timeEd32

I'm with you on that. I think we'll be open to selling Anderson at the right price, but we need him to come back and have a good audition in the last few months for that to work out. I think that's our ideal upgrade path. Otherwise, Bruno is the domino and I lean towards him staying.

Everyone really needs to remember that we are bargain hunting. Some of these players aren't the most exciting, but they'd all be decent additions at the right price. McTominay seemed to be on the outside looking in at Man Utd. He would have been a useful addition for ~£20m. We got quoted something ridiculous and thus didn't buy him. Everton gets threatened with a second points deduction that would put their PL status in jeopardy = we ask about Onana. Again, at the right price it's a good addition.

He's obviously a bit nuts, but his number of bookings would be pretty normal if not for the stretch from Luton to City. Not surprisingly that coincides with our lowest and most tired point.

I wonder if Villa Talk has done 20 pages on how Emery’s training methods endanger knee ligaments.

We should explore free transfers more for sure, as long as the wages aren’t obscene. No interest in selling Joelinton for what we’d likely get for him.

Villa have won two games since Dec. 22, both against promoted sides D - Sheff Utd L - Man Utd W - Burnley D - Everton L - Newcastle W - Sheff Utd L - Man Utd Their next three games are huge - Fulham (a), Forest (h), Luton (a). After that they have 11 games left that includes City, Arsenal, Spurs, Liverpool, Chelsea, West Ham, Brighton.

Then they should have voted no and the whole thing falls apart. I’m irrationally annoyed about those two just letting it go through with 12 votes

Rooting for a draw here I think.

Villa and Palace abstained like cowards.

We started the season with 6 midfielders plus Miley. Willock was already hurt, which wasn’t ideal, but I have a hard time placing too much blame there.

I agree 5th is probably too far unless we’re blessed on the injury front the rest of the way (wouldn’t bet on it) and someone else has it bad. That said… Everyone from 3rd to 11th still have to play City, except for us. Everyone from 4th to 10th still have to play Liverpool, except for us. Liverpool, City, Arsenal, Villa, West Ham, and Brighton have extra European games. Villa still play the entire top 11 (except us). Points will be dropped all around us.

The one time he comes off his line he gets caught in no man’s land.

Abstaining from a critical vote because his feelings were hurt in the last one.

I can definitely understand the anger towards him about the new deal ignoring streamers. Peacock paid $110m to get one NFL playoff game this season. It was just announced Amazon is paying more than that to get one next year. Apple and Amazon would have been ready to spend big. Other than that, almost everything else he’s done (or not done) feels like it can be explained by the fact he’s just a puppet for the whims of three or four clubs.

I've said this before, but this is the other problem with a lot of this. The margins are so fine. The week we ran ourselves into the ground we were literally three minutes away from one of our most famous wins ever and we'd almost certainly still be in Europe had we won that game. Someone will respond saying they should have scored 3 or 4, but I don't really care. By hook or by crook we had three points until an awfully questionable penalty. Then we were 30 minutes away from staying in the Champions League anyway, with 20 minutes left prevented from re-taking the lead by a spectacular save that still needed help from the crossbar, and then less than 10 minutes from the Europa League. Maybe that goes differently had we rested against Man United, Everton, or Spurs but we have no idea. And we almost did it anyway. And then @The College Dropout thinks we should have rested in the LC and I'm pretty sure said this without the benefit of hindsight. It's a perfectly reasonable stance. But again we were two minutes from another LC semifinal before an individual error. Very possible we'd be planning another trip to Wembley had that not happened. The fact that all of this went the wrong way makes everything else - Everton, Spurs, Luton, Forest - seem far worse. While not ideal, disappointing league performances would be a lot easier to take with Wembley and/or European knockouts on the horizon.

True, I guess the two-thirds part is more significant than the 14 even though both are mentioned.

That doesn’t make sense. The two abstentions should be effectively no votes.

