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ENIC

Muttley said:
Nah, you're putting words in my mouth there. I was talking majorly about the phasing i.e. multi-year forecasting by the club. I was never talking gross or net spend in that context and certainly not the post-stadium years either.


As an approximate guide (in Euros) we went through 5 years of buying 324m and recouping 292m. That's starting the year after Bale left and the famous 7 joined. That's 22m net spend over 5 years at an average of less than £4m per year when you convert back to sterling. Now I know these aren't "all in" numbers as fans don't get to see those but they are good enough for government work. Ironically that 22m euros was less than we actually paid the tax man for the annual profits for 2 consecutive seasons. From memory, I think we broke the PL record for profit.

Then after the CL final we spend about £100m whilst Poch was still in charge of which you have to think that a decent chunk (50%?) was the winnings from that competition.

So I was always left wondering whether we got our phasing right. The market was quite inflated back then with the silly season (Neymar, Dembele, Coutinho, VVD etc) happening around 2018. Our players were worth silly valuations and I still think we did wrong not releasing one or two so we could go again.

Also no fans seem to be down on the stadium build. We had to do it to get to the next level and I think fas genuinely understand what door it opens. It was more about what we could have done in the Poch years for me. That fall from the 86 point, second place glass ceiling was dramatic but not surprising to me.
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I think its much simpler

Old WHL, no revenue zero net spend

New WHL, loads of spend

Covid, Brexit, Ukraine inbetween some variables that impacted
 
Baleforce said:
A poor United side, you say it yourself.

Spend that amount of money you should get a player that elevates you to not being poor, imo.

Grealish was not available to us for 20m, Villa pulled the plug due to a take over.
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This is not a fair way to evaluate a player. Fernandes on his own cannot elevate United beyond their current standing. Just like Kane couldn’t do it for us post Poch.

On Grealish, I often find the defence of Levy in these situations to read like ‘this is what happened, therefore it’s what had to happen’. It completely discounts the idea that if we moved differently, there might have been a different outcome. In the context of Grealish, we could have moved earlier and more aggressive on fee and wages to make sure we got the deal done. As it was, Levy followed his instincts which have panned out sometimes in getting good deals on players but also left us short many times too. He allowed the situation to change because he thought he could squeeze Villa even further.

I get that Levy had a strategy and the idea of sound finances and a self sustaining club was working extremely well for about a 10-12 year period in making us a consistent top 6 team. But I think it’s an interesting discussion as to whether it was possible to do more in that period. It seems like multiple managers all agree that the way we operated was not conducive to building a title challenger. Clearly we were building a stadium, so it’s not as easy as just spending more. But I think there’s fair arguments around A moving quicker and more decisively on priority targets rather than waiting and getting stuck with second choices and B in general looking to make 1-2 top class additions, proven players rather than spreading risk around the squad, going for volume and unproven in the hope that enough of them hit at once.
 
SissokoWasGood (BoL) said:
This is not a fair way to evaluate a player. Fernandes on his own cannot elevate United beyond their current standing. Just like Kane couldn’t do it for us post Poch.

On Grealish, I often find the defence of Levy in these situations to read like ‘this is what happened, therefore it’s what had to happen’. It completely discounts the idea that if we moved differently, there might have been a different outcome. In the context of Grealish, we could have moved earlier and more aggressive on fee and wages to make sure we got the deal done. As it was, Levy followed his instincts which have panned out sometimes in getting good deals on players but also left us short many times too. He allowed the situation to change because he thought he could squeeze Villa even further.

I get that Levy had a strategy and the idea of sound finances and a self sustaining club was working extremely well for about a 10-12 year period in making us a consistent top 6 team. But I think it’s an interesting discussion as to whether it was possible to do more in that period. It seems like multiple managers all agree that the way we operated was not conducive to building a title challenger. Clearly we were building a stadium, so it’s not as easy as just spending more. But I think there’s fair arguments around A moving quicker and more decisively on priority targets rather than waiting and getting stuck with second choices and B in general looking to make 1-2 top class additions, proven players rather than spreading risk around the squad, going for volume and unproven in the hope that enough of them hit at once.
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Any chance of looking forward and not back??
 
robp135 said:
Had we sold Dier for £50M in 2027, Rose for £50M in 2018 and Dele for £80M in 2019 what would the reaction of the fan base been?
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Thats not the part that matters. What was the fan base reaction when we sold Berbatov, Modric and Bale? Upset is the answer but players will always have to be sold and move on. What placates the fan base is replacing those players and replacing them well. If we had done the due diligence and signed good replacements in a very short period of time the fan base would have moved on and not cared.
 
