Relegation Possibility

[Andy_Lochhead_in_the_air]

Dont worry, it will get us plenty of attention in the national media.
Blackburn, Bolton, Wigan going down is not that earth shattering outside of those towns. Obviously the London hacks will be concerned about one of their 3 fashionable west london teams, but what they can really get their teeth into in terms of  `fallen giant` or `once proud` or `at one time ruled Europe` is us.
Also expect lots of mentions, particularly on the likes of SKY, about us being one of only 7 teams continuously in the Premier League since proper football started. 

[Mister E]

I expect ticket, commercial sales and the general mood and confidence around the club to be appalling in the summer if McLeish is not replaced. This will hit Villa hard financially and would have to be addressed.

A lot has been said about calamitous season ticket sales and that the club must act to prevent this, but let’s say for argument sake for lose 7000 season ticket holders going into next season, that’s a drop in revenue of approx £3,1M. If we sell one of our £60K p/w earners and don’t replace him, we save approx £3,1M and thus negate the cost of lost season tickets.

The same Noddy maths can be applied to ‘at the gate’ sales. Let’s say that we drop approx 5,000 per match on individual tickets sold. Over the season that would pan out to approx £5M lost revenue. If we sell one of our £70K p/w week earners, we save approx £3,6M and thus take a loss of only £1,4M...... As you can imagine, you only have to get a couple more big earners off the books and not replace them and  we’ve broken even.

Now I know that this is pretty basic stuff, but it does go to highlight, that IF the only focus of the club is to reduce cost, then they can more than afford a calamitous drop in supporters turning up at the stadium whilst still ticking over.

Neil, that overlooks the fact that there's a huge deficit in he accounts that needs to be turned round, and cutting costs is only one half of the equation.  There's no point in cutting them if income drops off as well.  We undoubtedly needed to cut costs, but we need income to rise as well.

I appreciate that my very basic calculations hardly explain the complex nature of our accounts, but it does demonstrate that a large drop in season ticket sales could be absorbed if enough high earners are shifted off the books. In fact if we culled enough of them and sold Bent we would go a long way to offsetting the mess we are in......... I’m in no way agreeing, it’s just being purely subjective.

On the other hand, if we sacked McLeish it would cost us significantly in compensation with little prospect that our income would further be enhanced.

Another consideration is the extent to which Lerner wants out. If the playing staff is overly-stripped of "star quality" and the gate / merchandise revenue is compromised by the supporter-disllusion, the value of any potential sale is surely dented.
I think there's a real balancing act that RL needs to find here.

[villa for life]

one advantage that other teams have is that their fans have not given up hope as many posting on here have. You can bet your life, Wigan, Bolton, QPR fans are ready to get behind their team in the run-in. It's not a criticism, just a fact that surely this must work as an advantage.

[Ad@m]

'i kept us up' and act the big hero, Villa fans are playing into his hands by banging on about going down

Have to agree with this.
He'll give it the big 'un about how he saved us against all odds. Fans hatred, injuries, balancing the wages etc, etc.

I'm sorry guys but that's a crock of sh1te.

You could count on one hand the number of people in football who think the Villa should be relegated given the other teams in this division.  A 'par' result for our squad is midtable mediocrity.  Against that, AML has massively underachived.  Relegation would be akin to gross incompetence.

[pauliewalnuts]

'i kept us up' and act the big hero, Villa fans are playing into his hands by banging on about going down

Have to agree with this.
He'll give it the big 'un about how he saved us against all odds. Fans hatred, injuries, balancing the wages etc, etc.

I'm sorry guys but that's a crock of sh1te.

You could count on one hand the number of people in football who think the Villa should be relegated given the other teams in this division.  A 'par' result for our squad is midtable mediocrity.  Against that, AML has massively underachived.  Relegation would be akin to gross incompetence.

Aren't all three of you effectively saying the same thing?

