The Randy Lerner thread

[Ingram85]

For all the grief he gets, for all the ego, Stan is absolutely spot on yet again and if given the chance, despite his self interest, he would help as much as he could.

 

[maqroll]

Lerner the Coward

[coda]

He was just getting slagged off on 5Live  They then suggested Pearson for manager 

[The Fun Factory]

On 4/1/2016 at 10:21, sne said:

 

If only...

Who is Keyser Soze?

[Zatman]

Im not a fan of Randy but I think the gutlessness of our players is actually worse than the owner at the moment. Granted they are in a way connected as he refused to give the manager cash but some of the salaries to performance ratio are an absolute disgrace

he is behind some of the players in people I hate at Villa

[a m ole]

1 hour ago, The Fun Factory said:

Who is Keyser Soze?

Can he play upfront?

[ozvillafan]

10 hours ago, a m ole said:

Can he play upfront?

Better not miss him with a pass when his back is turned.

[ozvillafan]

Quote

Aston Villa's recent sacking of a second manager this season epitomised what has been a truly horrible season for a once proud club but, with relegation looming, their troubles go far deeper than this campaign's disaster.

Not long ago Jeff Stelling’s quick review of Aston Villa’s awful season on Sky Sports went viral.

The frustration among fans of what has to be one of the most underachieving clubs in world football is entirely understandable. They are former European champions based in England’s second most populous city, that in 2014-2015 had one of the highest wage bills in the English Premier League.

Yet the temptation to come to quick conclusions needs to be avoided and thinking that the club’s current position is simply down to some average signings and manager sacking/appointment is missing the real cause.

Villa’s problems are far deeper then the decision’s that led to the on-field calamity, instead it is down to a series of bad decisions over a prolonged period.

It’s for that reason that the cause of this once great club’s gradual collapse is more likely due to poor organisational culture.

That issue starts at the top and a quick look at who is ultimately in charge of the club would lead the Mythbusters to suggest “there’s your problem”.

That person is American owner Randy Lerner, who before taking over the club from ex-chairman Doug Ellis was the owner at NFL side Cleveland Browns (from 2002-2012).

This video of a Browns fan bemoaning his side’s constant poor on-field performance may be all too familiar for Villa supporters.

Now Lerner-less, Cleveland appear to be moving away from a culture that has led to them being described as the worst 'franchise' in American professional sport.

Villa,however, still seem stuck in old ways, with the departure of Remi Garde the latest in a long line of debacles on the Villa Park bench, even going back to the decision to renew Paul Lambert’s contract three matches into a season after battling relegation in the prior campaign.

Tim Sherwood might be a master motivator but he struggled tactically and with a squad lacking experience at the highest level, the combination proved disastrous.

It’s impossible to tell if Garde could have been a success, considering he never really had the backing required to do so - the lack of much-needed squad reinforcements in the transfer window was a case in point.

The heart of the problem was that the Frenchman was signed without a clear idea of how the bosses wanted the side to play and, more importantly, how to fulfill the needs of Birmingham's football-loving public.

While Aston Villa have strong support among the region's older population, England’s second-city is one of the youngest and most diverse in Europe and connecting with this group is vital for the club’s off-field success.

To do so they need to play a style of football that appeals to the city's burgeoning youth population, as well as their established fan base. This should form the basis for the club's underpinning philosophy and drive organisational culture.

Barcelona is a great example of how the club’s identity leads to a strong culture and then guides decision making, on and off the field.

Villa have recently restructured the organisation but without a complete overhaul in club culture a once mighty club will continue to languish in the doldrums.

Link: http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/blog/2016/04/05/aston-villas-troubles-go-far-deeper-field-disaster

[TRO]

A good article written by daniel davies in the "fan blog" on page 37 of the Birmingham mail.

check it out

[Spoony]

On 4/4/2016 at 01:06, Zatman said:

Im not a fan of Randy but I think the gutlessness of our players is actually worse than the owner at the moment. Granted they are in a way connected as he refused to give the manager cash but some of the salaries to performance ratio are an absolute disgrace

he is behind some of the players in people I hate at Villa

Agreed. Most of my hate and disgust is reserved for the players for the time being.

[PussEKatt]

Its Lerner with his "get rid of the high earners" policy.I mean, who are the high earners ?

The best players, so his policy is to get rid of the best players.Well we did that and got rid of the best and guess what ? the rest are not good enough. 

[maqroll]

I truthfully wonder if Lerner doesn't fully understand the concept of relegation or it's ramifications. What a **** clown.