Bishop said:
Thats not the part that matters. What was the fan base reaction when we sold Berbatov, Modric and Bale? Upset is the answer but players will always have to be sold and move on. What placates the fan base is replacing those players and replacing them well. If we had done the due diligence and signed good replacements in a very short period of time the fan base would have moved on and not cared.
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That is fair. But given how we replaced the players who did leave in that period I don't have much faith thet would have done a good job.
 
robp135 said:
That is fair. But given how we replaced the players who did leave in that period I don't have much faith thet would have done a good job.
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This is an argument for having a good succession planning strategy, rather than not doing it.

At the end of the day, my issue with that time period was that we never sufficiently valued the intangibles around culture, cohesion, and a system that made the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It was so clear to me that what gave Poch’s time lift off was being given the space to establish that in his first season, and then having everyone fully bought in for the next two to the point we were unlucky not to win the title.

And then at some point we just let all that go. But I think at various points Dele, Eriksen, Toby etc risked either not being additive to the culture (because they wanted to leave to try something else) or not being able to play the system as well (because they could only run less hard). If we moved out one or two players each summer, replaced them with top class players, we maintain the quality and the culture. As it was, we reduced the quality and destroyed the culture.
 
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Baleforce said:
I think the culture ate itself.

Also, there is a reason intangibles are called that.
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Would love to understand more of what you mean here. I would ask to what extent leaders have the ability and autonomy to create and maintain cultures? Was the culture eating itself inevitable if indeed that is true?

My point with intangibles is that they don’t necessarily show up in an analytics model when assessing a specific player, but the right players put together in a system where the expectations are clear and the complementary pieces fit together can have outsized impacts. Under Poch we didn’t just have great players, we had intangibles that other clubs couldn’t replicate. I personally think we should have done more to maintain them, because that was our unique competitive advantage.
 
billyiddo said:
I mean it doesn't really matter what the reaction would have been, all that matters is if the result of those moves would have seen us progress.

The trouble is that we know we got close and then eventually tailed off so any move suggested in hindsight is seen as the missing piece of the jigsaw when in all reality we could have just as easily sold those players and regressed all the same. Then the argument would be we should have kept that team together and done XY or Z instead.


For me the issues from that period are more to do with the transfer department as a whole being threadbare, rather than any particular deal or sale being the difference maker. We had the stadium build going on which meant transfer business was going to need to be balanced for a fair while, fair enough - but we would have known this ahead of time and should have planned accordingly, indepth knowledge of the market and supplement an already top quality team with lesser known players that command less of a fee. I guess we did try to do that, but we didn't have the setup in place to find the right players. I feel like we gave Poch the power in the market that he deserved, having earned his crust over several seasons, but it came at a time that we couldn't pursue his primary targets and so were left scrambling around with Hitchens little black book.
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When your transfer department is stripped down so that it basically only consists of Steve Hitchen and a few part time scouts you’ll likely get output commensurate with that.
 
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MartyFunkhouser said:
Grealish pulled out because he felt a mad sense of late loyalty, then added pressure of take over and new contract. We didnt fudge that one despite popular belief
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Absolute rubbish…. We could’ve got Grealish for £20m at the start of window. We instead spent weeks making silly low offers like f £4m and Josh Onomah, as we thought Villa were screwed financially, then after about 4 weeks of needless hagglijg and lowballing we got wind of Villa attracting new owners so we finally bid the £20m The new owners immediately placed a pause to player sales as the club no longer has money issues and therefore no longer needed £20m to stay afloat.

The irony is that we offered over £30m for him on the last day of the window. Quite how a player is worth £10m more on the last day of the window than they could’ve been signed for on day 1 of the window only Levy knows, but we royally fudged that deal up with weeks worth of stupid lowballing for a player that the manager really wanted.
 
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Not sure it's a good measure of our buying of players when Maddison appears to be our best player 4 years and close to 500M in spend later.
 
Raziel said:
Not sure it's a good measure of our buying of players when Maddison appears to be our best player 4 years and close to 500M in spend later.
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TBF he's an AM and an AM is typically going to be a teams best player usually (I'd argue it's Kulu personally). We haven't rebought the AMs other than adding Simons who got the big injury.
 
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