JPAngel

24 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

What I don't understand is the CL argument for not building the North Stand.

Firstly, it is not guaranteed. We don't know if we'll be playing CL next season.

Second, even if we are, isn't our aim to play CL 3-4 seasons from now too? Wouldn't it be better to have the stand sooner as in 3-4 years we will have the same dilemma?

The only reason I see for not doing it now is that should the owners spunk £100m+ they might not be so inclined to spend it on players in the summer. 

That is a valid argument, but while it's not my money, I would rather do it now then be in exactly the same position 3-4 years down the line. 

Perhaps, and this is wishful thinking, they are so confident about us to getting CL football each season for the foreseeable future that they see reducing our current capacity and spending a fortune on updating the North Stand as a waste of money. Why spend vast sums of money on updating the stadium over the next few years if they're thinking it may not be a viable arena for the inevitable success coming our way? We're better off moving to an absolute coliseum in 5-10 years time.

A bit of a leap, but I need a way to calm down after the commercial blunders of the last few weeks.

Whinging aside, I’m always a sucker for a monochromatic look.

9 minutes ago, Villa_Vids said:

It’s so uninspiring that I fully expect this to be legitimate. It’s about as safe and underwhelming as one could anticipate.

42 minutes ago, DJBOB said:

This is a decent picture of how I think it will play out. Lots of wild cards of course. Can we keep up our clinical touch in front of goal? Bailey, in particular, has been deadly from limited shots. Can Spurs keep up with their reckless defense? Will Chelsea ever learn how to score? Will Newcastle get enough players back from injury to play their style? 

 

 

 

Really not a fan of this. At first I thought it was an xG table but it's Expected Points which feels a bit whacky.

53 minutes ago, useless said:

 

It shows the absolute gulf in quality when they're selling their most promising player for around £3.5m.

We're going to end up with an abomination like this, aren't we? 

3 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

Now is probably a good time to review the last survey that went out at the beginning of the season - I'm pretty sure that will tell us what the badge will be like.

https://www.avfc.co.uk/crest-process/

 

Based on this, they've already told us exactly what the badge will look like, haven't they? In the event it's not liked, specifically highlighting the items below is essentially a free pass to say "but this is what you asked for".

• Predominantly claret and blue
• A shield - not a circle
• Aston Villa FC/Aston Villa - not AVFC
• Left-facing lion
• Features 1874
• Features a star

Now, if I can just figure out exactly what "build a picture of our heritage as a traditional club" means, I'm pretty sure we could mock up a design based on the brief above.

30 minutes ago, burchy said:

I hate it. Purely because I know it's perfect and that we won't get anything even close to this.

One of the biggest criticisms I remember from our bade redesign was that the silhouette was identical to so many clubs across the world. Incorporating the gas lamp into the crest in this way solves that problem in a beautiful way that is similar to the way Real Madrid and Espanyol solved the issue - with a crown.

2 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

This is Birmingham City University's logo

There's something so triggering about seeing a lion representing something that features the name Birmingham City.

Calling it now. It's going be Puma.

40 minutes ago, villabromsgrove said:

I can remember Villa Park in the late 1950's and every decade since then. It's in my blood and I have so many memories. I can remember when buses and coaches would pick up supporters from their towns and villages on a Saturday lunchtime. Those of us in the sixties and seventies with our Austins, Morris's and the few well off guys with their Rovers, would drive into the surrounds of VP then park up and walk in for ten minutes or so.

Times have changed. Football has changed, and what was possible and acceptable in the second part of the 1900's is no longer a serviceable option.

The owners of top Premier Clubs have to make very large amounts of money commercially to stay at or near the top where the real financial incentives are. I think it's inevitable we will have to accept at some point that the location of our Villa Park stadium limits our ability to create sufficient additional money streams.

Relocation to a brown site with good access and transport links, and the ability to stage non football events on a very regular basis, without interfering with "a local community" is essential in my opinion.

I never thought I would say this but I believe that change should happen if we want Villa to be a "Top club". If we were able to find a suitable site and relocate the iconic Holte End facade into our new "Villa Park" design, while perhaps also re-creating the historic brick face of the old Trinity Road stand as an historic resonating feature, then "Villa Park would still exist in spirit! I think  fans could quickly adjust to our "spiritual home" having moved a handful of miles away.

