Deisler123

Yes I am in the UK, more specifically in the northern kingdom (GoT sense) Would be.great to meet up and talk about football! In addition to Villa games, I am currently also following games of Espanyol, as they have a Chinese player there. Many friends of mine also follow Inter. They seem to have a good owner from China, but I am not interested as I was raised as a Milan fan. Certainly a lot of football to watch!

I was also defending him here (if people still remember me), but I was proven wrong as his business seemed to be more and more dodgy as time went on. All of a sudden, he became a top investor in China from nowhere (I reported his issue with his allegedly fraud application for getting research funding) and little was known to him (still the case now). It is probably safe to conclude now that he was used as a 'face' of a number of rich people for investment business, and when that bubble got too big, it busts. Some of you were right, particularly those who were concerned about 'his business model', as from the beginning we all knew his business model was based on 'buy and sell companies', which is not sustainable. Glad to see Villa doing well now in PL. I am still watching every game but only came here occasionaly. I was at Villa park on Saturday (Zone C3 I think it was) - you guys were great!!! Thought about asking a few of you out for beer but maybe next time! Cheers Deisler

Congratulations, Villa. Congratulations, guys!

Me in 5 seconds: Why are you shooting like that, El Ghazi? Fuk off.. Oh, wait. well done. That was a great shot.

Hey. Feeling nervous? Only 45 mins away from returning back to PL?

a goal scored using his back? Does not matter! Com'on!!!

Will take my Villa shirt out tonight for the play off final. Fingers crossed!

Lurking

This is perhaps what most Villa fans want, myself included. Things have to move on. Let's hope it works out.

It is possibly the best deal that one can imagine for now, assuming the new owners have good intentions (I don't see why not). Just hope the take over can be completed sooner. Don't want this to drag into the new season.

Interesting. What made you think like that?

I agree and I think it is fair to call him a 'chancer', as buying Villa straight after relegation was a highly risky business decision, but with high gain potentially. Taking chances has always been a part of his business model - he buys and sells assets all the time, and make profit from that. Sadly he is not someone who is wealthy enough now - he used to be quite close to a billionaire (in pounds) back in 2015-2016 but now he is nowhere near that. He (or the people he hires) seems to make awful decisions. The financial difficulty of this club was resulted from many years' mismanagement, and making radical and unwise moves on transfer market over the two summers made that worse. He must have known the consequence of not getting promotion a long time ago, but he (or his people) still did it. In fact, as soon as our last summer's transfer has done, it was the time that has already been too late to do anything about this. The only possible way out of this was to 1) get promotion or 2) sell players to cut spending. We didn't get promotion so we ended up with this mess now. I am not trying to say, by any means, that everything will be fine if we got promotion. But those decisions made on the transfer market over the last two seasons, i.e. gambling on promotion, were detrimental to this club.

There is a website dedicated to that purpose - a lot of articles written by different people trying to reveal some ‘wrongdoing’ from his past, some even covering his personal life. The controversy, although not quite verifiable, has been there for years. That approach does not seem to work unfortunately.

I think the second part (after 'my sons...') is more like personal opinions (which are possible but not quite verifiable), but the first part has places that are inaccurate. 1) It has been well documented (only in Chinese, up until now I have not found any translation in English about his pre-US life in China) that he was from a poor farmers family. Some were from his ex-wife and some were from his ex-classmates. These documents have high credibility as far as I can tell, however they cannot be 100% verified. 2) He suddenly became known to people in China because he was selected as the returning-professor in the first round of 1000-people plan. Just to give you an idea of what that means - that is roughly equivalent to FRS (fellow of royal society) in the UK in terms of academic achievement. But at that time, he was not even a tenure-track assistant professor in the US. At that time there were people who reported him of 'fraud', i.e. using misleading title (assistant professorship instead of research assistant-ship, which in Chinese are very similar), but there was no official investigation on this. I have seen photocopies of his application materials and the misleading was there (but to be 'fair' he is not the only one who did that, unfortunately). 3) ' The only thing that emerged was that the companies he dealt with were not listed on the Shanghai stock exchange but were trading through Hong Kong'. This is not true. There are two listed on Shanghai stock exchange, although he is not the sole owner ofc. 4) 'as these shares were quoted in Yen' - I guess you mean 'RMB' or 'CNY'.

There is no Santa in China...... probably because he does not know what he should say?

he is from mainland China, so it can only be HE. There is no ‘ho’ sound in Mandarin. I don’t quite get why he changed his family simply for other people’s convinience, but I understand as in my workplace nobody can get my names right. And the funny thing is, his last name, HE, should be pronounced as ‘her’ in English. That certainly makes things more confusing.

To be fair it does not matter which universe we may live in, we can still only guess what's going on in someone's head. ?

I was referring to your idea of ‘don’t lose real money as long as you don’t sell in stock market’, which is quite silly in the context of how holding companies work. Only retail investors can afford doing that.

I am not sure about that. We are talking about running major holding companies here, not as an ordinary stock investor (like you and me buying a stock in London). His business model is exactly that - he found two small listed companies and bought them so he had two ‘shells’ for reverse IPO. More importantly, He is not the sole major shareholders of the listed stock. When the price drops, every shareholder suffers. And The companies behind the stock are making loss every year. So he cannot play the ‘wait until price goes up’ games like us ordinary investors.

Whether or not that is a stereotype is not important. My point is he will not care about his face (i.e. Villa business) if his main business goes bust. Yeah. It is perhaps better IF villa can get a new owner with deep pocket and good management team. But for the crisis that the club is in, not quite sure how it is attractive to investors. From a business point of view, for Xia, selling now is perhaps not a good option. It is simply impossible to ignore the media nowadays. So his words ‘didn’t look at news’ mean ‘don’t really bother’. And the fact that it took so long for him to respond was potentially due to : either he was busy in dealing with his main business, or he just made a major decision, which, based on the tweet itself, could be ‘i will not sell up for now and let’s see how things go in the near future.

No. The loss I estimated was his domestic business, not including Villa.

It is totally justifiable for fans to be angry. Why would fans care about the owner’s business. The bad management decision was also there. So he must take the blame and the anger. Whether or not he will move on from the crisis (in terms of Villa business) is another thing though. If I were him, I will not sell at the moment. I will try to break even on finances and then try to see what happens next season. You can always argue that he should leave and sell up, but I don’t think selling at this point is a wise business decision.

Yes. He suffered huge loss since early 2017, in the scale of 50m~80m pounds (stock market value)

I am not sure saving face is his priority now. His priority is to save his businesses in China. People sometimes take the ‘culture point’ too seriously. Why would a businessman want to save face in his side business while his main business is in huge trouble? regarding the media coverage in China, no. Very little. Only top 6 premiership clubs are newsworthy in China. And Chinese ownership of an European club is not something new so people are not quite interested. Only places where Villa/Xia’s news appear are in economy websites - for people who are investing money in stock market. In general most news about Xia in stock market since 2017 has been bad - their prices have gone down a lot.

It has always been possible but, at the same time, difficult. Considering his financial difficulty now, it would not make too much sense to keep borrowing and keep investing into the club. Appointing a CEO who can reduce costs wisely and boost income over the summer would be the best strategy at the moment. But it has not happened yet.