As armchair managers, our job is no more complicated than dreaming up wish lists of players, deciding who gets to start in the team sheets and what formation they will play and assigning arbitrary valuations of players for transfer market purposes. Yes, arbitrary values, and buying players is no more complicated that writing that value on a bit of paper and feeding it into the fax machine.
A player is worth what the buying club are willing to pay and
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Unsurprisingly, with the pre-season schedule underway, I’ve started to spot one or two Villa fans crouching in corners gibbering about lack of signings, hyperventilating with a paper bag over their mouths. Does that describe you? Read on.
I did this before last year, so I’ve updated it with the data from 2009. All you have to do is look at today’s date in the left hand column and then scan across to the right to see how many players
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I added the transfer rumour page for a little light relief over the summer, but then gave it even less attention than it was due because of the World Cup. Let’s face it, whatever I’ve missed over the last few weeks has hardly come to fruition yet.
I was just having a quick nose around to see if there was anything interesting doing the rounds and I stumbled on this little nugget from the ever reliable Daily Mail:-
I know, not
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Preface
You know you’re in trouble when a blog post carries a preface! This post is hefty by blog standards, even mine, and it is statistically and graphically rich, but that’s not the reason for this quick heads up. That said, don’t start reading expecting a quick 300 word blog!
I had most of the data here at hand and this is a post that I’ve been meaning to pull together for some time. However, I’ll be perfectly straightforward and
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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
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As I wasn’t really expecting much today this wasn’t planned, but a few names are being thrown around in connection with Aston Villa today, so I figured we could use Twitter to keep us up to speed.
Below the fold you’ll find a widget for anyone who is interesting at the moment. Michael Owen and Nicky Shorey being the prime examples right now. If I spot anything else interesting on Twitter, I’ll drag it in here to share.
Don’t forget that
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My old mate Damo has been banging an interesting drum recently which is summed up pretty nicely in a comment he made on his blog today:-
I think the most interesting thing is if you look at actual spend as a percentage of turnover … it’s almost the same. Nothing has really changed.
He’s made similar statements several times recently, although he normally inserts some kind of disclaimer that this is just what someone has told him, so don’t hold him to
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Stewart Downing becomes the first player to join Aston Villa during summer 2009, but how will he fit in??
MON’s maintained his record of not signing a player at Villa during May or June, but can we expect a player or two in July? If you’re losing sleep over question like this then maybe this matrix will help, but probably not.