Our strategy

[QBVILLA]

They might have a more interesting and occasionally entertaining season than we will though. It's not like we will get a trophy for finishing above them or anything important.

Look at last season we had a horrible season with few genuinely enjoyable games and they enjoyed inflicting some outright thrashings on teams as well as a fantastic 4-4 draw with Arsenal. They will certainly have enjoyed that more than we did finishing 9th rather than 12th or wherever.

And if just one of those young players proves to be good their investment of a few million will be returned a few times over. I doubt ours on Alan Hutton will.

I seem to remember some 4-4 draws and spankings of teams - as well as a cup run or two and doing well in  the league - under a certain weird bespectacled Irishman.

I also remember that none of it stopped people whingeing about the team on here.

Absofuckinglutely

[Mellin]

I'd suggest very few people had a problem with O'Neill at the time, which reflected how enjoyable we were to watch and how well he was doing. It was the two years which followed that were the issue, and that's when he lost a lot of support.

[NeilH]

This is also my take on it. The club know full well that their actions will lead to drop in gate numbers, but they will have factored this in already as part of the cost cutting. The bottom line is that gates of 28-30k are about right for us. We are not going to drop below this and the club know full well that the investment involved in maintaining the floating 10K or so fans is just not worth it.

We tried to achieve the dream under MON and we fell short, just like virtually everyone else does, so now it’s time to pull back, regroup and try in a few years once more. It’s hardly the mantra to get us all excited, but there’s always going to be enough of us wanting to go to enable the club to do this.

In over 100 years we’ve pretty much fallen short at hitting the big time (except the oft mentioned blip) so we can hardly be surprised when the club does this.

[JJ-AV]

I'm pretty sure Daniel Levy is an employee of the actual owner at Spurs. Maybe we should be looking to upgrade on Faulkner with someone a little more experienced.

[hawkeye]

Not sure I agree with the average team for a hundred years.
We have had a succesion of Managers Taylor, Atkinson, Little, Gregory and  Mon that have got us very close to being competing with the Top Teams in England. Everytime through mis-management we have shot ourselves in the foot and faded. How many other Clubs outside the Lpool, Chelsea, Manure Arsenal have been threatening to breakthrough as often as The Villa. Spurs and Everton maybe. The rest have had brief spells in the Sun but have then yo yod from mediocre to worse.
This shows me that we have or had the capability to play with the big boys. Maybe our time will come again. UTV

[dave.woodhall]

Not sure I agree with the average team for a hundred years.
We have had a succesion of Managers Taylor, Atkinson, Little, Gregory and  Mon that have got us very close to being competing with the Top Teams in England. Everytime through mis-management we have shot ourselves in the foot and faded. How many other Clubs outside the Lpool, Chelsea, Manure Arsenal have been threatening to breakthrough as often as The Villa. Spurs and Everton maybe. The rest have had brief spells in the Sun but have then yo yod from mediocre to worse.
This shows me that we have or had the capability to play with the big boys. Maybe our time will come again. UTV

One league title, one European trophy and two FA Cups in that time suggest we have.

Better than that - Arsenal, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Leeds, Forest.

[hawkeye]

i might not have explained my point I was refering to where we got too under recent managers and was discounting Arse Lpool Chels Manure, Citeh are a new entrant, Forest and leeds are nowhere.
My point was that in recent times we have been close to getting there. I used to believe that we could breakthough. Every year that goes by that we just make up the numbers the more difficult it becomes and maybe it is too late now. Spurs look like they are hanging in there, we have given up.

[dave.woodhall]

The fact is, though, that for about 98 of those 100 years we've been at best marginal contenders or at worst appalling. Take out League Cups and all the clubs I've mentioned have won more trophies than us during that time. We've never been more than best of the rest so to expect more than that as some sort of birthright and to complain when it doesn't happen is wide of the mark.

[villadelph]

With the amount of players off the books next year, I think we'll invest wisely and refocus our European push.