[Villarocker]

Maqroll, that is such a terrible thing to say! Surely, just because the man is a billionaire, he can be forgiven for thinking that because our game is also called "football" he assumed the rules were the same as in America - bottom place means no relegation! 

[avfc1982]

When and if we are relegated today and you want to vent your anger at the players please don't forget the real reason we've finally become a Championship club after 6 seasons of humiliations. That sole reason is Randy Lerner. It is he that has caused our demise and him alone. Please aim your criticisms at that disgrace of a man. I curse the day he ever stepped foot into our great club. 

Shame on you, Randy Lerner. 

[sne]

9 minutes ago, avfc1982 said:

When and if we are relegated today and you want to vent your anger at the players please don't forget the real reason we've finally become a Championship club after 6 seasons of humiliations. That sole reason is Randy Lerner. It is he that has caused our demise and him alone. Please aim your criticisms at that disgrace of a man. I curse the day he ever stepped foot into our great club. 

Shame on you, Randy Lerner. 

Don't know why but I instantly thought of this quote from Dazed and Confused:

"Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."    

 

[chrisp65]

If he's got any last strand of interest I'd like to think he'll be present today. You know, as the owner that has just made a little bit of the history he is so proud of.

Then after the game, over to E4 to be on an episode of Tattoo Fixers.

'yeah, I got drunk and I had this sort of football lion done, but now I'm more in to jigsaws and staying home...'

[chrisp65]

So it looks like two americans might be about to take a controlling interest in Swansea City for £100 million. The Supporters' Trust will retain their 21% stake in the club.

The buyers are Stephen Kaplan, NBA Memphis Grizzlies and Jason Levien, of MLS DC United.

If only there had been some way we could have networked with americans interested in sports teams. I guess we had nobody here with those sorts of connections.

Nobody that wasn't incompetent and disinterested anyway. 

[villa4europe]

they both have experience of sports teams, levien a lot of different teams, seems like he amde his money buying and selling teams

thing is neither of them own a business from what i can see, so neither of them can play the FFP game, they might be able to bring investors in, sponsorship contacts etc but there doesnt seem to be anyone who knows how much either of them are actually worth and no suggestion that they'll pile a load of money in to the club or try and do anything other than be part of the happy to be here brigade and profit from the tv money

[Demitri_C]

Quote

Let bean counters call all the shots and the numbers will never add up

Aston Villa are set to be playing Championship football next season. Villa sacked the statistics specialist who oversaw their transfer policy.

Aston Villa, Newcastle, the Philadelphia 76ers. This is what happens when the numbers don’t add up. Relegation, ruination, and in the case of Philadelphia an act of sabotage so spectacularly misguided it beggars belief.

Hendrik Almstadt, the statistics specialist overseeing a doomed transfer policy, was sacked last month as Villa slid towards the Championship. Newcastle owner Mike Ashley is realising too late that to build a squad based on its resale value has an inbuilt fault a mile wide. Players who arrived on the promise of a lucrative move to a Champions League club are now wedded to a relegation battle, and plainly have no appetite for it.

And the 76ers? Well, this is the ultimate story of analytics gone mad. The tale of an NBA franchise that set out to become deliberately bad as a way of getting better — because that is what the numbers dictated. 

The architect of this lunacy, Sam Hinkie, general manager of the 76ers, resigned last Wednesday to end three years of chaos. This really has been another fine week for the burgeoning field of number crunching.

A graduate of Stanford Business School, Hinkie was recruited in 2013 from a similar position at the Houston Rockets. There, he earned a reputation as a champion of advanced statistical basketball analytics. It was this knowledge, it was hoped, he would bring to Philadelphia.

When Hinkie arrived the 76ers were a mediocre franchise. They had finished ninth of 15 in the 2012-13 Eastern Conference, missing out on the play-offs by a place. The previous year they made the Conference semi-finals, but lost to Boston Celtics. The 76ers were OK, but well short of the NBA’s strongest teams. Hinkie, however, was a man who thought he had the answers. As a way of building a 76ers team that could compete with the best, his analytical brain came up with a cunning plan: he decided to tank.

We sometimes hear, in this country, about the punitive cost of relegation. American owners, in particular, are often appalled at the consequences of a poor season. Relegation from the Premier League, the Championship, and certainly League Two can have savage financial repercussions. The Premier League award parachute payments to relegated clubs for two seasons as a means of compensation.

Yet Hinkie’s blueprint for the 76ers shows exactly why relegation will always be preferable to the closed shop.

