Enda

He’s a good player but this is another Ings situation. Sell him now and get decent money (say £10m), or wait a year when he’s lost a yard of pace and we end up subsidizing part of his wages while he goes on loan to Stoke.

Good player, always put in a shift, very professional. Good business by the club too. Best of luck if you’re off, Lucas.

22 minutes ago, Nigel said:

Galatasaray are very savvy putting the 2m acl tax on this!

I don’t think the 2m cancellation fee makes much sense in the combo with an option to buy. People are saying it’s a £6m loan, with £2m cancellation fee if we don’t buy, and the buy price is set at £23m or whatever.

Thats the same thing as a £6m+£2m=£8m loan fee and a £23m-£2m=£21m buy option, i.e. the extra two million was already covered by the available options.

1 hour ago, thabucks said:

Juventus still need to desperately sell players and have a plethora of options in midfield.

Thanks, it means a lot.

48 minutes ago, Hank Scorpio said:

No it's very real

No it's very real

No it's very real

Reel

1 hour ago, Kiwivillan said:

Read it was done deal hours ago. Official statement lagging behind.

And you believed the unconfirmed rumour?!?!

16 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

It's for developing players. Those who are deemed not good enough are sold. 

If you really push it and pretend Wolves/West Brom/etc simply don’t exist, there are three or four million people in the AVFC Academy catchment area. So at a real push the academy should catch about 5% of the population of Britain. 5% is 1-in-20. So only looking at Britain as the talent pool, you’d expect something like one squad player to be from our catchment area.

Thats before including Europe (Pau, Kamara), South America (Luiz, Emi) and so on. So it would be very unusual if our academy had produced more than a handful of our first team squad.

If we want to compete for the top 4, we need a top 4 squad. We can’t have a squad who are bottom-half PL standard, even if that includes some very very good players.

We should get used to selling 90-95% of our academy.

Just now, Demitri_C said:

I think boro have made a really good bod hence why we are thinking to sell

If we get 20m for archer 

14m a ramsey thats 34m pure profit for ffp

Roughly two years’ ticket sales. That’s a lot.

5 minutes ago, ferguson1 said:

Looks like Akpom is leaving Boro in the next few days, so we can expect strong interest from them.

Valuation on Archer? £12-15m?

Just to put £15m in perspective, according to our last financial accounts the total revenue from ticket sales (including season holders) is about £16m.

1 hour ago, Icarium said:

Replacing him in the aggregate as it were

Going further back, I hope this nourishes the West Ham fans romantically.

8 minutes ago, Delphinho123 said:

So West Ham want to spend the Rice money on Álvarez, McTominay and Maguire.

Yeesh. Just remember folks, it could be way, way worse.

There’s no way West Ham could replicate Declan’s output with one signing.

Instead they have taken the approach of replicating Declan’s output by spreading the transfer fee over three mediocre footballers.

8 hours ago, TRO said:

It would be easier to walk to Edinburgh from Birmingham, than getting a ticket.

What distance would that be, about 500 miles? Would you walk the 500 miles and then would walk 500 more?

Martinez

Cash Konsa Mings Digne

Kamara Tielemans

McGinn Luiz

Buendia Watkins

for me at least. Switch sides as you like, but I think that’s the most likely to keep a clean sheet and score. Bringing Diaby on after 60 mins to terrorize tired legs, and Pau and Chambers on for the final few minutes to see the game out.

Buendia to start over Diaby, anyone? He’s been more impressive pre-season.

Diaby as a super-sub for the first few weeks?

10 minutes ago, StanBalaban said:

If AJ is sold for 12m, as pure profit it would offset a 60m player incoming ona 5 year contract. It might not be quite a linear as that, but it gives us the gist.

But only this year. It would facilitate that purchase today but “paying for it” tomorrow would be a problem. We’d need to sell another AJ next year for £12m.

Anyway, this young man has zero minutes in the league and we’re getting £12m for him. With a buyback clause. It’s a complicated loan with little risk for us. We get the upside risk if his development blossoms, which is more likely with Burnley than being fourth choice with us. Great business.

I’m going to buy that training top, and another thing or two on clearance. Anyone got a coupon code for the online store?

Edit: I got 10% off the training gear by clicking a link from an Irish supporters club. Just find their Facebook, click the post about FAQ, and the link is there.

8 minutes ago, tomav84 said:

since purslow left percy gets **** all info about us. i think he had a direct line which has now gone

Yeah agreed, but nothing from The Guardian or whoever either.

1 hour ago, Philosopher said:

"Money doesn't buy happiness, it buys choices," this is very true.

Username checks out.

Edit: beaten to the punch by Adam.

3 minutes ago, Zero7 said:

Are there actually an credible links? 

No, I don’t think so. I think so far it is all Twitter and low level newspapers.

It could be true. But zero from the likes of John Percy.

9 hours ago, KMitch said:

The past 3 days have been extremely hot and muggy here in Washington DC with sporadic thunderstorms thrown in the mix, but luckily it's supposed to cool off and clear up a little bit tomorrow.  After logging a billion steps around DC's monuments and several museums, I'm looking forward to the real reason why I went to DC tomorrow.  UTV!!!

Not Villa related but what were your favourite monument/museums?

9 minutes ago, Villa 59 said:

There is no justification....most opinions on here are based on a couple of bad games and I've seen Martinez have just as many bad games. Olsen will improve when he has a number of consecutive games if and when he needs to!!

I’ve seen Martinez have bad games, you’re allowed two or three a season. The problem with Olsen is that’s it’s more like 50% of matches he has a howler moment, like against Newcastle where he passed it to their unmarked player at the edge of the box. Over the course of a season (say if Emi breaks a bone or tears a ligament) that’s not two or three bad matches.

1 hour ago, CVByrne said:

He said 2 players for every position and some young players trying to help. So 25 man squad + 2/3 young players I get the feeling.

I feel bad for saying this but surely that’s 22 man squad plus 2/3 youngsters? I know I am literal there but the difference between a 22 man squad and a 25 man squad in terms of actual people is Dendoncker, Traore, and Chambers for example. Big difference between 22 and 25 man squad.

53 minutes ago, mottaloo said:

Problem is, those two counties have a monopoly on winning "Sam" most years....be nice if a county from the north like Derry or Tyrone won it....it just gets boring otherwise. 

Tyrone won it the year before last!

2 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

I thought he actually said that they shouldn't be sat in our u21s at that age, which to be fair he's not, where the club failed previously was letting these kids stagnate playing kids football, Barry isn't he's out on loan

I can’t remember the exact quote, you may be right.

5 minutes ago, duke313 said:

In fairness, Nathan Delfounseo, Stefan Moore and Graham Burke were never signed by Barcelona.

Fair point, but wasn’t he about 15 at the time? Funny enough that move could have been detrimental to his development

Our previous CEO famously said players who aren’t breaking into the first team at age 19 won’t make it with us. I’ll go a little softer: players not doing well in the Championship at 20 won’t make it with us.

31 minutes ago, duke313 said:

Jamie Vardy was playing non-league at his age.

The sentimentality holds us back a bit, I think.

For every Jamie Vardy there are hundreds and hundreds of Nathan Delfoneusos and Stefan Moores and Graham Burkes and all the others who’ve come and gone but whose names we can’t event remember. These players make careers but are miles off established Premier League players. (No shame in that at all.) Louie Barry is older than Jhon Duran and has just been loaned out to League 2. He’ll do well to get a “Championship at best”-level career. Best of luck to him, and I hope he proves me wrong, but 99 times out of 100 he’ll be on his way.