ThunderPower_14

What if he's fired complacent staff who weren't great at their jobs for better qualified staff he knows and trusts? I think it's fairly normal for a boss to come in and drive a culture change and turn some of the staff over for what they perceive to be the betterment of the organisation. Whether Heck is doing the right thing or not remains to be seen, but it's not automatically a problem that there's a turnover of staff and some of them are disaffected.

I don't entirely fault his decision to leave under Gerrard, but to go to Chelsea when they've been absolutely chaotic with their squad changes over the past few years was a silly decision.

Absolutely, it is similar in Oz, but it's basically always met with pushback even when it's a very positive public project that will enhance the use of the city for a large proportion of the residents. I live in Adelaide where we had Adelaide Oval, another historic old sporting ground, remodeled just over a decade ago. There was strong opposition from the usual nimby heritage obsessed types who similarly were complaining about encroachment on public parklands, and despite that the stadium has been a complete success and has enhanced the area and the entire city by any measure. I'm very supportive of maintaining or at least maintaining the level of green spaces over an area. But this is exactly the sort of scenario where the heritage listing can unnecessarily get in the way. We've already got pillars on the Aston Hall side of Trinity Road, and then there's a playground, a basketball court and more sporting facilities. In a perfect world you wouldn't have a stadium stand hanging over the road like it does, but Villa park has been open for 130 years. Aston Villa leaving the area for a modern stadium elsewhere would be of great detriment to both the heritage of the area, and the club. The grounds of Aston Hall are not going to be meaningfully impacted by us say, filling in the corner between the Holte and the Trinity. Obviously this is all pointless discussion if the club don't actually want to expand.

I'd rather have the best players playing in the Premier League. The Premier League being stronger ultimately makes us stronger, and gives us the opportunity to buy better players as well.

This should be a recruitment war for the ages, but he'll go to Madrid because nobody else can afford him due to FFP. It's a shame, it'd be great to have him in the Premier League.

Where we'd want to expand is mostly taken up by the playground and basketball court space anyway. I'm generally against the wild overreach of heritage protection, it's a problem all over the world. There has to be a balance but there are groups of people for whom cities must exclusively be monuments to the past and any push towards progress so that they can be enjoyed by people is resisted. Nobody is asking for Aston Hall to be demolished but the fact that we're barred from expanding slightly further into some trees 200m away from the hall is crazy to me. Surely the basketball court that is currently in that space is more of an affront to heritage than the historic stadium of one of the oldest football clubs in the world.

This is utter garbage. He's not a bad team man and he never has been. He was our captain.

I don't see what this achieves that yellows don't. Just give players yellows for these offences consistently and watch them disappear.

16000+km club represent

This is the thing. The recent approach of surveys and shoehorning in bits of our history has meant we haven't had a genuinely good badge (for it's time) since the 80s. That round badge is clearly very dated now, but I think we can all see that it was a pretty good badge for the 70s when it was first used. I can't speak to what the idea was with the 90s/2000s Ellis era striped badges or the process that was used to design them. But the modern badges since Lerner have had what I think is a clearly flawed process where we've ended up with effective designs by committee, having to try to please too many people and ultimately genuinely pleasing very few of them, and that goes for the round badge on this year's kits as well. Heck came in and talked about "leaving it to the experts" and I thought finally, we'll get a badge that isn't bogged down by this stuff, but of course it's turned out that his badge change was just a cost cutting exercise because it was going to be too expensive to do a proper rebrand. Our approach hasn't got us a good result for 30+ years and we need to change it.

I hope you're right. For the shirt especially, it's perfect.

It can, but we've shoehorned it in in the most meagre, 4:45pm on a friday way possible. If we're going to do it like we have, what's the point? Crests need to be scalable and don't have a lot of real estate. If something isn't worth putting on the badge in a prominent way that specifically works with the design, is it worth putting on the badge at all? The star has the same problem for me.

Everyone has heard the audio. The court not being able to convict because the victim chose not to cooperate with the prosecution doesn't make Bellingham any less correct.

I like the idea of supporters having a final sign-off, but surveying supporters about individual elements and then shoehorning in everything they vote for is the worst possible way to design a badge, and everything we've had since Lerner bought the club proves it. "Consultation" isn't automatically a good thing.

Yep. It really is a case of if we want to punch a man in the face, aim for the back of his head. If we carry ourselves like title challengers and hold those expectations, a miss will see us in the CL spots. No limits under Unai Emery

He's a striker, he relies on service like any other. When the team has been playing well behind him he's been absolutely phenomenal this season. Constantly causing trouble on or off the ball, and linking up so well with his teammates.

Agree. Less is usually more with badges. The 1874 looks shoehorned in, in a hard to read white on light blue.

That boost to goal difference today was huge, it'd be nice if we could smash a few teams like that to give us an advantage over the likes of Arsenal and Spurs.

The detailing on the lion absolutely helps the badge significantly. It's not perfect and it's still got some design issues, but it's gone from a horrendous own goal to a fairly classy badge.

Gotta love him, shame he couldn't be his wizard best every week. Hope he does well at Villareal.

I think he's just settling into the league. He'll get there, he's showed he's got plenty of talent. Remember 12 months ago when Bailey was in the same position?

I only follow Adelaide United casually as they're my hometown club, but he's a super promising keeper. He's basically bashing down Mat Ryan's door to be #1, and Ryan is really only still there because he's a very experienced incumbent. Excellent shot stopper and his command of the box is great for his age. His distribution is getting better and better. This is a great signing, I think he'll absolutely be a #1 somewhere at a top 5 European League club before too long

Similar to Forest, the text isn't outside their badge, it's part of it.

The difference with the Forest badge is that the stars are a part of the badge, much like our star. It's never displayed without them. We could theoretically do the same thing, but then you lose a lot of readability at smaller sizes because the star has to fit so the rest of the badge is even smaller. Forest get around this by having one of the cleanest, simplest badges in football. There would also be PL rules limiting on how much real estate a badge can take up on a shirt. Forest have been prepared to deal with that. I think they only way we could have a badge with the star above like forest do is to scrap the shield altogether and just run with the lion.

Aston Villa is the most beautiful club name in English football and maybe the world, but ultimately everyone still recognised us with AVFC at the top. It was still clearly a Villa badge. The yellow on light blue is the biggest problem with that badge.