting sacked over that though. If we want anything to change we have to wait for one of the 3 points above to change, we need McLeish to shove 2 fingers up at the Board and demand Tevez and a few others on £200k a week, we need to drop much further down the league, or we need attendances to drop to such a low figure Lerner has no choice but to appease the fans. As long as we carry on as we are, the board will carry on as they are.

Ok McLeish is a poor manager, I'm not arguing against that. The question is so what? What do we do next? Sack McLeish, ok now who comes in? Do Hughes or Benitez want the job? Would Martinez be tempted to jump ship ahead of another relegation battle? But what does that mean for the side? Martinez would not get vastly better results for Villa than he does at Wigam with the playing staff we have at our disposal. Jan is a notoriously diificult time to buy players, and even if we did have he money to spend you cant gut hlaf the first team in Jan and expect results to come instantly. Are people really suggesting that Lerner's search for a new manager consisted of only McLeish, McLaren and Martinez? For whatever reason it appears they were the only 3 who showed any real, i.e not purely tabloid speculation, interest in taking the job. The board instead of taking the easy option (McLaren) seemingly grew a set of balls and made what was an unpoopular decision to take McLeish from SHA, why? It seems to me that McLeish has come into the club with a clear mandate, to keep us around mid-table without having any significant resources. So far, regardless of what we think about the man, his tactics or the players, he's doing just that. We're 10th almost half way through the season. If we were rooted to the bottom of the table, getting beat by fellow relegation candidtates then yeah I'd expect any responsible owner to take action. But we're not, the only issue there appears to be is the management of the fans expectations, and we seem to want top 6 on a mid-table budget. So tell me where is this apocalyptic mess so many on here refer to?

I cant see us wanting to sell him in Jan, I can see him wanting to leave in Jan to ensure he gets the 4-5 weeks with the England boys.

But does that not come down to money, be it on transfer fees or wages? A better squad costs more money, a better manager will want more money to spend, better players will want more wages, better scouts want more money. In the PL it all comes down to money, you might be able to sign the odd gem on the cheap but it costs money to keep good players in a side. All of the other stuff, the lack of communication, the fact he's not at the ground, Faulkner etc wouldn't be discussed on here to the level it is if he was still spending money.

Ok, but what has he done that the vast majority of other owners wouldn't have done. None of us like McLeish but who was the alternative, McLaren? Perhaps he should have continued spending but how much is enough? Should he just ignore the UEFA regs in the hope that they'll go away? I honestly dont get the level of hatred shown towards him on here. I'm not saying there aren't better owners out there but there's also a lot worse.

Makoun i'm not up on my smiley speak, what's your point?

he point we all seem to be missing is that Lerner has not simply turned the tap off on spending because he cant afford it. Yes he may be nursing some burned fingers, but it's not as if he or the club are in any kind of financial trouble. What has become clear is that the level of spending was not sustainable, and even if it was it would be fruitless. We would need spending to exceed what it was at the height of the Lerner reign in order to establish ourselves as a regular top 4 team. On top of that the big clubs have moaned to UEFA that that chavvy Citeh have won the lottery and moved out of their council house into their street and they dont like it. The UEFA rules will affect the majority of clubs, Citeh may have just done enough just in time to fall the right side of the line when it is finally drawn, but even still there's talk in the club of reducing spending over the next few years to appease UEFA. Yes we can sit here and argue that wealthy owners can find ways too artificially boost income, but as we've seen with City the rest of the footballing world are going to make sure UEFA have a proper look at it, and we still have not heard the official UEFA findings into that deal. When the regs come in it may well be that the money receievd for the gound naming (well maybe not all of it) can be counted as an officvial source of income. The issue this all boils down to is the level of the club's income. Now Lerner is not to blame for that being limited to the level it is now, we have to look at our previous owner who failed to realise the significance of the PL, SKY and the CL. Lerner came in and had a pretty good go at forcing the issue, but in reality he was never going to achieve any long term gains based on the money available. It's funny how he's gone from the very model of a foreign owner to the worse owner ever and all he's really done is stop splashing the cash. Before it was oh look at the training facilities, look at the ground, the Holte pub, isn't our support of Acorns wonderful. Now it's all he's left us with is a decent training ground and a shitty pub. No wonder we get stick from other clubs!!

No but you'd expect after a few seasons of buying £10-25m players that at least europa qualification would be on the cards. maybe, maybe not, personally I'm not sure where the market it unless we overtake some of ther established clubs to the point we adopt their foreign fanbase. But you're talking about potential value where as all of the noises from UEFA in light of what Citeh and to a lesser extent Arsenal have done is referring to current value. So the question is what do UEFA consider to be an appropriate sponsorhip figure for Aston Villa as we stand. It might be enough to fund a few new faces but certainly nothing to the extent we've seen at other recent take overs.

But as I mentioned before UEFA havn't even approved Citeh's buy out against the new rules. And if questions are raised about the market value of the sponsorship rights for Citeh, who hold the FA Cup, are more than likely going to be in the CL next season, and may even be PL Champions by then. Who is going to argue that the rights to Aston Villa, Coca-cola cup winners 1996, and mid-table also rans is going to worth anywhere near as much. Not to mention Citeh are looking to scale back their spending in order to show trends that they are within the rules, we'd need a prolonged period of spending above our means which surely would not go unnoticed by UEFA.

Me neither. But I'm under no illusion that despite my irrational love of the club I'm certainly a consumer of the product that is football, and currently I chose not to spend any more than my sky subscription to aid the current set up.

