Hot in the heels of the 28th anniversary of our European Cup triumph in Rotterdam, which was on Wednesday by the way, it’s emerged that Gordon Cowans and Colin Gibson have been keeping a little secret…
It’s a scene you couldn’t possibly imagine happening today; the midfielder and left back apparently chucked the trophy in the back of their car and headed over to the Fox in Hopwas, near Tamworth, for a few cold ones and a game or two of
Refusing to give up hope for fourth place as long as it remained possible, but knowing we weren’t favourites, the question of who I’d prefer take that place if we could not has been at the back of my mind for a little while now. I’ve made no secret of my disdain for City’s “throw money at the problem” approach to breaching the barrier of 5th place, so it may seem like a no brainer to favour Tottenham.
Not quite.
It’s probably entirely fair that the majority of the sane football world regard Barcelona as the best team on the planet at the moment and Lionel Messi as the world’s best player. Inter Milan were the under dogs for last night’s Champions League semi final and whilst Barcelona aren’t massively superior on a man-for-man basis, it was also fair to describe them as the favourites.
But a funny thing happened; Barcelona lost 3-1.
That’s not what is intriguing me and causing
In short, no.
Then again, maybe it is… eventually.
Maybe no one really remembers the runner-up, but they’re rightly rewarded with cold hard currency which is needed to help finance next year’s campaigns. I’ve never made a secret of my opposition to the rich benefactor approach or my pride at the Villa way of doing things right now. I’m pretty certain that I’m not in the minority there.
I want to see Aston Villa challenging for titles at home and abroad as much
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
Last season, possibly around this time of year, Aston Villa were looking fairly solid in the top four and, by contrast, Arsenal were really struggling to show their quality. We all know how it turned out, so no need to go over old ground, but one particular piece of banter from a section of the Arsenal support stuck in my mind. On a number of occasions I stumbled on a Gooner opining that Aston Villa would not be