In the NBA players are drafted before the start of each season and the weakest teams from the previous campaign get higher picks in the draft. The intention is to make the strong teams weaker, and the weak teams stronger, ensuring competition. Yet it also means that weakness becomes a tactical method of recruiting better players. 

Hinkie thought that the 76ers could never be true contenders simply building on what they had. They needed to completely overhaul the squad with new players. So to gain an advantageous position in the draft, he made them worse. By his warped logic, good players were holding the team back.

The year Hinkie arrived, point guard Jrue Holiday was the 76ers’ best performer. He was traded. The next year it was power forward Thaddeus Young. He was traded, too. Hinkie’s 11th draft pick in 2013, Michael Carter-Williams, another point guard, worked brilliantly, and somehow won the NBA’s Rookie of the Year. Immediately, he was traded.

And one part of Hinkie’s plan worked. The 76ers went from winning 34 games the season before he arrived to 19 in his first campaign and 18 the year after. The tanking was going brilliantly. Good players were replaced by the young, the inexperienced and the downright lousy. Yet where was the upturn?

This season the 76ers have won 10 games from 79, fewer than half the number of victories of any team in the Eastern Conference, and six less than the poorest team in the Western Conference. They will be well placed in the draft again — but who would want to come to Hinkie’s crazy world of bogus thoughts, theories and numbers?

The management also grew tired of waiting for the leap forward. So Hinkie quit with a 7,000-word letter sent to the 76ers’ majority and minority owners, plus chairman Jerry Colangelo, brought in last year to help oversee a project that had clearly spun out of control. 

The parting address was weapons-grade gibberish. It contained sub-headings such as ‘Thinking about thinking’, ‘A larger quiver’ and ‘Be long science’. It contained references to Abraham Lincoln, Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck and an extinct flightless bird native to New Zealand, called the moa. In Hinkie’s mind it was no doubt intended to cement his visionary status; the great contrarian, whose resignation letter cited James Clerk Maxwell, formulator of electromagnetic radiation theory. Great minds and all that.

In reality, Hinkie quit because his nonsensical concepts failed, and he didn’t like the owners bringing in Colangelo, an old-school executive who wished Hinkie to be shunted out towards responsibility for statistics and no more. In other words, he wanted to be more than just a number.

Yet that is what analytics reduces sport to: figures and equations, none of which can ever factor in the many human variables. Some of Hinkie’s draft picks got injured, others couldn’t forge the necessary relationship on court. It is not an exact science, as they are finding out at football clubs from Brentford — fifth in the Championship last season under Mark Warburton, currently 13th now he has left and an analytics-based model has its full say — to the Doomsday project that is Aston Villa, and also Newcastle.

‘You can be right for the wrong reasons,’ rambled Hinkie, ‘you can be wrong for the right reasons…’ — and that’s handy because then it is all about process, not outcome. Yet Hinkie was wrong. The fate of the 76ers confirms it, the Eastern Conference standings back it up and his resignation letter is the final proof. Hinkie took 7,000 words to admit he stuffed up. Now analyse that.

Aston Villa will enter the Championship next season with a nice new badge. The previous one did not perform well in some digital applications, apparently — as if that should have been anywhere on Villa’s list of priorities this season.

It is an indictment of Villa’s executive management that in 2016 more was spent on the performance of the badge, than the performance of the team. The cost of the redesign itself is £80,000, of making the changes that result from the redesign nearer £2million. Villa, meanwhile, spent nothing in the January transfer window.

In this digital age, falling out of the Premier League is increasingly like falling off the map and Villa’s usage in digital applications will be adjusted accordingly. User-friendly or not, the new lion rampant will be seen more rarely than its predecessor. As part of the redesign, the word ‘Prepared’ has disappeared, too. That is ironic. Any team as poorly run as Villa should be more than prepared for the events that follow.

Interesting Read

[Grasshopper]

Why Oh why do people make comparisons between USA sports & Football?

USA sports are franchises that operate on a system that is far away from a "Fan based/Location- catchment area supported/TV marketed throughout the world" football league.

As bad as Lerner ran CB's he still made money because its all about selling Hamburgers and stupid sports where only the first 10 mins or the last 10mins count.

Its a family picnic day out where you can witness up to and over 100pts/kicks/throws and other brain dead happenings.

American sports <-> Corperate America works

Football <-> Corperate America/Moneyball/Franchise/Draft and F***Knows what else Doesn't.

Lerner Out - never again Corperate America for AVFC