KMitch

Question to the Brits on here: Is there any UK public backlash toward the Saudis and their business dealings in general in the UK? I ask, because I'm noticing more and more people in the USA refusing to deal with or work with the Saudis for political reasons. One example is my company has a competitor which is 70% owned by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund and many of my coworkers have straight up refused very lucrative job offers from them because of political reasons.

I've had this playing in the background as I've been doing some work this morning. Cutler is top class and it was great to hear his coaching methods and some of the behind the scenes insights from the club. Would love to see him kept on, because it's obvious keepers love working with him.

Yeah, I can see McGinn's brother knocking them out of the Scottish Cup final in their next match, too...

THIS. I was going to explain this as hiring a CFO for a major tech company as someone right out of grad school. It works when you're a smaller company and don't have a lot of expectations at that time (think Elon Musk appointing JB Straubel at Tesla in 2012), but when you're a major massive corporation with thousands of people working there, you can't take a gamble like that again.

I think it's a matter of: Do we buy someone who is just marginally better than the midfielders who finished 11th last season, or try again for a massive upgrade in January or next summer? Say what you want about the Ings signing, he is a massive upgrade on Davis and was available this summer at a price we were willing to pay for him.

Are you seriously advocating us to offer the job to Gerrard because of the rare probability that he'll be extremely successful at Leeds, if they offered him the job instead of us, based on nothing other than the opinion that it would be "a very Villa thing to do?"

If we were a club in the Championship, chasing promotion, Gerrard would be a coup for us, but that's not the case now... We're a mid-table Premier League team underperforming at the moment, with ambitions of getting into Europe in the next 3-5 years. Our next manager needs to be someone the board, players, and the fans feel confident can get us to achieve that goal. I'd like to think there are a handful of progressive and ambitious managers out there who would jump at the chance to manage us, but I don't think we're an attractive enough prospect for one of the elite managers with Champions League experience to come to us just yet. Of all the options we're linked to at the moment, Gerrard is one of the most underwhelming to me (Martinez being the worst). Putting it into perspective, he's only been a manager for about the same amount of time as NSWE have been owners of Villa, and TBH, he's done well there but that's the minimum expectation when you're one of two clubs with money and quality players in that league. Let me ask you this... Do you think Dean Smith could guide Rangers to a title win in Scotland, given 2 seasons to do so? I think he would... Which is why Gerrard's accomplishments aren't spectacular to me and I don't think he's that huge upgrade on Smith we could all get behind when the decision was made to part ways with him. I could be very wrong and Gerrard guides us back to the Champions League within 3 seasons, while playing the best football in Europe, but I'm not going to hold my breath. This is why I'm fairly confident we won't be extending an offer to Gerrard this week.

I'm not bothered about all this Gerrard talk. I went back and dug up the Henry thread. Betting was suspended on him days before Smith was announced and all the media ran stories about how he was nailed on to be our manager... Next thing you know, Deano was appointed.

I also can't believe some people actually take polls like these seriously...

Pretty sure MacPhee, Danks, & Cutler are still at the club leading training at the moment.

Other - Joe Kinnear, please!!!

That's exactly what Zat & I are getting at. You have to realize that top 6 quality players don't grow on trees. There may only be ~18-20 CMs of that caliber in the globe at any given moment, and instead of massively overpaying for one or taking a flyer on one which might not pan out, they decided to hold off until next season and spend the money on Ings instead.

This... Anyone seriously suggesting John Terry needs their head examined.

Joe Rogan is a football manager now? What has COVID done to that man???

Lol... Suso got slated for signings like Nakamba being "Plan B" for Phillips. I guess the choice was to strengthen another position instead (Ings) and try again for JWP in January or next summer as opposed to taking a gamble on someone else.

I'm going to assume someone at Villa (most likely Lange) contacted the agents of the managers (employed or not) on our shortlist prior and summarized their responses to Purslow/NSWE before they made the decision to jettison Smith. After the news went public, I'd imagine the interest flow went the other way and agents of interested managers we didn't initially contact would reach out to the club to throw their clients' hats into the ring. Purslow/Lange/NSWE then goes through the overall finalized list and select the top 3-5 candidates to at least speak to. Employed managers may need permission from their current clubs to speak to us, but that's all dictated by whatever is in their current employment contract. Based on how those conversations went, you'd want to talk to the front runner or two face to face for several hours (like Smith's late night hotel conversation with Purslow or Brenden Rodgers' 180 page dossier he delivered to the Liverpool panel) to get a further sense of the man, his actual interest, and what he is like to work with. If all goes well, contract negotiations start and depending on how complicated the compensation package is, it may take hours to days to sort out. Levy did this all before sacking Poch and replacing him with Mourinho, and again with Nuno/Conte, but it's very rarely done this way. The fact that we're in an international break shows we have time to do it right this week, but I very much doubt we went into this decision without anyone in mind for the job.

Come on! Real men do it above the knee...

He's no Elphick...

He's also managing the best national side in the world (on paper) and has won a grand total of fook all with them over the past 5 years. After they crash out of the WC next year, he'll be sacked.

You mean like when Bruce was sacked and a lot of fans initially wrote off Smith as being a backwards step? No, I think that if we end up going with one of the obvious names and nothing improves after the inevitable new manager bounce, the backlash will be against Purslow and the ownership, not just the manager.

I know it's just rubbish paper speculation, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that we already had a replacement lined up and ready to go (like Spurs had with both Mourinho and Conte).

Nevermind @useless. I saw you just replied above.

An 82 year old man who hasn't managed in 22 years and also lost his last job as a pundit for using a racial slur on the air... That will go over well with our political activist captain.

Says that 3 hours after he cowrote another article claiming we're considering Gerrard and Hasenhuttl as our next manager... Doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence.