Wasser Going On?

EDIT: Hiya guys, sorry I didnt mean to actually post this. I thought I had saved it to the drafts on my phone last night. Only to see it being posted on VillaTalk and Twitter. Thought it was in my drafts..then started getting messages on my phone about it! Its now removed as I never had chance to OK any of this with the people connected and thought it was saved in my drafts until I started getting messages on my phone about it and realised it must have accidentally been published. Sorry to those involved

De Toekomst

De Toekomst, roughly translated from Dutch means ‘The Future’, apt then for the name of one of the best Footballing Academies in the world, home of the Ajax Youth Academy.

Graduates consist of Edgar Davids, Johan Cruyff, Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Kluivert, Greg Van Der Wiel and Rafa Van Der Vaart.

It is simply one if the best Sporting Institutions in the world creating world class stars on a seemingly endless conveyor belt, players that are capable of playing attractive, attacking football.

Ajax are a club that regularly churn out World Class talent. Infact. Were it not for De Toekomst graduate Johan Cruyff. The current Barca team may not even be about as it was he who fundamentally changed their Academy, La Masia. Yet Ajax can still not keep hold of their talent, but that is likely down to the quality of the league they are competing in.

At Villa we have a very good academy and our current batch of youngsters are very promising indeed. But they are no where near the quality of the players De Toekomst produces.

In an age where UEFA financial rules mean that our owner can only invest 40m of his own money into the club over 3 seasons, it is simply impossible for us to break into the top 4 and get to the holy grail of the Champions League. Unless we can get major investment to increase the revenue of our club incredibly significantly, which is again, very hard to do. A sheikh doesnt just turn up at every club.

However, under these rules owners can plough as much money as they like into youth development. An age where former AVFC player Gareth Southgate is in charge of Youth Development for the entire country. Does this not sound like the perfect time in which to go about building our own De Toekomst or La Masia?

At a recent event by Barcelona they commented how the entire of La Masia runs on 7m a year. 7m a year is a pittance to many clubs when you consider the quality being produced by both Ajax and Barca. Dont be fooled, they don’t put stuff in the water in Amsterdam or Barca that produces such quality. Its the coaching. There is absolutely no reason why the next Messi or Iniesta cant be pulled out of Erdington.

De Toekomst recruit players as early as 5 years old, they are also given a full and proper education so that if it turns out they are not cut out for football then they still have other skills to fall back on. The players work constantly with the ball working on passing and ball control (this is the same as La Masia, where fitness training does not start till 13/14). Both academies produce fantastic FOOTBALLERS. Not typical british brits but players who are bryant on the ball with superb passing.

It wouldn’t be a quick solution to getting into the champions league or winning the premiership, not at all. But if we are realistic the only other way of breaking in is to get an absurd amount of investment and I, for one, would feel slightly cheated if we simply bought trophies (not that I would turn them down!). But if we could bring in players from around the world and locally from a much younger age, instill a style of play into them instantly and gradually build them into hardworking, skilled players we would eventually pay off.

For example the way Ajax practice crosses is the same through every single age group in the Ajax ranks. If you play for Ajax you know exactly what you and your teammates should be doing. Now that is how you organise a defence!

Yes, it may mean that we produce better players that move on to a bigger club. But if we begin producing youth that are worth 15, 20, 30, 50m regularly we will be much better off than buying players for 12m and selling for 20m two years later. Also if you bring a player up from the age of 5, not only will you probably have better players, they will probably support and love the club (imagine a team of Marcs and Gabbys…but better).

For me personally the players the club produces itself are more exciting than new signings from another club. With the NextGen Series arriving (Ironically announced today Ajax will be our first game for that tournament) and the Uefa FFP rules it is incredibly important that we begin to produce top quality players constantly. Not one or two then cry when they leave its something that needs to start happening now. Because it wont happen over night.

1st a style of play needs to be decided upon. Its not easy and takes planning, but switching from defensive, attacking and defensive minded managers is simply.something that can stunt a project like this. The style and vision has to be constant.

2nd our scouting network needs a serious revamp we very rarely bring players over from abroad at a young age. Something needs to change in order for us to start collecting top class youth at younger ages both locally and abroad.

3rd A system that encourages ball control, passing and hard work from a young age.

Not that Im an expert but it seems painfully clear to me that in order for us to progress we can only do it by buying or way into the CL or we can produce the quality ourselves.

P.S. Good Luck Harry Forrester: latest player to be taken into De Toekomst on trial after leaving us at the end of last season. Just don’t score the wining goal Vs us in the NextGen Series!

The Curious Case of Cuellar

Today we agreed a fee for Carlos Cuellar to rejoin his old club Rangers. He is a top bloke, connects with the fans, is a very good defender who can read the game and is good in the air. He’s a fan favourite and his song is great fun to sing. So it’s easy to understand the movement of Villa fans trying to persuade him on twitter to turn down any advance from Rangers.

 
However he’s never managed to constantly break into the first 11 in his favoured position under four managers. So we can kind of understand why he may look to make a move to his old club where he is practically guaranteed to be first choice. We can also understand why McLeish may look to move him on, after all by the time he is fit again he’ll be 30 and only have 12 months left on his contract. Despite many Villa fans rating him as the best Centre Back at the club (maybe except for the very highly rated Ciaran Clark).
 
Which would all be fine.
 
Except. Carlos most certainly doesn’t want to leave the club and McLeish has publicly said Carlos is part of his plans for this season and doesn’t want him to leave.
 
So. Who is pushing for this transfer if not the Manager and if not the Player?
 
The Board.
 
Don’t get me wrong. Randy Lerner and his board have worked wonders for our club and got us pushing for the Champions League, Trophies and at one point (however early in the season and how obviously unlikely it was) we looked like we could challenge for the league in Jan 2008. he has invested over £200m of his own money into reinvigorating our club. I would never create or endorse a website as stupid as RandyLernerOut.com.

But when the board is pushing so hard for a fan favourite, who (amazingly) still wants to be here and the manager wants to be here. For a fee as little as the reported £2m, there is something wrong. Very, very wrong. I would understand pushing for the move if we would be the best part of our original £8m or more back as it would make good business sense.

But it’s £2m.

I’m not saying go out and protest at Randy as it makes us look like idiots. I understand the unwillingness by some of our more level-headed fans to moan about Randy, who has done so much for our club. As we could very easily end up with an owner like Carson Yeung or the Porn Barons.

But if any other club was forcing out a highly rated player for a fee as small as £2m with no chance of signing a replacement for that amount of money, whilst players who are much more deserving of such treatment (who would also command larger fees, Ireland, Warnock, Dunne and Collins I’m looking at you). Very serious questions would be asked about what was going on behind the scenes of that club and how bad the £140m debt (that is growing at £40m a year) is. I know for a fact that if this was happening at our Rivals many of our fans would think it hilarious.

NOTE: I just realised that both of the articles on this blog that seem anti-the board. Im not at all like that but when things are as they are it is hard to be objective and come out with a glowing reputation for the board. This article is simply stating that The Board, who have done a lot for our club, should stay away from the players and leave it to the manager. Any pundit, fan, player or manager would agree with me. This isn’t just a case of being negative for the sake of it.

Even clubs like Chelsea get a bad rep in the media when their boards/owners get too heavily involved in the football side of the club.

The Culture At Aston Villa FC

It’s important for me to stress that I do not work at Aston Villa and I don’t have an ITK source. This is speculation and opinion looking from the outside in at our club. Attempting to maybe see a reason why a lot of fans post tweets, posts, comments etc wondering why, as a club, we are just so slow.

Search #avfc on twitter and you’ll see what I mean. Hundreds of pointless tweets wondering impatiently why we haven’t signed anybody yet. Luckily a few more well informed ‘tweeps’ who actually listen to McLeish or the General reply with the reason:

‘Everybody was on holiday until today, Faulkner, players, Admin Staff and also McLeish wants to assess his squad. He cant begin do that until July 8th as that is when the Players come back from their holiday.’

But you have to admit sometimes it’s not a case of needing time. Legal battles, Tapping Up, selling best players, restless fanbase, kits. They aren’t all big problems, but when you look at them together it starts to paint a picture of our club.

Our manager has no Backroom team, who are currently all at Birmingham City waiting to be released upon the compensation being paid. Surely their current club wants them gone too.. in order to allow Hughton to bring in his own staff? Lets get one thing straight too. We may not like it but we tapped up McLeish, he was in holiday in Corsica and we know Randy’s jet flew out to Corsica (just like it did before he hired Houllier). Three days after Randy touches down in Corsica, McLeish resigns by email. So we owe them compensation and our players are about to come back to training with a skeletal coaching team to ready them for the coming season.

I know its early, but in order to assess his squad surely McLeish needs the help of his assistant, doctors etc (such as for assessing whether Ireland is fit enough after his recent problems with injury, same for Cuellar and Dunne’s shocking fitness last season). The backroom team is one of those problems where there is a quick fix, I understand the boards hesitance as the compensation is likely to be costly.. but this brings me to my next point.

Appointing a Manager

Im not going to go on about it, we all know the reasons why he was unpopular. I can see why he would be chosen, PL experience, dirt cheap if he quits but surely the board knew his staff would have to have compensation to leave. Our managerial search was a farce, it took way too long and managers such as Mark Hughes and Martin Jol were available for free, and I presume their backroom teams were too.

Fulham, acted fast and appointed a great, attacking manager with Premier League experience. Fulham had already interviewed Jol last season when appointing Hughes, so its obvious why they were so quick. But would he have gone so quickly if we had gone for him quicker too? It seemed like an awfully long time to wait for a manager, with no info from the club (appreciate this is the right way to do business) to end up with such an awful appointment. The board took long enough to appoint Houllier.. surely they could remember some of the previous managers they discussed.. were Hughes and Jol not even discussed when appointing Houllier? Why were they behind McLeish for the job? (McLeish treated Blues much worse than Hughes treated Fulham). 

Again, it’s not the actual decision that I want to talk about, its the length of time, is it possible that the ‘Take Our Time’ nature of the club cost us a manager like Jol? It certainly made it worse for fans (imo) to have that big wait and then have…that happen to the managers position.

Contracts.

It’s hard to keep hold of your best players, we know first hand. But what is it with the way contracts are handled at our club, that every season another top player is down to one year on his contract or in a position where its:

 ‘sell now for top money…because next season he’ll be down to 12 months and we wont get what he’s worth.’

Barry - 1 year left, Milner - 2 years left, Ash - 1 year left, Downing - 1 year left next summer.

What is with that? The age of the standard 4 year contract is dead. There is absolutely no reason why we should be offering anybody other than old players, or injury prone youngsters 4 year contracts or less. It means 2 seasons, and then they are well and truly on the market again. Why cant we tie our players down to long contracts? It’s even better for the club when buying players. Amortization means a longer contract spreads the cost of the player over a longer period.*

Contracts mean nothing to the player. Nothing at all. It’s a small payday for the Agent, a payday for the player and if they decided in 12 months they want a new one, they’ll probably get it.

But Newcastle tied down Carroll to a 5/6 yr contract and because of it got 35m for him. ‘Oh but he’s Newcastle born and bred’ you say. Cheikh Tiote, probably one of the most wanted players imo by bigger and more successful clubs, chance to break out of Newcastles strict wage structure and go to a better club… signs a 5 and a half year contract. Kyle Walker has also signed an extension for 5 years. Again, they mean nothing.. but it means you get a big fee for the player. Why are we so slow to offer contracts to our best players? What is happening at Tottenham and Newcastle where they have no Champions League to offer, one has been recently relegated but they are still managing to do something Randy’s team has yet to perfect since buying the club.

There are players that could very well help our squad and vastly improve it going very cheaply and even free. I know McLeish may have different ideas to me and all of us how he wants to build his team. But players like David Vaughan and Kieran Westwood going on free’s to Sunderland strikes me as two deals we should have been desperately trying to get into. Vaughan ran the show at Blackpool I maybe wouldn’t want to pay for him but on a free it’s a no brainer. 

Westwood is the main one though. He is on a free, he’s in a position McLeish has already ‘assessed’ we need new players for. He’s good, He’s young, He’s British, has a very bright future and lives just down the road in Coventry where he had played until recently. IMO he’ll be a top keeper. Im not so fussed we didnt sign him.. more the fact we seem to be moving so slowly at the minute that we may not have even assessed whether it would have been good for the club.

So.. Is our Club just a bit too slow?

It just makes me wonder if this is something to do with the Culture of the way the club is ran. If you look at a top company like Apple, everything is secret, little information gets out, it is all impeccable compared to many other companies, time and again you hear about Apple’s culture, how it seeps through the entire company, worldwide and is organised and directed the same way throughout. The way Steve Jobs vision has worked means that.. even if he left his nature and vision is so steeped into everything the company does that they could probably continue what they were doing.

Now transfer that to Aston Villa. Randy bought the club and as we all know gave MON way too much power, he ran the show, he did first team duties, his ‘scouting network’, contracts and everything. He ran money into the ground just as he did at his previous clubs. But when it comes to thing like transfers and contracts. He was poor, he couldn’t handle money, he couldnt get contracts good enough for the club and when it came to transfers he was..slow. Now I’m not blaming everything on MoN as it infuriates me when people bring him up in relation to the first team and their performance.. he’s gone. But in terms of running the club. It was his, he ran it it was his staff doing things his way. Fine. He’s gone. It all changes, it gets better and it gets sorted..

Paul Faulkner.

Our wage bill had to be decreased, massively. It still does. So I appreciate Paul has a hard job, a tough job and the things he does simply will not always please the fans. But for the last 12 months it has been Paul’s job to run the club, sort out contracts, reduce the wage bill, assist with choosing a manager, our Public Relations and Marketing. In short. In the last 12 months we’ve gone from Champions League contenders to Relegation contenders (22/1 last I checked). There are a multitude of reasons for this. Loads and they aren’t all Faulkner’s fault. But PR, Contracts, money (another 40m loss last season… Uefa Financial Fair Play would give us a bollocking..) basically anything to do with how the club is ran. Comes down to Faulkner. Now to the common man it may be hard for us to comprehend ‘well it’s not his fault’. ‘Its not just him doing it, he probably has a whole team dedicated to this and that’. Yes. Very true. But he doesn’t become a CEO without having to take responsibility for everything. He is CEO of Aston Villa football club. He is CEO of Aston Villa as a business. As a business and as a Football Club over the last 12 months. Everything. Everything. Has been a shambles. 

Whilst kits are coming out much better this year in terms of timescale, last years was utterly diabolical. We are still amongst the last this year and are yet to see our home kit, apart from a ‘prototype’ (its going to be the final one i’m sure). FXPro dropped us like a stone this year too and simply pulled out of a contract (who is in charge of contracts again?).

I applaud Faulkner for his part in securing the sponsorship of Genting. It is a great deal for the club, both monetarily and as a worldwide and local brand (Genting will be owners of the large casino in Brum). It is certainly to his credit that Faulkner and his team pulled off this deal. However, it was done late, so late in fact that any Villa shirt (despite not yet being on shelves) not bought at Villa Village or Club Shops will come without the sponsor. Whilst I appreciate this (I dont really like sponsors, whilst Genting’s logo looks classy on the away shirt). It isn’t exactly a concious decision. It’s a forced decision because we probably set Nike very strict deadlines after last year… but then failed to find a sponsor in time for a club with a £100m turnover in an industry where people literally piss money up the wall for fun on a daily basis.

This is all my opinion. But in that opinion. I believe something crucial has to change at Villa Park. We have been a shambles and a laughing stock for the past 12 months. Kits, manager(s), contracts, drunken bust ups, players berating the city, upheaval in the squad, relegation battle.

I think it started with MoN and his inability to control and run a club (really.. that isnt his job anyway) and it’s continued and gotten worse since Faulkner joined. I am sure Faulkner is a great businessman and wouldnt have earnt Randy’s trust as his has done without being so. But he isn’t a football man. Football is a quick business, it changes all the time and there is no time for holidays at the end of a terrible season (harsh… but oh well). We need a businessman. We need a football man on our board, we currently don’t have one at all. Our club needs to be more ruthless, it needs to have a decision maker at the top calling the shots with a vision for the club, where it is headed, how its going to get there and clearly lay this out.

(Changing from Defensive, to Attacking and back to Defensive minded coaches in such a short space of time screams of rash decisions, lack of a vision and strategy from my viewpoint).

If you’ve managed to read this far you should probably get out more. :P

UTV.