The problem I have with this whole debate is it kind of glosses over two things: 1) Players were forced to play earlier because of freak injuries, so you can still point to bad luck. If Tonali (Ashworth MI5 blame aside), Anderson, or Longstaff had been available at various points then Joelinton gets more time. If Barnes and Murphy are fit then Gordon could a) rest and b) give Wilson and Isak more time. 2) The logical conclusion if you say we should have still not brought them back is that would have been effectively conceding games along the way. I would have been ok with us doing that at Spurs given what came before and Milan after. But I also know what this thread would have looked like if we got embarrassed with a glorified U23 side. And one game wouldn’t have been enough. So what else are you giving up? - 3 points against Man United? “Why are we giving points to a rival?” - Risking Fulham at home? “Losing every game in a month is inexcusable” - The LC at Chelsea “Eddie’s throwing away trophies. It’s the Ashley era all over.” - The derby? “He just doesn’t get it. Eddie out.” The fact is only winning every game prevents moaning about something.

At least in some cities I’m pretty sure these will be the hardest WC tickets ever even with there being more games.

I think people are forgetting how dire it got. Coming out of an international break in late November we played the following games with these benches: Chelsea home: Dubravka, Karius, Gillespie, Ritchie, Dummett, A. Murphy, Ndiweni, Diallo, Parkinson 3 days later... PSG away: Dubravka, Karius, Dummett, Hall, Huntley, Ndiweni, Parkinson 4 days later... Man United home: Dubravka, Karius, Ritchie, Dummett, Krafth, Hall, A. Murphy, Diallo, Parkinson 5 days later... Everton away: Karius, Gillespie, Dummett, Hall, Krafth, Ritchie, A. Murphy, Diallo, Parkinson 3 days later... Spurs away: Karius, Gillespie, Dummett, A. Murphy, Krafth, Ritchie, Hall, Longstaff, Wilson ---------- We played 5 games in 15 days against mostly good teams with a 'break glass in case of emergency only' type of bench. We also lost our goalkeeper in the middle of that stretch, which I think we're all realizing is probably an even bigger loss than originally feared. We had exactly 11 genuine first team players give their all for almost 300 minutes of football in a week and then we paid the price for it for a month. The six games we had to play in the next 21 days off the back of this have defined our season to this point -- we went out of Europe, we went out of the League Cup, and we had our worst run in the league with losses to Luton and Forest.

The connections David Dein, Irving Scholar, and Martin Edwards had to the NFL have been pretty well documented and it did not go unnoticed in the early 1980s when the NFL signed a multi-billion $ TV deal and the leaders of English football were squabbling over a multi-million £ deal. The idea of Monday Night Football was obviously a straight rip-off and part of Sky's first Premier League deal, but so was the one club, one vote model. Hillsborough was certainly a forcing function on the redevelopment of stadiums, but it really started before then: Dein referencing seeing the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s: "That was an eye-opener. I understood that was how a sport should be run. The way they marketed it - it was more than 90 minutes of football, it was an event. This was a family sport, good outlets, you could get a decent meal. Even the toilets were good." Also Dein: "I felt football was really a sleeping giant and had a long way to go. After seeing how the Americans operated their sport, particularly American football and baseball and basketball, I felt we were light years behind." Scholar referring to the NFL in the mid-'80s: "In terms of the commercial attraction, it was amazing. You could see the future."

Not really on the field (except for maybe VAR, though that's inspired by many sports). But everything else from stadium development (luxury suites, wide concourses, food, screens) to mascots (the stupid, fuzzy kind; not kids) and, most importantly, TV rights deals and extracting maximum value from broadcasters.

Are the cups for the women all separated by division?

They've been trying (and have been) replicating parts of the NFL for three decades.

You're just moving the goalposts now. You said: "It's the system did you not see early in the season we had all our big guns playing and we were still getting cut to ribbons." There's no basis for that comment or this "last year we kind of got away with it to a point" considering we had the second best defensive record in the league behind only the best team in the world.