wishywashy

Spanish media reporting that it's completely done now. Hola, Monchi.

Not even that, but that we are one of the interested parties!

https://www.premierleague.com/news/3537139 Shakpoke probably the surprise in there. Shame about the injuries.

Actually groaned

Don't think Monchi's haircuts are particularly complex sadly

Twente conceded a grand total of 6 goals in 20 games last season (and somehow still didn't win the league, despite also scoring 81 goals in those 20 games). Dominant.

Are you trying to tell us that AVFC The Religion doesn't have their finger on the pulse? Just check out this great exclusive they uncovered today.

Sure they do. First you need to click the 'Make an Offer' button on a player that looks good, put in a bid that goes near enough his estimated value with a lot of instalments, press 'Suggest Terms' and repeat a few times until the bubble goes green and they accept, then press 'Finalise Offer' and do the same with the player once they enter contracts talks. Once that's all done, Emery will get an email in about 5 days saying that the player has agreed and they just need to click the 'Confirm' button. And just like that, the transfer's sorted. Not sure why football clubs find it so difficult.

They're on the verge of appointing Tim Steidten from Leverusken

I believe that's the case in Spanish football regardless: Emery was the one who paid his own release clause, for example. This will be subsidised by the club. My impression from dodgy Google Translated articles is that there has been a 600k fee put on top of the 2.5m release clause for Sevilla to waive the 3-month waiting period. We've given Monchi that extra money and in turn this will be accounted for in his contract.

4 year contract with 6m euros per year in salary.

Salary doubled, apparently.

Clause will be paid and his departure to Villa is imminent bar final details, per Matteo Moretto.

How

Monchi just has left another Sevilla meeting after a few minutes. He got a parking ticket while he was in there. I wish I was kidding.

Who works for El Chiringuito, the Spanish equivalent of TalkS****

I think it's safe to say that Monchi will leave Sevilla, as the working relationship between him and the board seem to be in tatters now. But the contract is allegedly pretty complicated.

Heck solely uses 'President' to describe his role on Twitter (@chrisheck76), rather than President of Business Operations. Doesn't particularly mean much, but I think it's a tad interesting. Also, Chelsea also appointed a similar "President of Business" when Boehly (lol) took over. He left a few weeks ago after Chelsea appointed a CEO, but there were circumstances/sensitive incidents in play that may have led to his departure.

Politicians in the making! Jokes(?) aside, I agree entirely. Some right weird people out there. It's a shame because once you mute the dozens of accounts on Villa Twitter that do nothing but spout/spread lies it's a pretty alright place.

A huge number of people on Football Twitter are young teenagers/children. The majority of these fake "ITKs" are without a doubt just attention-seeking kids. Frankly, for their sake, they better be: sadly, there are some who are definitely grown adults. It's annoying, because once in a while you do just get people who are lucky enough to know a thing or two (like the Leicester fan who knew Tielemans' wife), and once in a blue moon you have people who are actually ITK. I think Everton have a guy on Twitter who knows their stuff.

Thank you! Here's more. I think the general rule of thumb is that journalists who focus on a club/region (with the exception of the Birmingham Mail) are usually more reliable than 'generalist' ones (bar Ornstein/Romano). If you're a journalist who's got a high-level relationship with people at a club, making stuff up is a fast track to breaking that relationship very, very quickly. I think it's easy with Villa as you have the likes of Collomosse, Percy, Gregg and Maher who quite evidently have a pretty close relationship with the club, so they're not going to make crap up anytime soon. Gregg in particular has been good lately. He gets a lot of flak (which at times may have been justified, particularly when he was working for the Brum M*il) and he clearly errs on the side of caution but the fact that he published a news article about Purslow's departure simultaneously with the club announcement and then one of his long-form pieces barely an hour later further confirms that he's very close to the club. His speciality isn't even transfer news anyway but long-form, almost biographical articles. It's harder when it comes to non-English speaking media as any news (even if it ends up being legit) won't be leaked by our recruitment team/management but the other teams (if it is true at all). Combined with the generally less professional and reliable approaches within the likes of Spanish football media/reduced knowledge on the track record and reliability that a foreign journo has, it's good practice to just take it with a heap of salt.

Tbf it's more than likely that most of these links are just downright fabrications for players we have zero interest in. 24/7 football social media journalism is an extremely oversaturated market and there are way too many journalists out there who are doing nothing but making crap up that sounds relatively feasible enough. Kone is 100% one of these: one look at our squad and it makes absolutely zero sense, given how we're arguably overloaded on CMs, so there's a very good chance that it's just fabricated nonsense: especially as it hasn't been done by Collomosse but a generic Mail journo. Us, Brighton and Newcastle get these sort of nonsensical links a lot due to our status as knocking on the door of elites. Another example is, Ugarte: not a single Villa journalist with an ounce of reliability said that we were interested in him. Portuguese media strung out this whole saga between us and Spurs for weeks, while it turned out to be Chelsea and PSG! I think a good tell to spot whether a journalist is unreliable and clearly making crap up is (other than the likes of Ornstein/Fabrizio) if they mysteriously have contacts that allow them to have information about transfers all over Europe. Unless you're at the top that's just not how it works. Bonus points if they never actually break exclusives themselves but coincidentally manage to obtain and publish additional 'information' about transfer links an hour/two after they're first broke. I'm looking at Konur and a loooot of Spanish outlets. Buzz phrases that actually mean nothing like "keeping tabs on" or "monitoring" is another big one, as it's a great way to link a club to a player without actually committing to anything. Compare the ruckus and the noise of the players linked this summer to the one deal that we actually got done this window: Tielemans. Other than the actual ITK who knew Tieleman's wife (which is quite a rare circumstance which a recruitment team can't account for), there was nothing more than a Gregg link a week before the signing and an Ornstein confirmation 30 minutes before it was officially announced. The media process for the deals that we actually get done are like night and day compared to the noise.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/aston-villa-beat-tottenham-complete-27112130