wishywashy

https://sport.sky.de/fussball/artikel/bayer-leverkusen-transfer-moussa-diaby-vor-wechsel-zu-aston-villa/12924317/33895 Holy crap we might have actually won it

Do you have a source?

MAKE. THE. RACE.

Nothing in that tweet we didn't know on Monday: 2nd bids, player not fully decided.

At this point it's probably best to block out the noise. You've got utterly crap sources saying he's agreed with us, utterly crap sources saying he's agreed with them, and all of the sources with actual notoriety saying nothing but both clubs are in negotiations with Leverkusen.

Ekrem Konur, Nico Schira and Rudy Galetti.

El Nacional are absolutely awful, sadly. The Barca subreddit transfer reliability guide, which'll be accurate for Spanish sources as a whole, has them at Tier 5. There's also the question of why a Spanish outlet would be the one to break the exclusive about a French player in Germany going to an English club

I felt that he made such a disproportionately big deal out of aerial ability, especially given how Champions League regulars Man United have a 5"9 CB in Martinez and Man City turned 5"10 Fernandinho into a CB for a season or two

Tbf I've always found Tifo videos to be a bit deceptively shallow whenever I watch them. Use of fancy charts and graphics usually obscuring not much great insight. Nothing wrong with that, probably targeting more casual fans which is fine, but it's an issue when the insight is just really reaching for anything and seeing what sticks, like it was in that video. The Tielemans bit was baffling, having to resort to a.. financial argument? for a free transfer? It was hilarious. Even the guy didn't seem to agree with the comparison, saying that there were "admittedly other factors" in Rooney's decline.

Might be biased because I don't like TIFO (Athletic owned) to begin with, but their new video, titled "Are Aston Villa's transfers making them worse?" is baaaaad. Trying to put my bias aside, it was genuinely just wringing 15 minutes out of "Tielemans has played a lot of minutes and he's free so his wages are high (???), and Torres is below average in the air". Not even any in-depth discussion about these potential points, just presenting them and proceeding to spend 5 or so minutes trying to shoehorn Mings in as either an inverted left wingback or using Cash in a 3-at-the-back. They briefly considered the possibility that Mings could simply just play on the right but dismissed it due to.. passing angles? Didn't even mention Diego Carlos once. I don't like TIFO.

Bored on a Tuesday night, so here's a random link. This was the rando who scored on his Italy debut against England.

There is a greater chance of Small Heath winning the Champions League than FIFA ever doing this

For cod sake, not again

Not sure where else to put this, but looks like the rumoured changes are taking afoot in Villa media...

He doesn't do any of the fancy warnings, apparently. Just straight for the throat. Spaniards in football certainly tend to have a certain... disposition for the dramatic...

Diaby is by far the lower risk signing. Doku likely has a higher ceiling but has the typical injury concerns that are natural for players who rely on explosive acceleration. Villa prioritising Diaby makes perfect sense in that regard, but would be elated with either.

If you aren't already, switch to the Following feed. For You is unusable. Threads was clearly an extremely rushed launch. It's very, very barebones at the moment: definitely not suitable if you're mostly on Twitter for Villa. As for keeping on-topic, absolute no thanks to signing Reina. He was crap for us and his political stances don't indicate that he is a particularly nice person. Do agree that we might see a British keeper come in given Steer goes. Or maybe Sinisalo? Feels way too early, but you never know. I'm not sure if Olsen goes. He hasn't been good for us at all, but you don't stick around as a No.2 in the Prem for long if you're anywhere near Premier League quality. Martinez had a few good games for Arsenal and immediately went to us. Liverpool are losing Kallahan after 21 appearances. Think they still keep Adrian around, actually.

Barney Gumble vs The Nation State of Saudi Arabia was not how I expected the summer to go

He used to be a *lot* worse. Think he has cleaned up his act a bit now but still occasionally see the tweets where he's quote tweeting utter crap. The sad thing is that he's still far from the worst (probably one of the best, even) of the way too many aggregators on Villa Twitter. That wooden spoon goes to AVFC The Religion, I think.

He got started a few years back by being a fake ITK, and had a tendency to be quite aggressive towards others when called out on it. Gave up once someone DM'd him and baited him into saying that we were after Bednarek and became an aggregator (not sure why there needs to be more aggregators than Villareport, tbh). As an aggregator, he tends to use quotes very selectively (or get them outright wrong) and has a habit of using bad sources, presumably for interactions. Often he'll do it 'subtly' by quote tweeting a source he knows is complete crap and saying something along the lines of saying "This says XYZ". Can't stand him.

YES. YES. YES. YES. VERY GOOD.

Faithful's smooth transition from an ITK who got busted (IIRC he got Bednarek'd. IYKYK) to a discount Villareport will never not be odd. TBF, I suppose the only difference between Twitter ITK and Twitter aggregator is putting the source in brackets at the end. For the obligatory on topic discussion, I find it curious that we've been linked to both Diaby and Johnson. I know there'll be quite a big exodus of attackers but I wonder if it's one or the other. If it's both, I wonder how they'll fit in the same team (I know we're trying to build a squad, but you don't sign a bunch of £40m+ players at our level with the intention of not playing them in the sheer majority of games)