/\ This if you take the emotion out of it, which I understand is difficult, why is it you pay money to go to Villa Park? For me first and foremost it's because I like watching football. Then the question is why Villa Park, why not the Emirates, White Hart Lane, Stamford Bridge etc, all as easy for me to get to as Villa Park? Well for me it's because members of my family before were Villa fans. Now ask yourself what have the club done this season to persuade to choose to watch a game of football in their ground? Club's have been treating their supporters as customers for years, increasing ticket prices, 3 strips a season, £5 for a pie and a pint at half time and they've been doing this based on the loyalty of those customers, the board know that they can pretty much do anything they want, sell off their best assets, ignore protests and appoint a useless manager and continue to raise ticket prices and yet the loyal customer due to the belief of some sort of social contract will continue to put their hands in their pocket and turn up in the thousands. We are what we are and the clubs know it, and thats why no matter wwhat we do, sing, or say in the ground will change a thing, becuase we've just paid them a shit load of cash for the priviledge and that's all they really care about. sucess = more fans = more fans = more cash = better players = success and so on.

But seriously how do people think we're going to get round the UEFA regs even if we do sell up to mega rich arabs? That's not hyperthetical I'll take answers on a postcard.

Just out of interest how many owners do regularly attend games? Seems to be a lot of people using the fact Lerner never turns as a stick to beat him with, I mean what does it actually matter if he's there or not? Will it suddenly be ok that we have McLeish and we're trying to reduce our expenditure if we can look up nad see Randy in the Ground on a match day? How many games do they Citeh owners go to? Are their fans on their backs about it? Just wondering...

Massive debt? You may need to elaborate on that a little....

A valid argument, but I could easily argue that constantly spending money on something that gives you no enjoyment, when you have a choice in whehter you do or not, makes you an idiot. According to the Oxford dictionary a supporter is: a person who is actively interested in and wishes success for a particular sports team: Now as far as I'm concerned I can do that perfectly well from the comfort of my own home without spending any additional money watching my team get rolled over from the first whistle. But each to their own and all that, but what I will say is that as long as there's around 30,000 people like you the board are never going to do anything drastic.

It's probably that 'mutual consent' thing meaning they paid them a shed load of cash to go quietly. The problem being I dont think Randy has the balls or the appetite to throw a shed load of cash at the problem to make it go away and I really struggle to see who would want to come into the club after we'd just shown our 3rd (proper) manager the door in less than 2 seasons. Especially when you consider the things we all know about in the lack of transfer funds and a wage bill that needs to be reduced etc.

Yes but we'll be in a completely different situation to Citeh when the use of such loop holes get examined. As it stands there's no guarantee that UEFA will accept that the £400m or whatever it was Citeh got for the naming rights of their ground as the genuine market value, but even if they do at that point, Citeh will almost def be back in the CL and may even be Champions of England. Villa will be a club that has flirted with relegation for 2 (probably) seasons and last won a trophy in 1996, would be a lot more difficult to argue that the rights to naming our ground etc are worth anywhere near the value of the bigger clubs. That's before you've even got into the fall out that would occur if they tried change the name of Villa Park.

playing devil's advocate I can also see it from the club's perspective. As it stands AMc actually hasn't done anything wrong (well I odnt have a copy of his contract to hand but it's a fair assumption I believe) we're not in the relagation zone, in fact we're in the top half of the table with almost half of the season gone. The club isn't bankrupting itself, and so far all of the players he's signed permanently are in the starting line up (at least appearing to earn their money). Hardly grounds for a sacking is it? I would wager his contract talks in terms of results, league positions and rounds of cups, not formations, tactics and styles of play. Yes we can turn up and moan, and yes the board may not like it, but ultimately while we're still paying to turn and moan and our PL status isn't at risk they're not likely to do anything, and from a legal perspective are probably unable to. And until such time that AMc fails to meet the objectives stipulated in his contract, or it clear that his being at the club is significantly affecting attendences the board will not even entertain getting rid, and nor should they.

But isn't the issue, and the reason behind Randy's cut backs, not the fact we're skint but that in line with the money we bring in we cant continue to pay the amount of money we do on wages and still be compliant with the rules? That's how I've understood the rational behind the austerity measures but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. The way I understand it is regardless of whether we spend £200m in a oner or over a few seasons we still need to prove that money came into the club via one of the permitted sources of income. And if we can do that we then need to balance the wage bill against our approved income, and the problem with £10-25m players is most of them are accustomed to receiving fairly big wage packets. Dont get me wrong it certainly wont hurt to have owners with a few more quid in the bank, but I'm not convinced it'll mean a significant change in our fortunes and standing in the league.

Havn't we already missed the window of opportunity to benefit from mega rich owners? Seems UEFA are intent on closing the door to the big boys club before any other clubs get ideas of being the new Citeh. In fact aren't Citeh now starting to address their spending to ensure they can at least look like they're going to comply with the financial fair play regs? There's no way we could start splashing the cash next summer and still hope to pass any UEFA audit of our accounts.

The whole issue here is the fact that we can see the way things are going yet on the face of it he's doing an alright job. Nobody really gave us a chance of beating City, Utd, Liverpool, and everybody is writing us off for the Arsenal and Chelsea games so actully it doesn't really matter to him and his contract if the players dont even bother turning up for those games. Presently we're 10th in the league, which must be about smack bang in the middle of where he's expected to finish this season under the terms of his contract. We cannot legitimately sack him for something that might (although probably will) happen so unfortunately until things get really bad we can't expect the board to listen. The white flag idea is brilliant but will probably be more of a kick up the arse for McLeish and the senior players than the board.

This is very good point all those that argue we could get a fantastic manager because we're the mighty Villa, seem to forget there's a whole generation of fans that have seen us do jack shit in terms of honours. It's ahrd to argue you're one of the best clubs in the Country when your last trophy was the league cup 15 years ago, epecially as that competition is now the playground for the big club's reserves and youth players.