HanoiVillan

Those things are mostly fine, but I probably wouldn't be okay with just owning random restaurants; on the other hand if they were part of the stadium complex like Villa Live was originally planned then it would be not just okay, but excellent. The basic premise here is that the further you get away from the core business of 'being a football club' then the more you encounter different types of business challenge that we may not be equipped to resolve, that may be cyclical in other ways or subject to regulation, that ends up dragging down the football business. I mean, you can take the absurdities in other directions as well. Why not build an Aston Villa supermarket to compete with Tesco? Why not set up Aston Villa Rented Properties Ltd and try to become the biggest landlord in the local area? Re Aston Hall, if the club had a particularly excellent idea to use it for hospitality (I doubt they will, because it's several hundred metres from the stadium and what is it really going to offer people seeking hospitality at a football club that can't be provided better and more cost-effectively in the hospitality areas of the stadium?) then I have no issue with the club approaching the council to do some sort of deal to use the space occasionally, for a fee, but I'm opposed to any situation where the maintenance and upkeep of this old building ends up on the balance sheet of Aston Villa Football Club. In the end, we've appointed people to executive roles because we think they'd be good at running a football club, and that's what we should allow them to do.

The differences between selling routine consumer items that football fans want to purchase as part of a match-going experience on the one hand, and taking over a long-term commitment to maintaining a listed building located on the opposite side of a park from the ground and which serves no footballing purpose and is of no interest to match-day crowds on the other seem too obvious to have to expound at length.

Also, as I've said before, we're a football club not the National Trust. We don't need to getting into the business of preserving crumbling stately homes that serve no footballing purpose.

Not to greatly disagree with this, but would he have known he was under investigation at the time these bets were placed?

Yeah, I live in Stourbridge and this makes public transport a real option for the first time for me.

Is there much need for one? The pick up point is not that far from Moor Street . . .

Anything which reduces pressure on the roads outside the ground and disperses fans into the city centre is good news.

The Midlands does have a 'car first' mentality but I think it's important to remember we're not a different species to Londoners, the difference between our mentality and theirs is largely a consequence of patterns of historical development and poor public transport links. I drive from Stourbridge to VP now, despite living near Stourbridge Junction, because despite everything it's still faster. That difference would only get more pronounced if we moved halfway to Coventry. If the Midland conurbation were far denser and had an S-Bahn style underground it might be a different story, but as they say about my aunty . . .

I think this nicely summarises the problem, that many fans are primarily concerned about sporting equality (from which perspective it seems bad that clubs can monetise 'being in London' and others can't), whereas PSR rules are about ongoing financial viability, from which perspective these things are great.

Well you learn something every day.

A housing project is a lot of additional money but a reliable stream of revenue. But by the time they've built this stadium, Peaky Blinders is going to have been off-air for about a decade, hard to see many people being interested. Maybe Wagner can try and get the financing for a spin-off movie or something.

Too reckless IMO, don't think he has the discipline for it (I don't think it's an accident he hasn't already been offered a gig).

Much like Hopkins, he's a troll who feeds on negative attention and is trying to monetise it. And as with Hopkins, as soon as people stop paying attention it stops working.

Absolutely not. There's basically no moderation at all.

It was arguably a worse squad that went to Russia, but not much in it either way: 11 of the same players, and most of the other changes (I tried to put them like-for-like, but Southgate took an additional defender instead of an attacker) are much of a muchness. Most of the swaps are squad players who didn't get much if any pitch time in either tournament, with the glaring downgrade of not having Rooney this time. In the run-up to 2018, very little was expected from that squad. In the immediate aftermath, absolutely everybody felt that England had over-achieved given the squad available. Now, I understand, a national team manager remains in place for a long time and everyone gets fed up with them, but there's some re-writing of history happening if people are going to insist that England suddenly should have been challenging for the tournament with basically the same side as 2 years prior. One frustrating aspect of the debate is that people assert that England's squad is massively better now, without considering whether any part of that appraisal is actually *because* they've done better at tournaments than they used to. I'm not saying that's all the difference - in particular, Kane is a genuine difference, a truly world-class striker who really does it for England - but nobody ever seems to even consider it.

