MattVillan has submitted the following.
Good post Matt and cheers;
I’ve just watched the end of the Chelsea-Palace match and saw Chelsea lifting their fourth Premier League title under Abramovich and couldn’t help feeling somewhat melancholy- as a Villan born after 1981 I’ve never seen such scenes at Villa Park.
Thinking on, I wondered if I’ll ever see that in my life and came to a troubling realisation: in its current format, I almost certainly wont.
What with FFP and the vast commercial empires that have been grown like colossal fortifications around the chances of the “big clubs”, the likes of United, Chelsea, Arsenal and City, there is no way Villa could ever rise up and compete at that level regularly.
One only has to look as far as Liverpool to see this. They haven’t won a title 25 years now, and the few pops they have at it are irregular and based around fortune with lucky signings and tend to burn out as the going gets tough. They’ve missed the bus and it’ll only get harder to catch it now.
We’ve seen the might of United this year- out of the champions league and yet they sanction north of £100 million in transfer fees to make up for it, sourced from their vast coffers topped up by their global brand. It’s truly a closed shop up there, a different world we can see but could never make that leap and ascend into.
For as much as Fox’s rhetoric is captivating that we can grow to be a top 6 club again – hurray! – that is very much the glass ceiling; even in the excess of the MON days there was no real danger of us ever being a squad that could challenge for the title no matter how much Randy had poured into the squad, and now with the draconian “keep everything as they are” financial fair play rules not even the slim chance of a multi-billionaire investor coming and ploughing money into the club and buying us titles is possible.
With these depressing thoughts in mind my thoughts wandered to the FA Cup final at the end of the month. How massive is that game for us? This is essentially the highest peak we can ascend unless something drastic is done to rebalance the league, bar perhaps a fortunate run in the Europa League after years and years of building (bearing in mind the true prize for that competition is qualification for the Champions League).
This means our date with Arsenal at Wembley could well be the defining match for a generation of Villans- please Tim, don’t let them bottle it like we did in 2010!
Up the Villa!
