Summer 2025 Transfer Window - hopes, speculation, rumours etc.

[kippaxvilla2]

As long as Emery doesn’t walk to man united when the press click their fingers in the international break.

[cdbearsfan]

I don't know. I think our game is based around working extremely hard, running players into the ground safe in the knowledge that we can take them off and replace them with subs who are of a similar standard. With the squad shrinking all the time I'm not sure that's the case. We need to be very lucky with injuries or have some unknown kid from the youth team step up, IMO. I don't expect us to struggle or anything, but I would be surprised to see us match our achievements of the past couple of seasons.

[PaulWinch again]

Come home Marco.

Indeed - we need a spark badly and he is that.

[garyellis]

There is nothing wrong on financial controls on a conceptual level.

If there were no controls, Newcastle would be becoming the next Man City right now, imagine watching that happen.

Someone needs to stop clubs getting into loads of debt because based on years gone by, the clubs can’t often help themselves.

The problem is, the way it is currently set up seems to stop clubs from competing at the top level consistently whilst also having the frankly absurd side effect of making selling your home grown players more appealing- how nuts is that?

So how should it be set up so as to curb excesses but encourage clubs to grow?

I don’t know the answer to that.

It’s a bit like VAR - perfectly good idea but with dreadful implementation.

100%

Yup. It's rubbish, but it's tricky to come up with a fairer way. And this way is preferable to playing a game of "who has the richest owner" Top Trumps.

I think it just needs slightly larger budgets - and some kind of way to book against know future revenues (i.e. European qualification)

Don't get me wrong, as a Villa fan I'd like the rules to be that we get to spend whatever we want and everyone else can't spend anything. But for everyone who isn't connected to our club "the precise set of circumstances that benefits Villa the most right now" and "the right way to govern football finances" aren't necessarily the same thing.

If we swapped places with say, Palace - the above scenario would benefit them and hinder us. Would you still think that it would be the right way to do it?

Or would The Right Thing To Do then be to stop billionaire owners just pumping in even more money and paying hundreds of millions more in wages, meaning the clubs without billionaire owners would still be able to compete?

The current rules protect certain clubs and prevent all the others from competing. That can’t be right even if you are happy being an also ran.