Czarnikjak

They’ve been flaunting and bending them but didn’t openly say F to them. City have come close to being banned for 2 years. Look at Inter, they were banned from Europe. This is all a bit irrelevant now anyway, with FFP being reformed into Salary Cap soon.

I would walk to Mecca and back if they took over Villa.

FFP won't be a huge block in the road for Saudis, initially at least : and that's even without them artificially increasing NUFC commercial income, which will definetly happend via various naming and sponsorship deals.

Conte is a good shout. Probably the best manager out there who is available. Poor Brucie, his days are numbered

They don't have to get around current FFP rules. First of all, current ffp rules allow you to spend anything you want on infrastructure (stadium, training ground etc). Also Premier League FFP allows each club to loose £105m on average every 3 years. Ashley obviously wasn't taking advantage of it, so immediately they have a big wiggle room to spend on players. More importantly FFP is due to be scrapped in the near future ( could be as early as of next season) and replaced with a Salary Cap. This is rumoured to be a soft salary cap which allows teams to overspend if they pay luxury tax. So they will be in prime position to catch up with their Qatari and UAE neighbours.

He hasn’t ruin them, that’s true. But he didn’t do anything positive either. Twice relegated under his ownership, for a club of their size it shouldn’t have happened. More importantly, since his takeover they have the lowest Capex (investment in facilities like stadium and training ground) of all premier league clubs. Ashley is doing the bare minimum to keep them afloat. He is just as bad as late Lerner, and if he was at Villa we would all kick and scream to get him out. Can’t blame the geordies. Still, not a good news for us and other Premier League clubs.

There’s a minority against it. According to latest NUST survey 93.8% of supporters are for the takeover. About 6% against.

That's what I said. It will take them few transfer windows to look at competing for Europe. Another competitor, making the objective of getting to Europe more difficult.

Make no mistake, this is really bad news for Villa and other clubs with European aspirations. Within couple of seasons they will be looking to challenge for europe, making our project even more difficult.

She is just a deal broker with 10% minority stake. Saudis have 80% stake in the consortium.

Not this season though. This is 21/22 thread. It will take them couple transfer windows to catch up.

You just described 4-4-1-1 not 4-3-3

Burnley? They have aging, under invested squad...Dyche magic can only work for so long. Certainly on paper Newcastle have much better squad than Burnley. If they can keep ASM and Wilson fit for most of the season they might just keep their head above the water in spite of Brucie

So now he can't even get into Ipswich U23 team Looks like it's WBA conspiracy to destroy his career.

So do you expect us to get European football this season? Genuine question.

more than you believe, more than you believe...

Excellent summary of our situation. The question is, will Smith have the balls to drop one of Watkins-Ings (if he agrees with that assessment in the first place). His reluctance to drop hopeless Barkley last season (until our season petered out and it was too late), might suggest he has not.

To join up with England He had disrupted preseason but he will come back stronger from the internalitonal break.

My point is that when these creative players play, Ings will not benefit from it as he will be on the bench. Ings is not suited to play single striker as well as Ollie is, he just doesn't have the physical presence to do it.

They are benched to accommodate 2 strikers on the pitch.

Neither Buendia nor Traore ever in their careers played on the left wing. Not sure why. It's really down to El Ghazi or Young ( having watched JPB in last U23 game, he is defo not ready to start PL game) on LW if Bailey is not fit. I don't fancy any of these 2 options.

I agree that switch to 4-3-3 is needed. I'm just worried that our LW options are not good enough if Bailey is still not fit to start. It would mean El Ghazi starting, I am not a big fan of that.

Apologies for the LOL, couldn't help myself. If you are concerned about health of the pyramid you are barking at the wrong tree. It's not SKy who decides how the money is distributed. They just pay the money to Premier League and they decide who gets how much. Premier League could scrap the "facility" fee and redistribute more money to lower divisions if they wanted to.

Lol, sky are privetly owned business that pays billions of pounds for the privilege of showing Premier League games. Why shouldn't they be entitled to maximise return on their investment?

Yes, it is a vicious circle. I am just saying that I understand why Sky are showing more Arsenal games than ours. Makes perfect business sense for Sky. I don't make a judgement if that fact should entitle Arsenal to receive more money from Sky or not. You could argue that it would be fair, if we talk about any other type of business. Should it be different for football?