allani

In that case we should be looking at NSWE in a very different light. They are the owners. They should have had the balls to tell Heck that they didn't agree and vetoed his decision. Now either they don't care (which would seem unlikely given everything else they are doing) or they are so rich that they are happy to throw money around to "fix" something multiple times. I would be incredibly disappointed in them if Heck just walked in and said I don't like the badge I'm going to do a new one and they didn't seriously grill him on why they should do that having just spent a lot of money doing it once. They sign the bills and if they are happy writing cheques out because someone just says "I don't like this" then the club is in very bad hands.

The claret lion on the blue background is one of the design elements I do like about the new round badge (it's better than the pale yellow on pale blue for sure on the Lerner badge for sure). So we've finally found something that we can both agree on!!! Based on that I'll limit my response to the other points to the fact that Chelsea and Villa both use monochrome versions of the badge (which looks really cool on some of our training / leisure gear) and so colour shouldn't be the major differentiator as the badge needs to work with no colour.

You can make a shield any shape you like so that it becomes unique to your club (it doesn't even need to be a shield). I think that the more elements of the badge that you have that are unique (or at least identifiable) the more scope you have to use each of them independently - which in turn widens the palette of brand components that you can use. It's much harder to draw a round badge that isn't... well just a circle. And then when you use the round design on it's own it has no identity - it's just a circle.

We haven't finished in the top 3 of the PL for 30 years. Atletico haven't finished outside the top 3 of La Liga for years. We haven't played in Europe for 20 odd seasons. Atletico have reached the knock-out stages of the CL nine times in the last 11 seasons and lost in the final twice. One of the seasons they got knocked out in the Group Stage of the CL they went on and won the Europa League. Emery and Monchi are taking us places for sure - but we are not on the same level as Atletico at the moment.

Probably more to do with the fact that their bench is full of full international players worth upwards of £50m.

My Arsenal supporting friends are very unhappy that he has been allowed to leave. They think he should have been in with a shout of getting into their squad next season. So I'm hoping that proper first team football at Plymouth is a step towards being in / around our squad rather than just the next loan deal. My mates are concerned that Arsenal might lose a couple of other really good young prospects as well - there's apparently some resentment building within the camp. If so then maybe they'll turn into another West Brom for us.

I think the chances of us beating Atletico Madrid to his signature at this point in time were pretty much zero. So I don't think he was a transfer we've missed out on.

Yeah - the less said about the rest of the list the better.

Digne has been one of our best performers this season. We are definitely missing him at the moment. I appreciate that his resale value won't be great but he's played a pretty big role in our improved perfomances last season and this. Sometimes we need players who we won't make a transfer profit on but they still add value through better league / cup finishes and positioning us for the next stage in our re-evolution.

Based on the up front fees that we have paid - I'm not quite sure how we would have found guys that could have come in and changed (for the better) what is happening right now for the same money. It's hard to know the exact structure of any of the deals as they've been "undisclosed" but I can't imagine we've paid more than £15-20m up front for all 4 players and wages wise for the season they probably all add up to below Digne's hourly rate. It would (I think) be very hard to spend £20m and find an established player who can walk into a team 5th in the PL and push them back into the title hunt (which on paper they should never be in at the moment anyway). We'd probably be looking at someone towards twilight of their career who we would probably be looking to sell (at a loss) next summer at the latest and who would almost certainly be demanding wages at the higher end of our current pay scale. Either that or gamble on someone who has fallen down the pecking order at their current club and who we think will reflourish almost immediately here - the key word there being gamble. For what it is worth - if that £20m player who would improve our starting XI was out there then I am sure that Emery / Monchi considered them. Maybe a deal (within FFP limits) wasn't possible, maybe their existing team refused point blank to negotiate, maybe they deemed them too big a gamble, maybe they are confident that Pau, Ramsey and Tielemans (and maybe Zaniolo although as a big fan of his I am now feeling more doubtful that it will happen here) are closer to full fitness / form and that the return of those players will have more of an impact on us in the short term? Maybe they don't see 5th place (11 points clear of 7th) as something that requires big change, that we're in little more than a temporary blip and they are confident that they can get more from the existing group of players to break out of that blip?

West Bromwich Villa? Or maybe to fit in with VSports - Vest Bromwich Albion.