[Percy McCarthy]

With the amount of players off the books next year, I think we'll invest wisely and refocus our European push.

I'm hoping that's the plan too.

[Toronto Villa]

I'm at peace now the window has closed. It's clearly a year to settle things down again. It's a season to shed the last of the fat contracts, and to really start to incorporate an entirely new philosophy at the club. Clearly the MON strategy didn't work as a long term objective because it wasn't sustainable for the owner, and the manager refused to cooperate. The GH experiment halted as his health deteroriated, and the club took it as a project to go a different route. I think it's why Moyes would have been an attractive candidate for the latest chapter as he knows better than most about operating on a strict budget.

I'm now going to look forward to this season in the knowledge that our squad, in my opinion, is far too solid to go down, is solid enough defensively to compete against the majority of the league, and possibly has the firepower if the chemistry can be attained to compete just below the very best. That's fine for this season. Throw in a cup run or two, and hopefully by the this time next season we'll be far better for the experience and we can start to invest again in the type of players that will properly push us on again.

[MarkM]

We have high aspirations for the Villa, we want our club to be challenging for the top honours but the reality is that we wont.

Lets face it we are not going to compete with Manchester [blue or red], Chelsea or Arsenal and with Spurs and Liverpool making progress we are left in at best 5th / 6th but more realistc 7th / 8th. I would think that the board realise this and have settled for this and are cutting our cloth to fit.

Unless the top four dissapear into a European League then we we will be an also ran club hoping for cup win from time to time.

Unless of course the football governing bodies decide to cap wages etc... then we might have a chance again

[Billy Walker]

Not sure I agree with the average team for a hundred years.
We have had a succesion of Managers Taylor, Atkinson, Little, Gregory and  Mon that have got us very close to being competing with the Top Teams in England. Everytime through mis-management we have shot ourselves in the foot and faded. How many other Clubs outside the Lpool, Chelsea, Manure Arsenal have been threatening to breakthrough as often as The Villa. Spurs and Everton maybe. The rest have had brief spells in the Sun but have then yo yod from mediocre to worse.
This shows me that we have or had the capability to play with the big boys. Maybe our time will come again. UTV

The only thing that sets us apart from the Lpool, Chelsea, ManUre and Arsenals over the years is that they have been blessed with the ideal combination for success - dynamic, ambitious leadership allied to plenty of financial backing - for more sustained periods than us.  (Thinking about it I don't think there has ever been an era when we have had massive financial backing compared to other clubs of the time.)

Our time will come again, though, of that I am certain.

[NeilH]

I don’t think anyone is saying that we don’t want the best for the club, but football history is measured in trophies and the facts are that for a so called ‘big club’ we do not have the evidence to back it up. We may have come close to achieving success on a number of occasions, but for all the good teams we had, we still did not lift any major silverware; be it the great Atkinson teams of the early 1990’s, MON’s millionaires of a few years ago or Graham Taylor’s battlers.
We have absolutely no right to bleat about our club sliding back to mediocrity when its a pathetic 54 years since we even lifted the FA Cup.
As much as it pains me to say it, the facts are that we are a very average club and the area between 6-10th place is our natural place. I suspect Randy has realised this and also realised that the effort required to keep attendances at Villa Park around the 38,40K mark is just not worth it.

[luke95]

Not sure I agree with the average team for a hundred years.
We have had a succesion of Managers Taylor, Atkinson, Little, Gregory and  Mon that have got us very close to being competing with the Top Teams in England. Everytime through mis-management we have shot ourselves in the foot and faded. How many other Clubs outside the Lpool, Chelsea, Manure Arsenal have been threatening to breakthrough as often as The Villa. Spurs and Everton maybe. The rest have had brief spells in the Sun but have then yo yod from mediocre to worse.
This shows me that we have or had the capability to play with the big boys. Maybe our time will come again. UTV

One league title, one European trophy and two FA Cups in that time suggest we have.

Better than that - Arsenal, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Leeds, Forest.

So we're not a top 5 club then Mr Woodall