[JJ-AV]

If he does keep us up it will be with a whimper, so I doubt he'll be proclaiming it as a success.

However, he will get until Christmas minimum I reckon.

[David_Nab]

We could do with one of the other teams down there to have a poor run ,right now QPR ,Bolton and Wigan are all on good runs.I haven' t looked too deeply but I don't think any of them 3 and Blackburn are struggling with the injuries we are.Bolton I think are a little short in midfield but thats all.

[Rip Van We Go Again]

'i kept us up' and act the big hero, Villa fans are playing into his hands by banging on about going down

Have to agree with this.
He'll give it the big 'un about how he saved us against all odds. Fans hatred, injuries, balancing the wages etc, etc.

I'm sorry guys but that's a crock of sh1te.

You could count on one hand the number of people in football who think the Villa should be relegated given the other teams in this division.  A 'par' result for our squad is midtable mediocrity.  Against that, AML has massively underachived.  Relegation would be akin to gross incompetence.

Aren't all three of you effectively saying the same thing?

Yes.

I'm not excusing McBuffoon, just agreeing with john e about what tosh he'd come out with when we've made safety, I wouldn't agree with it at all.

Our performance has been totally unacceptable.

Yes he's had injuries, just like any other Premier team.

Yes the fans are not happy with him, but he's got off amazingly lightly during games, it's not as if he's been persecuted.

Yes he's having to keep an eye on wages, but he was still allowed to sign a player he's always coveted (N'Zogbia), A top class keeper and a right back that he obviously loves (but who is piss poor).

The only one small concession I'll give him is that Blandy should have given him funds to buy a quality midfielder, having said that, he made little or no effort to intergrate Makoun.

[brian green]

I do not want to see Villa relegated.   The pain would be unbearable.   In addition my age makes it more than likely I shall never see them back in the top half dozen teams in the land.

However, I am coming closer and closer to the opinion that it will take relegation to have a sufficiently drastic effect on the governance of the club to cure us of the sickness which grips us.

What is happening to us is what is happening to top level football in the country generally but writ large.   We have ceased to be a football club and have become a product.

As football moves further and further away from its cultural and geographic roots and seeks to become part of the entertainment industry, more and more clubs are being run along contemporary business lines which dictate that they have to be "marketed".

That is the canker which has eaten away at our club.   We have a naive owner who has never really understood the way we feel about our clubs in this country.   He has appointed directors who have no feel for or understanding of the fact that football does not obey the conventions of business.  Why else would so many of us have paid Doug Ellis £11 each for shares in Villa which were not worth a fifth of that sum?   Neither do the directors have any football nous.  The owner does not believe that they need any.   They are in place to run a business.

They and the owner have squandered twelve millions pounds in pursuit of a replacement for O'Neill but neither they, nor the current man of their choice is held to account for their monumental blundering.

As I said in another thread, because the directors and the owner absorb their knowledge of what is happening to Villa via the media the comment in yesterday's Daily Mirror that the fans (implying all the fans all the time) have been on McLeish's back since he arrived,   that media lie and all the others like it will carry much more weight in the Villa boardroom than anything we say or do.   

The manager is what he is, a man of unimpressive record completely out of his depth in the premiership.   He stays in place because the media says we the fans hate him for where he came from and because the owner was personally involved in appointing him.

If the club is to be re-born, it has to be utterly purged of the concept that it is a product to be sold and that the loyal fans are nothing more than a crop to be harvested.   Such has to be the depth of the purge that we have to get back to the basics of taking into consideration whether a player like Emile Heskey should be signed when he has always been a figure of contempt and ridicule by the fans.   In the new dawn which may or may not break through the Astonian Gloom (epic couplet) if say, Craig Gardner was available in the summer whoever is in charge has to consider if that player's provocative and hostile comments about Aston Villa make him a suitable player to wear the shirt.   To ignore such implications is to perpetuate the concept that the fans will turn up however they are treated.   To respect the fact that the bedrock fans have expectations of behaviour and loyalty from players paid such obscene sums of money is where the rebuilding must begin.

