Jadon Sancho (loan)

[cdbearsfan]

It's perfectly reasonable to assume that a British citizen can seek employment with a British club and that the authorities wouldn't invent yet another rule to try to fuck us.

[PaulWinch again]

It’s not really good enough to know all the rules that might impact you when you sign a player. I get it might be a stupid rule, but we should have been aware.

[paul_e]

It was clearly the fact that he's English which created the problem. It is very weird to have restrictions on a player transferring to his own country and him not being eligible to play. I totally get why the rule exists but this is pretty clearly a fringe case that wasn't considered in the drafting of the rules and instead of accepting that it to be altered they've dug their heels in.

[cdbearsfan]

Yep, that's about right. Stopping under-18s hopping across borders is quite sensible, both in terms of allowing smaller countries to develop talent and in terms of reducing young players being taken advantage of by exploitative agents. Banning a British player from playing in Britain is mental, though. Villa not to blame, that's all on the authorities.

[PaulWinch again]

Both things can be true - even if it’s a stupid application of the rule it’s something that exists in the drafting. If you’re spending multi-million pounds you should understand those risks, and any potential risk of the authorities not taking a common sense approach.

It’s a daft way for the rule to be applied, but Villa should have identified the risk of it being interpreted in that way.

[cdbearsfan]

What if signing him then was the only way we would have been able to beat competitors to his signature and he turns out to be the next Messi? The only way of knowing if Villa made any mistake is if he turns out not to be any good. And I doubt spending six months learning from Emery has done him any harm.

He's basically a child, we were never signing him expecting him to be making an instant impact in the first team. No harm done.

I think part of the issue with him is we were on a bad run of results/injuries at the time and his signing got bundled in with a general "everything is going wrong" malaise.

[PaulWinch again]

Sure and if we understood that was the case and that’s why we took the decision it’s fine. But that’s not what the counter arguments have been.