This 75% thing is beginning to annoy me in the same way that people bang on about 52% of people wanting Brexit. Firstly it isn't 75% of everyone connected with Villa. Secondly most people (and I appreciate that the working group were presented with more options) could only vote between two options. Neither of which were particularly great. So being better than something that wasn't that great isn't necessarily the "win" that it is made out. If you have people the chance to cut of their right testicle or their left testicle then 75% of people voting to cut of their right testicle doesn't mean that it is a good choice. Maybe we shouldn't be chopping off either testicle - maybe we should be removing both? Thirdly just because people voted for something doesn't mean that there aren't other factors that should have been taken into consideration before / during the process. The "proposals" put forward for Brexit ignored a whole heap of (quite important) issues that experts explained would cause problems - concerns that were ignored because they were dismissed as "project fear" on one side and poorly / badly communicated by the other - ever since the government has lurched from one compromise / **** up to another and some people have found out implications that they didn't realise would / might impact them - because it turns out the experts were right and those issues needed to at least be better considered from the start. There have been plenty of experts both on this forum and elsewhere who have highlighted that a round badge has limitations in terms of creating an identifiable brand. If that is valid then we can't just keep ignoring it. IF the new badge fails to deliver the basis for an easily identifiable brand then we need to take that into consideration and recognise that that was something that should have been considered / explained more clearly the first time around. That doesn't mean that we should have voted in / out or that we should necessarily have entirely ruled out a round badge. I'm not saying the process around the second iteration is right / good at all. But my point is that IF what "we" voted on is flawed and fails to deliver against its purpose then it doesn't matter how many people liked it or voted for it. I say IF because I don't think we've really had enough of an open discourse from the club / experts (unless that has happened within the smaller group) about whether it is round badges in general that are problematic or the fact that a lot of the design elements are too similar - Luton's badge for example is round but looks more individual. The process for launching the second revision wasn't good - I agree entirely with that - but that isn't the same as just saying that we should have started from the round badge. It kind of feels like first time we tried too hard to do something that was popular and ignored other important factors / stakeholders. Whereas second time we've tried to come up with a unique brand and ignored the fans (or at least to date - not involved them enough). I think we've got the approach wrong both times. I don't think we gave enough time to detail the constraints under which the badge had to work first time and we've not gained enough feedback from fans the second. Consequently, it feels like we have missed two opportunities to come up with something that meets the needs of all stakeholders and looks brilliant at the same time. (I appreciate that these views might be coloured by the fact that - whilst there are elements of the new round badge that I quite like and many elements of the Lerner badge that I don't - overall I feel disappointed that the new round badge was just not unique enough. I also appreciate that maybe more of this did happen in the smaller working groups - although I struggle to then understand how last year's version delivers against the "unique" test. I also appreciate that being "unique" isn't the only consideration - I'm not suggesting we do something completely random just to be different. But I do think we could have come up with something that properly reflected our history, the fundamental components of our "image" (lion, name, founding year), felt "modern" and looked distinctly and recognisably Villa whether that be on the shirt, on the stadium, on digital media or in colour / monochrome whatever).

Argentina's Gigi Buffon.

Yeah Kosta looks like a great find. A player at that age with good CL experience - including doing pretty well against Man City - looks like a real prospect. It will be interesting to see him during pre-season. My Arsenal supporting mates seem to think that Sousa is a really good prospect and are not happy that he's been let go. Sounds like they thought he might make the odd appearance next season - but will be good for him to get some experience at Plymouth. Gauci is an interesting one - one thing that stood out to me is that he made to penalty saves in a penalty shoot out, one of the things I love about Emi is how you can almost see striker's confidence drain away when they are taking a penalty against him! Seems like a division of opinion on Rogers - I've definitely read more negative "opinions" about him being no better than players we've let go - but the data suggests he hits the target on a lot of the things we need. He gives me the vibe of someone who will get better when playing with / against better players. I have a sense that he might score a big goal quite early on and play more minutes than we might expect.

Agree with you entirely. The other thing to note is that FFP has really cut deep this winter for all the other teams in the division. Especially after the penalty handed out to Everton and the potential penalty for Forest. I think everyone is trying to make sure that they are well within the limits so that they aren't relying on a big offer coming in for a player in order to balance the books and / or climbing 5 or 6 places in the league. It feels like Emery and Monchi have had control over the signings. If we've not made signings it isn't because the owners aren't willing to back the manager and we've not made a panic signing and overpaid for a short-term "potential" fix. I can't say that the players we have signed would necessarily have been on my list / I don't know a great deal about them - but the data and stats all seem to fit in with the way we want to play. They all feel like they "fit" the master plan. It will be interesting to see how well they turn out and how we view the signings in a couple of years. But this is exactly what we wanted Monchi to do - find some young gems and buy them before they become £30m players. We'll find out whether he's managed to do that. But they all seem pretty low risk - if things don't quite work out then I don't see us losing a load of money on any of them.

Spot on. My target at the start of the season was 7th but being in the European places all season long rather than clinching it at the death. 6th or higher would still be a fantastic season. Unless something crazy happens in the next 20 mins we are 11 points clear of 7th (Man Utd have a game in hand but aren't in great form) with 16 matches left to play. So we have effectively 3 or 4 games "in hand". The odds are still very much in our favour for finishing 5th. Which may or may not be enough for CL football. There's definitely room for improvement on our last few displays but I really don't get a lot of the doom and gloom and calling for Emery to abandon what has worked for him over the last 10 years as a manager because we've had a couple of poor results.

Given that our summer window and winter window have exactly followed Monchi's standard approach of summer = first team, winter = youth / development - then I think it is highly likely that we will sign a player for the first team in the summer.

