mayubeproud

If Aston Villa finishes 5th and wins the Europa League, then 6th would also qualify for UCL next season. With Chelsea dropping so many points this season, it should be easy......

If we didn't face Chelsea in March, who is in even more horrible form than us, we would be on 39 points now and not safe yet.

Conspiracy theory: their owner hates Chelsea - Bought loads of overvalued players for no reason - Sacked Tuchel and hired a mid-table manager in Graham Potter - When Potter is inevitably sacked, hired an even more incompetent Lampard and results got even worse - When Lampard is also sacked, hired Pochettino, who didn't have a job for more than half of the previous 4 years, but Poch proved he can still do a decent job and the team showed encouraging signs of revival. In order to curb their reemergence, they decided to sack Poch for apparently no reason. - Then they hired Maresca, who never managed any teams in the top flight, but he did a very good job by getting back to UCL, winning the UECL and becoming the world champions. 'Disappointed' by their achievements, they decided to sack Maresca as well. - Hired Rosenior and he's doing a 'good' job now. Chelsea's arch rivals Fulham had many iconic American players, like Dempsey, McBride, Keller and Bocanegra. In contrast, the massive American talent of Christian Pulisic was wasted at Chelsea. Their American owners are secretly Fulham fans and tried every means to bottle Chelsea.

Some of our elite players like Gordon, Livramento not looking interested, refuse to run or lose concentration consistently. Some like Wissa and Willock doesn't really even give a shite. Botman shows no aggression as well. Most of our better player like Tonali, Gordon, Livramento likely looking to leave in the summer. All of them playing below their supposed level right now. Some of our high valued signings like Woltemade, Elanga look completely lost and have no confidence at all. Ramsey isn't much better. Even one of the leaders of our dressing room, Murphy was jogging back watching his LB to score a goal. The only players who are showing some fight as well as confidence are Burn, Hall, Bruno and Osula.

Regardless of how good or bad EH is, I think he isn't a good fit for us anymore, at least for the moment. Few, if any, of our players seem to trust, or full engaged in EH's tactics. Unless you do a complete rebuild, e.g. selling 15-20 players and buying the same number of players to replace them, which is completely impossible, I just can't give any logical explanation how his ideas would work. The only pragmatic approach is to get someone else asap.

I thought about that months ago. Get a new manager and some of them may undergo a Joelinton/Almiron/Murphy style revival. Ideally, doing that now may be the best timing. The new manager can have a month to work with the current squad and get to know the players, the players would also understand what will be happening next season, and we can know which players want to leave regardless of who the manager is, which players should be get rid of, and hence planning our transfers earlier. Otherwise, any new manager would have to wait until after WC to really train with the players at all.

I always scratch my head when the fans here seems to hate Nick. A lot of the times I see Nick being a better performer in the team but he still gets heavily criticized here. With Nick we can sometimes progress the ball vertically and create some real danger. Without Nick it is always sideway passes. That's the difference I can see watching our games.

I'm neutral about Mourinho. He won't be an upgrade over EH. I don't think he'll be disastrous either, if you look at his performance at Man Utd, Tottenham, Roma, Fernabache and Benfica, he has the tendency of performing roughly the same as his predecessors and successors. So he won't make any teams better, but he won't make them worse either. We'll probably need to look for another manager in 18-36 months though. If he is our manager, we'll get much more attention from the media regardless of his performance though, which could be a positive as we can broaden our fan base worldwide and improve on sponsorships and revenue.

Exactly what I think about. I wouldn't be too surprised if we randomly pick one of Iraola, Glasner or Marco Silva we'll see some improvements in the short term. That doesn't mean they're 'better' than Howe, and I can absolutely foresee us getting into similar trouble like now in the long run if we hire a 'mid-tier' manager. Getting rid of Howe now doesn't mean he'll never come back in the future. Many other famous managers returned to their former clubs and still get success, e.g. Ancelotti (Real Madrid), Zidane (Real Madrid), Heynckes (Bayern), Mourinho (Chelsea), Moyes (Everton/West Ham). Kevin Keegan also had a second spell with us, although it ended prematurely. Relieving EH of his pressures now could actually be good for him, so he can have the opportunity to step back and reflect, further improving his ability. EH and us have the special bonding and affection with each other, so as long as he is not hired by someone else, I would imagine it to be rather easy to bring him back if we want.

That would be animal abuse.

Tbf India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are never too interested about football. I think they like cricket more. China has a very large football fan base. A lot of Chinese follows the Premier League & Champions League week in, week out. They were once a powerhouse in Asian football but they have declined pretty badly in recent decades. Indonesia was mediocre in the past but they are catching up quickly in recent years. I think they are trying to lure talents from Netherlands to their NT due to some historical ties. Reijnders' brother is actually also playing for Indonesia's NT.