I think we may just scrape out of the bottom three this season but that in itself will only make matters worse if the sickness which ails our club is carried into next season.   I see Sid and KMac being in charge by Christmas, nearly two years too late.

[The Laughing Policeman]

^^^  *Hands over the head clappy thingy*.

[Rip Van We Go Again]

Another cracking piece from Brian.

[ktvillan]

'i kept us up' and act the big hero, Villa fans are playing into his hands by banging on about going down

Have to agree with this.
He'll give it the big 'un about how he saved us against all odds. Fans hatred, injuries, balancing the wages etc, etc.

I'm sorry guys but that's a crock of sh1te.

You could count on one hand the number of people in football who think the Villa should be relegated given the other teams in this division.  A 'par' result for our squad is midtable mediocrity.  Against that, AML has massively underachived.  Relegation would be akin to gross incompetence.

Aren't all three of you effectively saying the same thing?

f he tries to claim any credit whatsoever for keeping us up by the skin of our teeth, especially if we don't even make 40 points, then he'd be an embarrassment to himself and should be laughed out of town.

[ktvillan]

Good, thought-provoking piece again Brian.  Unfortunately football has ceased to be a sport with a bit of business behind it and is now a major business with a bit of sport involved.  If you want to compete at the top end, the only options seem to be Sheikh or Brand.  Or both.

RL and co have a few get-outs in what you say.  Many fans will stll turn up regardless of how they are treated, because of their loyalty to the club.   

They can stick with McLeish because they can alway invoke the "you only hate him because he came from Blues" fallacy.

Even if we go down they have the get-out that McLeish has "proven experience" of getting teams promoted.  Unlike his "proven Premier League Experience" this time it would have the advantage of actually being successful experience.  So I think we may be stuck with him, whatever happens, unless there is a fan uprising.

[richard moore]

Excellent piece Brian, I suspect we are of roughly the same vintage and I am increasingly subscribing to the view that I would rather see us relegated, our awful awful manager got rid of and the kids given a chance to impress next season with a few judicious signings than wallow on in the Premier League vying to finish somewhere between 10th and 15th with a bunch of players I just can't identify with nor care one jot about for the most part. When I first started watching us properly in 1974, we were in the second division and there was a real cult feeling to following the Villa. I felt it again when we were in the second division in the late 80s - some of my best memories of attending matches come from both eras, particularly away games - and I suspect it needs to happen again to have any hope of my feelings for the Villa being fully re-invigorated. At the moment, so much of it is just so meaningless. As Brian points out, the same could sadly be said of about 90% of football these days. The game has almost completely lost its soul and has to grab at increasingly fleeting moments such as what has happened to players like Muamba and Petrov to try and show it does still really care

[richard moore]

Excellent piece Brian, I suspect we are of roughly the same vintage and I am increasingly subscribing to the view that I would rather see us relegated, our awful awful manager got rid of and the kids given a chance to impress next season with a few judicious signings than wallow on in the Premier League vying to finish somewhere between 10th and 15th with a bunch of players I just can't identify with nor care one jot about for the most part. When I first started watching us properly in 1974, we were in the second division and there was a real cult feeling to following the Villa. I felt it again when we were in the second division in the late 80s - some of my best memories of attending matches come from both eras, particularly away games - and I suspect it needs to happen again to have any hope of my feelings for the Villa being fully re-invigorated. At the moment, so much of it is just so meaningless. As Brian points out, the same could sadly be said of about 90% of football these days. The game has almost completely lost its soul and has to grab at increasingly fleeting moments such as what has happened to players like Muamba and Petrov to try and show it does still really care

I also suspect that getting relegated, after the initial shock and fall out, would have a really unifying effect on us all which can only be for the good, albeit that we need to have got rid of the twat managing our beloved club