No one should be surprised that Aston Villa have been able to name their squad under the new “home grown” rules well ahead of today’s deadline as it was as straight forward as it can be. I took a look at the squad back in July and listed 23 players who would have to be named under the new rules. Since then, James Milner and Nicky Shorey left, Stephen Ireland joined, so here’s the 22 player who were
That’s the Summer 2010 transfer window done then.
Out: Marlon Harewood and Andy Marshall were both released at the end of their contracts. Stephen O’Halloran went to Coventry on a free, while Nick Shorey joined West Brom for £1.5m and James Milner joined Man City for £26m.
In: Stephen Ireland joined from Man City for £8m.
KMac has confirmed that he would like an interview. Make whatever you will of the inclusion of a two minute video recap of his four
Squad Numbers for 2010/11 have been announced and the only significant change is Stephen Warnock taking the number 3 shirt after Freddie Bouma left the club at the end of the season. If you’re wondering what Freddie’s up to, I’ve heard nothing since he went back to PSV on trial in June and I’m assuming that’s still the case. Perhaps no news is good news, but surely we would have heard by now if they were going to
After revisiting how the new Premier League “Home Grown Rule” impacts Aston Villa and confirming that we’re comfortably able to comply with the rules, I couldn’t shake my curiosity about Man City. After all, they must be among the worst offenders in terms of the number of foreign players and I keep hearing about how many they’ll have to offload, right?
Well, unless my understanding of the rules is way off, I didn’t find them to be in bad shape
Last September, I wrote an overly lengthy post which stumbled its way through the then recently ratified rules introducing quotas on numbers of “home grown” players and squad size limits on Premiership teams from 2010/11. The conclusion I eventually came to was that it would not adversely affect Aston Villa in any way. It just took a while to get there.
As we head ever closer toward the start of the 2010/11 season, with much speculation about the likes
You’ve probably already seen the Premiership fixtures for 2010/11 and are hopefully aware that due to a particularly anachronistic and egregious piece of copyright law, I can’t just publish the fixture list here. I’ve no intention of coughing up the £266 plus VAT for the Villa list and absolutely no intention of forking out the £3,931 plus VAT for the full list, so I’ll just pick out some highlights and intertwine the European fixtures which are not protected by
Quick hat tip to EPL Talk for putting me on to this, here’s how much each team in Premiership received (will receive?) in prize and TV money for 2009/10:-
A total of £831m is shared among the 20 teams above plus the 6 teams relegated over the previous 2 seasons receive £12.4m each in “parachute” payments. (As Birmingham City were promoted back to the Premier League, their £12.4m goes to the Football League to share among it’s members).
Each team receives
Blackpool have just beaten Cardiff 3-2 in a thrilling play-off final at Wembley to win promotion to next season’s Premier League, joining automatically promoted Newcastle and West Brom.
Besides the Premiership link, the game also featured ex-Villan Peter Whittingham, who has been one of Cardiff’s key players over the last couple of seasons, and also our very own Barry Bannan got a run out for Blackpool in the last couple of minutes.
This was the match recently christened “the £90m game” since
Regardless of what happens in our remaining two games; Man City and Blackburn, Aston Villa’s performance over the course of the 2009/10 season will be at least the 2nd best in the 18 year life of the Premier League. It will make no difference how you choose to compare the records from each season, only 1992/93 can rank higher.
However, some people feel the need to wait until the season is over and our final position is confirmed before they