I don't entirely agree with the view that the first bit. I do agree that maybe some of the players - like many fans - got a bit ahead of themselves and saw a potential fight for the title. Whereas anything above 7th should still be seen as progress for a team / squad that is still a work in progress. I do think that we are really missing Pau and Digne who were both excellent during our long spell of terrific form. We're just not getting the same quality of passes out of our back line and it's hampered our ability to make things happen. It's also meant that Luiz hasn't quite had as much time and space because our opponents don't need to be as worried about Lenglet pinging a defence splitting ball past them. Nothing has changed in that if we want to compete at the top then we need all our key players fit and on form. Ramsey is also a loss in terms of adding that more dynamic thrust from midfield. We did some good stuff yesterday (maybe not as much as we could / should) and had a couple of decent opportunities to take the lead. They had a couple of big slices of good fortune at key moments (which you could easily argue they earned by being a bit more assertive around the box). Not that long ago we probably benefitted from a those kind of breaks ourselves. I'm confident that as long as we don't panic and continue doing what we are good at then we'll hit our groove again. I've always been looking more at the gap to 6th than the gap to 1st and we're still in an excellent position at this stage of the season. It's been a long time since I've been as excited by the football we are playing as I have throughout 2023 - even yesterday it felt like we knew what we were trying to do but it just wasn't quite happening. For several years I've felt like we didn't really have a plan that everyone was behind. We need to not panic, continue to trust in the system / in Emery and not get on everyone's backs about losing our first league match at home in a year.

Well in some respect you can argue that the loan did work. It's given us a chance to see whether he can play in the PL without the cost of having to sign him (depending on how / when / if the permanent deal clause clicks in). He was genuinely one of the most exciting players I've seen play for Roma when he broke through but he's not shown anything like that here. Even after his return from serious injury he put in some superb performances for Roma (he was asking for a new contract for a reason) so I don't think that you can write it off as down to the ACL issues. I don't know whether it is the speed of the game, him not knowing exactly what he is being asked to do, playing him in the wrong / a different position, the pressure of trying too hard or what - but it's getting more and more difficult to see it suddenly clicking here. Genuinely at Roma every time he got the ball people were either out of their seats or getting ready to do so. Sure he didn't beat his man every time (or even most of the time) but if he did then things happened and happened fast. He's just not doing that here. And I am gutted.

Yeah it is a pretty important and massive IF though!!! You can't separate the question from the person. It's a bit like saying that if you wanted to meet some influential people in the USA then the best people to arrange a meeting with would have been Epstein and Maxwell. Whether it is true or not doesn't matter. Without a single doubt I would rather Villa get relegated to non-league football than sign Greenwood.

Agree. You can see that he could be an absolute nightmare to play against when we are playing well and he is confident in himself. But he needs to also gain some of that Gordon attitude. If it isn't working don't go into your shell. Go out and do something even more extravagent or just do something to pi55 off the defender(s) and opposition fans around you and / or fire up our fans.

I would rather burn my kids at the stake than have Villa sign a predator like Greenwood. (OK maybe I wouldn't actually burn my kids at the stake that might be considered a bit OTT). But I would certainly refuse to have anything to do with Villa until he and everyone who was involved in signing him had been thrown out of the club with no hope of ever finding another career in football.

I was chatting with @TRO recently about how Gordon and Almiron have an annoying habit of making things happen and trying to impose themselves on matches even when the match is going badly or they are not playing very well. Diaby just seems hyper passive - he's always waiting for things to happen and then doesn't currently have the confidence to take advantage. There were a couple of early chances today when Ollie would have hit a shot and seen what happened - Diaby didn't look like he wanted to shoot and instead tried to thread a pass through three players. Bailey came on and immediately wanted to make things happen. It gave everyone a boost - it gave Ollie a bit of a kick up the arse too. Diaby needs to watch what Bailey did today and take that energy into his own game. Bailey (admittedly knowing he only had 30 minutes or so) was constantly trying to make space and make the defenders worry about what space he was going to attack and where he was going to run. This immediately gave our midfielders a potential target and an option to look for. Ollie suddenly sensed there was more space for him to exploit to and started making better runs too. It's not always about the supply not being good - it's sometimes about being more assertive, active and determined to try and make a chance for yourself rather than waiting for a great ball or even sometimes just annoy the hell out of the opposition defenders. Hopefully, someone shows our other forward players how Bailey's attitude created chances that he (and they) could then exploit. If you're struggling with supply then you can't just sit back and be passive about waiting for it to eventually come. Sometimes you need to do more to try and create the supply.

I would rather not start next season on -10 points and be excluded from all UEFA competitions because we broke the rules this season.

If it is £8m up front for a 5 year contract then from an FFP perspective £1.6m a year sounds pretty good. If £5m of the add-ons is due if / when he plays say 40 matches - I assume that the additional £5m "fee" is then spread over however much longer the original contract had in place - so let's say he does 40 appearances between now and the end of the next season then I assume that would add £1.2m per year extra for the 4 years remaining?