As a lad with Asian background I'm quite sure one of the motivation of this new format is to make it easier for China to qualify. China has a population of 1.4 billion so FIFA would probably earn more through TV broadcasts etc if China qualifies. Yet China is also too rubbish to qualify even with this format (sorry in advance if any Chinese feels unhappy about this comment)

I think there's still a slim chance of Iran withdrawing and FIFA decides to let the highest ranked team not to qualify (Italy) to replace them

Tons of random clubs have bigger global following than us. It reflects one thing that I feel disappointed with PIF since the takeover. Surely we can blame FFP/PSR for tying our hands in the transfer market, but there are other aspects like sponsorship, global fan base, infrastructure and academy that seem to have evolved very little after nearly 5 years. Looking back, I think PIF isn't very passionate about running the club. We are just one of their many projects and we are never their priority. Unlike Chelsea (under Abramovic), Man City or PSG in which these clubs are the flagship investments of their respective owners. So it just happens that we have a very rich owner who don't care about us too much. It is what it is, still much better than Mike Ashley anway......

Without Nick I almost never see us create anything through the middle. We can only resort to passing the ball to the wingers to hit an opportunistic cross into the box which is very predictable and ineffective. Sometimes it is sad that he is the only one on the pitch who really provided something through the middle and yet he is still being strongly criticized. And Murphy isn't in very good form this season (he was almost unstoppable last year which is hard to repeat), it makes things even worse, and I think this point is rarely being mentioned.

He was injured until December so it doesn't really make much difference if we signed a striker in January instead in hindsight. I don't know who we'll buy if that happens, possibly still Wissa? Or Strand Larsen again (he still cost Crystal Palace £48m, not much cheaper than the £55m rejected in summer)?

Btw I think Gordon is one of the players who only work hard occasionally. That being said, I think he has the right attitude and played very well in general in the last 2 months, which is good for us regardless of the reason. I suspect he only worked hard because he is worried about his place in England NT though, if he continued to play like what he did in the earlier part of this season, he may not even make it to the NT.

You can compare with this Newcastle team, where our expected points per game was almost always around 2.0 for about a year.

It could be an explanation for 23/24, but surely we never had any distraction of European football nor injury crisis of significance in 24/25. Yet you can see that the performance during that season was also inconsistent.

If I look at this graph I wouldn't be too optimistic tbh. We had one game a week in 24/25 and yet it was a mix of mediocre results for 2/3 of the season and 2 brief good runs. Same in the second half of 23/24 season, we were out of Europe in December and we didn't rediscover our form until March.

One point to add, a lot of the greatest managers prefer relationism (over positionism). It adapts to the evolution of the game better in general. Ferguson or Ancelotti for example, they never have a fixed "system" or formation, it's very hard to describe what type of football they play, but they simply always win with whatever players they get. Arsene Wenger to a great extent, although he wasn't as successful in his last 10 years, possibly down to his struggle in finding balance between freedom and discipline of the players. Managers who prefer positionism often have shorter period of success. Mourinho for example, he was very successful for about 10 years only. I don't think he is an extreme believer in positionism though, he sometimes blend relationism into his game, e.g. utilising Sneijer at Inter or Ozil at Real Madrid for creativity with success. So he is still somewhat relevant now, but never as successful as before. Rafa Benitez has even shorter period of success. Pep Guardiola seems to be an outlier, he clearly favours positionism. But as you said, Pep's "system" itself also evolves over time, and thus prolonging his period of relevance. His "syle" now is very different from his original Barca team. The conclusion is, if a manager's "system" is more rigid, his lifetime of success almost always tend to be shorter.

Real Madrid in this season is quite interesting btw. Alonso is good on paper, did a great job at Leverkusen, but he lost the dressing room at Bernabeu and it is clear that things wouldn't work. Then it comes Arbeloa. Everyone thought he is rubbish. Just Florentino Perez's puppet. Lost his first game to a team ranked #17 in the Segunda. Also lost to Benfica 2:4. And then slowly and suddenly fans at the Bernabeu start to have trust in him, he beat Mourinho, Pep and Simeone recently. Vini and Valverde are immense now, after they were booed by their own fans 2 months ago. Also got praised for giving chance to their B-team players.

One other thing about control, I think Howe's tendency to 'correct' players to fit into his system could set him back at times. This approach might work very well for average players. But for more talented players, giving them some degree of freedom may work better in unlocking their potentials. I always find this speech from Ancelotti inspiring:

It wasn't. We clearly peaked in 2023, where we can almost always expect about 2 points per game on average for about a year. Other than that, I do agree there seems to be some issues with the mentality of the players, as evident from this graph. Even in 24/25, without the distraction of European football and without a lot of injuries, we only had 2 short-term good runs. The players seemed only cared for about 1-2 months occasionally. It was a warning sign.

I used the data of expected points and plotted a graph of the 10-game moving average of xPts under EH. What would be your interpretation of this graph?