No worries. Similarly, apologies for getting annoyed. But yes, I think it's time for me to call it a day in this thread. Time for some other voices.

Which bit is a stretch? That Zaniolo is better than Coutinho today, in 2024 (obviously), or that Zaniolo 'isn't up to it' (debatable, depends what 'it' is I suppose)?

I don't really understand why you're patronisingly intervening in this conversation, but I can assure you I'm able to read so please do one.

'His record gets worse' if you're bothered about his win percentage against top 10 teams. As I've said, I don't really care about this.

I will admit I am, to a certain extent, playing devil's advocate, because the cosy consensus in this thread irritates me. But I will absolutely fight to the death that **** third place playoffs don't matter, and that including friendlies in a manager's record is bullshit.

Because I don't think they matter really. Pretty embarrassing for Argentina to have lost to Saudi Arabia! Oh but they won the World Cup so who cares. Groups are for getting out of, something Southgate has done each time and many of his predecessors failed to do.

Probably nothing! As I say, I don't think the stat is particularly meaningful, in any form. You're free to disagree of course. Performances is a better metric IMO, and I don't completely disagree, but it's a more balanced ledger: 2018 - Colombia (nervy but got the job done); Sweden (fine); Croatia (poor) (don't care about 3rd/4th place playoff, I'm sorry) 2020 - Germany (good); Ukraine (excellent); Denmark (nervy but got the job done); Italy (poor, and tactically outclassed) 2022 - Senegal (fine); France (disappointing result but a good performance in defeat to an excellent side) That's about even.

I have two other issues with this way of looking at things. Firstly, it is quite circular; if we beat them they were shit, but if we lost to them they were good. There's an element of disrespect in it too; did everyone agree in 2018 when we played them that Colombia were shit? I don't remember everyone believing that at the time. Nor do I remember everyone agreeing that Denmark were shit in 2020. It seems to suggest that only games against the top 6 or 7 sides in Europe or South America can ever be a challenge, which instinctively I don't like. And then secondly, essentially every manager at a tournament is going to have a record like this, except for the manager of the winners, and like, the Moroccan manager. It's just the nature of tournaments that most teams exit fairly early, having lost to one of the best sides, and having won - if any games - against sides weaker than themselves. Now I realise in picking holes with all versions of this statistic that I'm not offering a positive statistical yardstick to measure performance against, but really that's because I don't think there's an unproblematic one. It's just very different from club management, where you play every weekend so win percentages are more meaningful. International games are rare, and tournaments rarer, so the context of the moment matters more in evaluating performance IMO. And the context of 2018 was, we went into the tournament extremely pessimistic with an 'it's a free hit' attitude, we hadn't won a knockout game for decades, and then we won two. The context of 2022 is that we played well against France and didn't get the game to extra time because Kane missed a penalty. Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to whether people think 'nothing less than winning the tournament' is a reasonable expectation to set for a manager. I don't think it is, more or less ever. But clearly others disagree (this is the only possible meaning of 'we'll never win anything with him in charge' after all) so I suppose people who feel like that will and should simply ignore any wider context.

I seem to find myself taking the role of 'Southgate defender' more often that I actually want to (I don't deny he's a very flawed manager), but I do think it's worth putting a couple of asterisks in this statistic, namely: Presumably a lot of these games are friendlies, where the result is by definition not particularly important. Of course you don't *want* to lose, but international managers do need space to try new players and systems in competitive-but-not-meaningful games, or else they'd never do anything new. Nobody counts pre-season friendly results when assessing club managers' performances. A bunch of the other games are from the Nations League. My recollection of this tournament was that most fans, media and players treated it as an irrelevant annoyance for the most part. I also seem to remember a lot of players pulling out with 'injuries' and finding reasons not to participate. Now maybe that's wrong, or maybe we can argue that it's the manager's job to take all these games terribly seriously even if nobody else is, but I think it's a *bit* harsh to turn around after the event and be annoyed about results from games you didn't care about when they were played. That's not to excuse all the results or the performances, still less being doubled by Hungary FFS, but I think it's relevant context.

Well it isn't, I lived through many many examples of us doing worse under other managers. If people want to say he's a bad, tactically limited manager that's fine, but the historical record is what it is. He's done better than every single other England manager in my lifetime.