February was a busy month, but with all the Carling Cup and FA Cup fixtures, there were only 3 Premiership games to capture the data from. It’s probably quite fitting since he’s consistently among the highest scoring players in every game that Brad Friedel finally win an AVC Player of the Month award himself.
Very well deserved and largely thanks to being the highest scoring player in the Tottenham and Man Utd games. It’s unquestionable that Brad has saved
It was over a month ago that I first wrote about the bad JuJu surrounding Aston Villa in March under Martin O’Neill’s leadership and since then I have not rested in my quest to find the source of this curse and vanquish the demons once and for all.
I couldn’t reveal my journey to you all before now, for fear of derision and at half time today in Reading I seriously questioned whether by mission had truly been successful, but by
Ex-Villan David Ginola just took part in the draw for the FA Cup Semi-Final and Aston Villa will play Chelsea… thanks David!!
In the other Semi-Final, Portsmouth will take on Spurs or Fulham.
Both matches will be played at Wembley Stadium over the weekend of 10 April and 11 April.
I suppose we haven’t done bad with cup draws so far this season, so it was probably inevitable that we would draw Chelsea. But there you go, they always say that you
What March curse?
We might as well just get ‘Aston Villa’ etched on one of the Wembley changing room doors permanently… after beating Reading 4-2 at the Madejski today, we’re off there again. We don’t know who we’ll be playing in the FA Cup Semi-Final over the weekend of 10 April and 11 April yet, but the draw will be later today and I’ll update here.
If you ever wanted to see the epitome of football’s oldest cliche; ‘a game of two
The walls of Aston Villa Central are still creaking under the weight of what turned out to be quite a busy day here yesterday. There were no less than three posts, none of them particularly brief and all of them focused on financial matters. So, plenty to make the eyes glaze over of most football fans, myself included.
I need to follow up on the third post (this one effectively replaces it), so here’s a quick recap of the
[Updated: This post has been replaced, The Telegraph have butchered the facts]
I didn’t expect to be following up the earlier post on the 2008/09 revenue so quickly, but I just spotted this article at The Telegraph which suggests that our accounts have now been filed, they’ve seen them and the revenue increase of 11% to £84.2 million is confirmed.
However, the not-so-sexy news is that we still made a loss. Not insignificant either. £43.7 million in the red for the
Let me just preface this post by pointing out that I don’t generally spend much time taking potshots at other Aston Villa blogs, but yesterday was one of those days and, in a fashion, so is today. It’s a coincidence, nothing more.
Last summer I spotted a claim being repeated here and there that Aston Villa’s spend on transfer fees under Randy Lerner was really no better than under Doug Ellis if you expressed it as a percentage of the
You may have already seen that Deloitte recently released their annual Football Money League report which ranks Europe’s top 20 football clubs by revenue. The headline for the 2008/09 season was that Real Madrid became the first sporting club in the world to earn more than €400m in one year.
If you’re not familiar with the report and/or don’t fancy reading the full story at The Guardian, I’ll just summarise the top 20 below (figures are €million) :-
1
Real Madrid
401.4
11
Hamburg
146.7
2
Barcelona
365.9
12
Roma
146.4
3
Manchester Utd
327.0
13
Lyon
139.6
4
Bayern Munich
289.5
14
Marseille
133.2
5
Arsenal
263.0
15
Tottenham
132.7
6
Chelsea
242.3
16
Schalke
124.5
7
Liverpool
217.0
17
Werder
I said I wouldn’t dwell on this sort of expose much, so apologies up front, but once again a slightly negative story with a sensationalized headline in the British tabloid media is seized upon by the delusional Aston Villa blogger in Sweden to further bolster his bizarre agenda.
This time the subject is Habib Beye and his quite understandable frustration at his lack of playing time. Firstly, let’s look at the headline and quotes (yes, they have quotes!!) from the