Villa have decently wealthy owners now. I think its a partnership (or consortium or what have you) with at least 2 billionaires. Not oil money rich, but richer than our owners for sure. Thats why they are having high ambitions now. Like Prolix said, they have been investing lot of money. Gerrard was given a decent amount to spend. Unai Emery will probably get the same benefit too.
The problem for these guys is how competitive the league is today. If they had bought Villa back in the day of traditional ātop fourā (when Villa were already decent), then Villa might have become the first team to get into the ātop sixā slot. But now there are already six very strong teams. Add to that you have Newcastle now, not to mention Leicester always aims to be there or thereabouts, West Ham has had a real resurgence under Moyes, and most seasons there is at least one dark horse team that manages to defy expectation and get into the top eight.
In todayās day, even if youāre wealthy, it is no guarantee of anything. You have to be run pretty much perfectly at all levels, from coaching staff to scouting and recruitment, medical department, analytics, obviously management, and have a big load of luck too.
Noone in the top four is resting easy with us breathing down their necks.
A loooong way to go.
Even Goldbridge acknowledged it yesterday (right before the jammy cunts scored and we were only 2 points behind them), our season so far has on the whole been fucking terrible.
Let the Arse take 6points off the Cheaters then fall away when teams have worked out how to play against Legoman a bit better later on in the seasonā¦
We take 3points of Cheatersā¦
Saudicastleā¦ have a go at the the Cheaters and take 2points of themā¦
Spursy, Chelsea and Red Mancsā¦ give it a go against themā¦
We keep winning with Chaos Nunez beginning to really shine we wonāt be trailing anyone come April :0)
Weāll have to soon go back to a rhythm of at least 2 points per game.
What gives me optimism is that Tottenham have shown cracks recently, Chelseaās performances and results dropped.
On the other side, we have Newcastle who have gone up a level (weāll see when teams prepare better against them) and United are inconsistent in their idea and tactics, but still getting solid results.
I had a feeling that Spurs would be pretty strong candidates to retain top 4 status, now Iām not so sure about them anymore.
Itās important because with Arsenal and City not looking like theyāre dropping soon, you want 2 places in the top 4 not being certain.
For now, itās very much head down, work hard, work on getting players back fit (even if itās more and more obvious that we didnāt build a good base last pre-season), find more consistency in our performances and then better results.
Iām just looking at the next club ahead of us, absolutely nothing else than that.
We have Brighton behind us now, next is United as things stand. Simple as that.
And yet, imagine being sponsored by Nivea and then facing a ban for using their product. Itās a perfect illustration of the moral rot of the game to accept so much money from the industry and then make it illegal for the players to use it.