There is no really enjoyable match day "Villa Park experience" except during the actual match on the pitch. We have to deal with the time consuming crowded hassle, lack of public transport and vehicle parking, and the "joy" of wading in piss if you fancy a good drink and the inevitable toilet trips, not to mention the frustration of trying to access decent food. We may be an awakening 'giant' on the pitch, but we will never again be the top venue that we used to be even with the current building permissions, unless we face the stark fact that the location of VP makes a viable business plan for the next few decades totally unrealistic.

I'll put my tin hat on, lol.

You can take that tin hat off because this was a great read.

Now I've had some time to mull this over, I think I'm fine with it.

If we're to understand that this is simply a marque - much like the McGregor one that has adorned shirts previously - it's fine. Not great, but fine. Imagine that this logo is something that appears no bigger than a two pence piece on the nape of perfectly coloured home shirt and it gets a lot more palatable*. 

*Unintentional but insert shirt on a pallet meme if you need to

It's going to be an unpopular opinion but, having been to stadiums like SoFi in California and AT&T in Texas, I'd love for us to have a super stadium. I love Villa Park deeply but if the owners that have dragged us from back from obscurity to challenging for top 4 see this as the best route to becoming a Premier League superpower then so be it.

That said, I'm 99% certain they're not even looking at doing this and that this forum has become a bit of an information vacuum over the last 24 hours.

8 minutes ago, rubberman said:

Fun article on Opta about being top at Christmas, just in case it happens. In the PL era, only once has a team top at Christmas finished outside the top 4 (and y'all know who that was!)

Teams top at Christmas go on to win the title 52% of the time in the PL era (45% all time). 

https://theanalyst.com/eu/2023/12/top-of-the-league-at-christmas-does-it-mean-anything/

I'm such a sucker for articles like this!

One thing I found interesting is that, if we're top at Christmas and we implode as we did in 1999, we'd still finish above where we finished last season 

16 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

It was an in-house interview - essentially Heck had some things he wanted to say so they got the office boy in to read him the questions he'd written and filmed it - it won't have just come up.

The worst part about this part in bold is that, at the beginning of Heck's response to a question he clearly wrote, he triumphantly stated "that's a great question". Cringe.

1 hour ago, avfc1982am said:

The fans are every clubs most important asset. End of.

I don't know, if Man City offered Villa £100m for me, I'd expect them to take it.

5 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

I'm pretty sure he's the latest incarnation of VillaLad.

You don't think Heck is look at the Euros and thinking "Hmmm... 2028... that'd be 4 years to build a new stadium" and seeing it as way more cost effective than renovating the North Stand?

Spitballing, obviously. I'm just wondering what the long game is.

It really sounds like Heck is concerned about having 10,000 extra people use the existing transport links around Villa Park and I do understand where he's coming from. Anyone who visited the ground when we were pulling in 30,000 fans in the Championship can attest to how much worse travelling in is now we're filling VP again. Now add 10,000 more fans on to already strained transport links and it's clear to see there's a problem. Perhaps he wants that solved before moving ahead with extra seats.

I still think it's a weird decision given we've clearly put a lot of effort into those plans and, as I said in another thread, we're simply moving this same problem to another season.

Trying to trust the process but I am puzzled here.

It's just difficult to read and even looks somehow off-center? I really hope this isn't an indication of what could be used on the kit as, in my opinion, that's as bad as it gets. Even the Lerner badge was better.

1 hour ago, rubberman said:

Crazy to say it, but that looks very pessimistic! Whichever way you look at it I can't see us getting 7 draws - it's not how we are set up. If you extrapolate season to date to the remaining 22, you get W15, D3 and L4, so 83 points. If you look at his entire time with us you still get W14, D3 and L5 for 80 points. And just for completeness, using just last season (which is kind of like-for-like timeframe), W13, D4 , L5 - 78 points. I'm sure someone has a spreadsheet to compare the remaining fixture points vs what we got last season, but I'd be surprised if it gave much of a different picture. 

Maybe injuries, europe/tiredness will come to bite us in the latter stages of the season, but while Newcastle/Spurs are already looking leggy, we're looking brilliantly managed so far. And maybe expectations are getting too high, but to finish mid-60's would be a pretty big drop-off from here.

I just wanted to pick up on the bit in bold, here.

When swapping out Leicester, Leeds and Southampton for Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton (in that order) our results from last season for all of our remaining fixtures this season equals 34 points (W10, D4, L8) and would leave us on 69 points. Weirdly, that's exactly in line with my pessimistic prediction for the rest of the season (W9, D7, L6) and would see us claim 5th but I'm quietly confident we can do better than that!