The Randy Lerner thread

[StanBalaban]

Upon reflection (no pun intended) that might be a kitchenette, not a bathroom.

The willy waving still might have happened though.

[Kingman]

My Dad had those seat covers on his old Austin Princess 

[dounavilla]

If you zoom into the laptop screen you can almost make out Ashley Young.

[osmark86]

1 hour ago, StanBalaban said:

Upon reflection (no pun intended) that might be a kitchenette, not a bathroom.

The willy waving still might have happened though.

The stories those mirrors could tell..

[StanBalaban]

[a m ole]

2 hours ago, StanBalaban said:

had the opportunity to put football manager on the laptop and didn't... 4/10

[maqroll]

 word removed

 

[AJ]

13 hours ago, StanBalaban said:

Yeah not too shabby.

Here's the outside and the bathroom.

Just think, Randy Lerner's probably* waved his willy in that mirror.

 

*probably not 

Just what you need to make kick off at Villa Park....oh wait

[PussEKatt]

Has it passed its MOT ?

[Ooh-Ah]

Just stumbled upon this video which I liked on YouTube five years ago. The Browns fans continue to comment "still relevant". It's still relevant to us too. Cheers Randy!

Edited April 25, 2016 by Ooh-Ah

[Gary Thomas]

Blog in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/apr/22/aston-villa-charlton-athletic-owners-relegated

Quote

Aston Villa and Charlton: two clubs contorted by a new style of disastrous ownership

Charlton and Villa fans have seen their clubs suffer the consequences of owners who are bad in new and innovative ways; bad in a way that frankly makes no real sense for anyone.

Gore Vidal, who had a good line about most things, was famously droll on the subject of US presidential candidates. “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically be disqualified from ever doing so,” Vidal observed, with his usual pitch of skewed, drawling hyper-irony. It is a point that might equally have applied down the years to anyone wanting to own an English football club. As high-risk commercial ambitions go this one has never really made much sense. Outside the real elite, football clubs are still right up there with airlines or a particularly decadent 1970s record label when it comes to mechanisms for losing lots of money very quickly. The puzzle remains. Why would any non-mad, non-corrupt business person actually want to do this?  It is a question that might seem particularly poignant to fans of Charlton Athletic and Aston Villa as the season thrashes towards its end point. Both clubs were relegated this week. Both are contorted by supporter unrest. Both face major losses. Both give the impression of having been hollowed out from the inside, one in a rush, one over time, by a new style of disastrous, long-range speculative ownership.

Football never stands still. New forms, new tropes emerge. There have been shadier, more abusive owners than the wretched Roland Duchâtelet and the decent but distant Randy Lerner. But the fact remains, even as Lerner creeps closer to finally selling Villa, that here English football has found a pair of owners who aren’t just bad judged against the traditional sweaty incompetents, or the standards of some impossibly virtuous fan-collective ideal. But bad instead in new and innovative ways; bad in a way that frankly makes no real sense for anyone.

Consider for a moment Duchâtelet’s progress at Charlton. Has there ever been a more chaotic, self-destructive two-year spell of ownership? It really shouldn’t be that hard to make Charlton work, a homely old suburban club that was fanned into life by the late-Victorian spread of prosperity east along the railway lines, and which in the golden years either side of the second world war could draw the biggest crowds in the country. Hard times have come and gone. By the mid-1980s The Valley was a concrete ruin, with weeds blooming up between your feet through the cracks on the terraces. But jump to 2004 and Charlton were finishing seventh in the Premier League, hovering around the Champions League spots right up until the moment Chelsea decided to put a stop to all that by plucking out Scott Parker. Duchâtelet bought the club in January 2014 through Staprix NV, “an investment vehicle with several football-related interests”. An entrepreneur, populist politician and mild oddball, he owns a syndicate of smallish clubs across Europe. Clearly he made some kind of sense to Richard Murray, the club’s longstanding chairman. At which point: enter sandman. In 28 months of Duchâtelet-flavoured weirdness Charlton have burned through five managers. The current braying-donkey regime, with its cast of pressed men and passers-by has won 18 of 70 matches played. Last month Duchâtelet released a statement defending the club’s chief executive, Katrien Meire, who had compared the club’s fans with cinema viewers and restaurant goers, who don’t “scream to the people in charge” if they’re unhappy with the customer service. The home defeat by Derby County last weekend brought huge protests outside the ground, with people dressed as Bedouin holding inflatable palm trees, a slightly confusing reference to the chief exec’s recent 10-day holiday in Dubai. The Coalition Against Roland Duchâtelet is planning another massive turnout around Saturday’s home game against Brighton. More than anything else, it is all bafflingly pointless, good news for nobody. Not least the owner who has scarcely been glimpsed on club property, and who has through a combination of basic mistakes – alienating supporters, enacting some half-baked inter-league player franchise plan – transformed a happy south London middleweight into a wild, miserable place desperate to free itself from the grip of a semi-detached speculator.

