Fans Worried Over Villa Future

[old man villa fan]

Are you ever going to show us the proof of this?

Perhaps my memory isn't quite what it used to be but having worked at the football grounds of Wigan, Hull, Derby and Swansea twenty odd years ago the point I'm trying to make is that even without the benefit of twenty years premiership income they and others have moved away from ram shackle grounds operating in some cases out of portacabins to compete with us commercially whilst we started the premiership era from the advantageous North Stand office complex which was undeniably one of the best in world football.


I don't think we've moved on at anything like an acceptable pace and we've been caught up commercially by clubs whom none of us historically would have considered worthy of competing with Aston Villa.

If I'm guilty of lacking in the figures to prove this as fact then I apologise, but I can't apologise for having retained the passion and belief that Aston Villa Football Club should think bigger. Guilty as charged; blame me Dad and William Mcgregor.

I'm going to agree and disagree here.  LE is quite right to state that we have fallen massively behind other clubs when it comes to Commercial income, any glance through the Deloitte rankings will tell you that, where it spells it out in a horrifying glare.  However his start point is a complete fallacy in saying we had a world class commercial operation a few years ago.  I'd say we possibly had that in the late 80's and possibly early 90s but were rapidly overtaken by clubs of a similar and comparable size throughout the next 25 years.  We've been playing catch up in the Lerner era but as Dave W has pointed out on numerous occasions the opportunity was lost in the mid/late 90's and early 00's.  And the blame for that can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of one man, H D Ellis.

It's been embarrassingly bad since Tony Stephens departed in 1986. Never mind Steve Stride, there was one man who should have been manacled to his desk and never allowed to leave. He went to Wembley, turned that round, then became an agent and hand-picked the best English players of the nineties.

Not bad for a Sunday footballer.  I still have is book somewhere in the house.

[dave.woodhall]

The seventies, and even the nineties, are a long time ago now. One FA Cup and one league in almost a century of trying.

[dave shelley]

Tony Stephens wrote a book called The Sunday Footballer.  About his times with a team called Martini International.  It so happened that a lad I worked with played for them, incidentally he had been on Villa's books and I got to go training with them on a couple of occasions.

Through this tenuous relationship with Tony Stephens, he agreed to come along to our Referee's Association monthly meeting as guest speaker.  He came armed with gifts and a shirt Ken McNaught had signed and supposedly worn during a European campaign which we raffled off for our funds.  He was at the time commercial manager at the Villa and gave a very interesting talk.

He gave me two tickets in the Trinity for the following days match against Arsenal which we promptly lost 5-1!  It was obvious then that he was destined for higher things.  Top man.

[KevinGage]

When we win one, we'll win another one soon after.  Such is the way of these things. 

I would sell my first born child for an FA Cup win. 

On a wider point: If we do get new owners and a new manager, I hope they at least try to win the fucking thing.

You often hear that Randy 'gets' the Villa.  But any genuine custodian would have taken the guillotine to a Villa manger treating the FA Cup as an inconvenience. 

[dave.woodhall]

Not bad for a Sunday footballer.  I still have is book somewhere in the house.

You and I must have been half of his total sales. Even then you could see how he thought ahead of the game, though. The look at the players he had - Beckham, Platt, Owen, Shearer, Barry, the pre-Jordan Yorke. Not only great footballers but also great images for the off-field and post-retirement work. He didn't touch the likes of Gascoigne and Collymore.

[dave shelley]

Oi!  I've still got my copy too.  My mate has a chapter named after him.

[Chico Hamilton III]

Our old P.E. teacher used to play for Martini International.

As you were.....

[dave shelley]

It was amazing how Martini threatened to sue them if they didn't change their name, even though they were named after a different Martini. 

[Ron Manager]

Oi!  I've still got my copy too.  My mate has a chapter named after him.

and me!  Derek Statham's on the front cover.

[dave.woodhall]

Oi!  I've still got my copy too.  My mate has a chapter named after him.

and me!  Derek Statham's on the front cover.

There you go. We've cornered the market.

[hilts_coolerking]

Probably because they were/are of an age when the League Cup was an irrelevancy, as indeed it largely still is. The fact remains that over a large chunk of football history we've not done particularly well, yet we somehow expect to always be up there challenging.

We may not have always been brilliant, or even very good, but generally speaking we've usually been better than we are now.  I don't think many of us really believe we should be up there challenging - certainly not with the staggering ineptitude at the club currently - but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we should be doing much better than we are.

[AV82EC]

Probably because they were/are of an age when the League Cup was an irrelevancy, as indeed it largely still is. The fact remains that over a large chunk of football history we've not done particularly well, yet we somehow expect to always be up there challenging.

We may not have always been brilliant, or even very good, but generally speaking we've usually been better than we are now.  I don't think many of us really believe we should be up there challenging - certainly not with the staggering ineptitude at the club currently - but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we should be doing much better than we are.

I wrote a really boring article about this in the fanzine in the late 90s I think and the conclusion I drew was that for a club of our size each decade we should be looking to have a title challenge, win an FA Cup and a League Cup, probably finish Top 6 most seasons with at least one flirt with relegation and a few good runs in Europe, hopefully with a UEfA Cup win.  Whilst the landscape has dramatically altered since then I don't see that some of that isn't still viable as long as whoever takes over has a plan for both on pitch and off pitch and chooses the right people to execute it.

I realise that 15 years on I'm still dreaming!

[steamer]

Memory thread Alert

 I first went to villa park in the mid 60,s with my dad.
First real recollection Everton at Home season relegated to Div 2
Remember empty ground at home with Cummings as manager, Then the Revolution, The Doc, Ellis, full houses, Relegation.
Hope, Division 3 , Villa are winning for the first time in my experience, Wembley, wow we only dreamt about this.
Division two, Ron Mr 110% beating everyone, into Division One, "where the Holte will sing louder than the Kop and we fight for the Villa till we drop "
We win the league.
Ron Leaves.
Rons team wins the European cup.
Some journey from the mid 60,s.
Doug comes back and between then and the sell out to Randy piddling success.
Randy was G.I Joe, him and O,Neil were the new dream team.
Alas we know what happened.
My heart bleeds for the fans who follow the Villa home and away, our support today is as good if not more consistent than it has ever been.
That is why to me we are sitting on that proverbial massive fan base.
There is nothing there like the passion of the Doc and Ron to bring in the fans, yet they come in bigger  numbers.

We need some Hope, I think Randy is a genuine guy and that he will sell to someone with the club at heart.

And by the way, I still blame that Victorian travel Agent that paid himself a fortune and invested diddly squat of his own money or anyone else's  money in missing out on the potential of the Premier league.

Viva the new hope, Viva!

[Matt Collins]

But the counter argument is that we've won the league once in a hundred years. And our run of top flight football for over 25 years is the longest run we've had in that time. So we've been reasonably successful

Does it really mean anything - in terms of potential and expectations - that forest won the European cup twice? Does it make them 'bigger' than derby or Leicester in terms of potential. I don't think so.

In premier league era, We're probably of equal status to Everton, who've been better run and done well as a result of late. But also to Newcastle, Leeds, who've both been relegated.

If and when we do go down, it will be a big thing and weird to see villa not in the top flight. But hardly the end of the world that some suggest. These things do happen when big clubs are managed badly.

[dave.woodhall]

It all goes back to what I've said many, many times before. For twelve years after 1990 we had so many situations and unique advantages and we threw them all away. It didn't need a fortune, it needed vision and business acumen. Other clubs were bringing in top-quality marketing people while we relied on an over-promoted Saturday shop boy.