Which brings us back to Lerner, an equally confusing if much more sympathetic figure. Lerner’s real failing appears to be naivety. He got into this for the right reason. He backed his managers, in the early years at least. And yet he remains arguably the least successful owner in Premier League history. Lerner bought Villa with his own money. Ten years down the line the club has cost him £350m, in return for which he’s been relegated, seen his fortune drained and generally been portrayed as a mysterious, sulky overseas refusenik. And so here we are: job losses, a crippling Championship wage bill, a club captain who raises the question of what exactly a footballer has to to get sacked around here. Someone’s not really been paying attention here, have they Randy old boy? Lerner is not a bad man. Personally I hope he gets a good price for the club, moves on, salvages some happy memories never goes near a sports “franchise again. He is simply bad at bad at being a tycoon, and bad at running Aston Villa. This is the real nub. You get the owners you deserve, As a society we have made the decision to submit to the market, to say pretty much anyone can own pretty much anything, the only regulating forces demand, supply and finance. This argument says football clubs are not in any real sense community assets (communities themselves are old hat) but commodities like anything else. To complain that we’re not happy unregulated markets attract both desirable investors and incompetent chancers is a bit like leaving the doors and windows open and then bursting into tears when someone walks off wth your television. This is the problem with neo-liberal economics. Lerner may have come to Villa as a rich kid born with a silver sports franchise in his mouth, unloved at the Cleveland Browns, an investor with the slightly unnerving air of a 1980s digital watch tycoon who wants to talk to you about his aura. His failure at Villa may have been hugely damaging. Duchâtelet may in retrospect look like a rather dangerous entrepreneurial uber-capitalist with some funny ideas.

But there is nothing in English law or in football regulation to stop any of these people buying up that embedded infrastructure of clubs and grounds and generational ties and acting as they will. To offer protection, in the style of the German league, would be to perform some unacceptable act, the ultimate crime of corrupting or perverting the market. And so here we are, two grand old clubs thrashing about hoping for the right kind of buyout next time, the right kind of gambler, the right kind of monied weirdo. As ever it will be supporters, those whose lives are bound up in that funny old unconditional love who will fight the worst of it. Perhaps with some proper regulation, a little unashamed protectionism, we could all decide to give them a hand one of these days.

[PussEKatt]

Sounds like he could be the person that is buying us 

[Ginko]

If Guardian bloggers (who don't proofread their work) are paid that well then I best get on it.

[Richard]

lerner you utter cockwobble word removed

[Phumfeinz]

I dreamt last night that Randy Lerner took to the pitch to give a trophy to somebody called Andy McClean, the boos were terrific.

[dounavilla]

1 hour ago, Phumfeinz said:

I dreamt last night that Randy Lerner took to the pitch to give a trophy to somebody called Andy McClean, the boos were terrific.

They were Terrific , I was there.

[The Fun Factory]

I am just flicking through some old programmes. Here is one- versus Portsmouth on the 8th of December 2007. So about 8 and a half years ago. Some much has changed.

Then we had positivity and excitement. You could pay £10 to £13 to watch Villa play live in the North stand. We had a new badge and kit deal. We had a respected manager and appeared to be going places with a young ambitious owner.The previous 4 matches at Villa Park all had crowds above 40,000. Now next season Villa Park's capacity will not even be at 40,000. It is heartbreaking to remember how exciting it was to watch the Villa then to now forcing yourself to watch a awful side lose at home virtually every time.

Just thinking about it- how have we gone from that to this shambles in less than a decade? How?

But then look at Pompey- now in League Two. So it can get a hell of a lot worse but at least they have got their soul back by the fans owning the club.

Lerner out.

Edited April 27, 2016 by The Fun Factory

[terrytini]

Yeah but if that's the game I'm thinking about we were crap and one of their guys scored twice and the only fun was abusing Harry Redknapp.  So all that could still happen next year, have hope.

[Straggler]

If it is indeed true that we are up for sale for 40 odd million it is the clearest indicator yet just how hopeless Lerner is. He has sunk hundreds of millions into the club whilst in real terms halving the value of it. It is so spectacular that you imagine a deliberate act of malice would be less effective. He isn't going to get back 10% of the money he has invested and he has earned every penny.

His relatives must be so ashamed of him.

 

[sne]

2 hours ago, Straggler said:

If it is indeed true that we are up for sale for 40 odd million it is the clearest indicator yet just how hopeless Lerner is. He has sunk hundreds of millions into the club whilst in real terms halving the value of it. It is so spectacular that you imagine a deliberate act of malice would be less effective. He isn't going to get back 10% of the money he has invested and he has earned every penny.

His relatives must be so ashamed of him.