Unai Emery ‘messed up massively’ after Aston Villa PSR gamble backfired

Unai Emery gets an absolute kicking from Aston Villa fans after that defeat at Crystal Palace. Plus, more on INEOS and Liverpool.

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Unai Emery got it wrong
It’s a rare thing to say, but I think Emery got it a little wrong there. Although the players didn’t help either. Absolute fair play to Palace as well mind. Appreciate M&M (Asensio and Rashford) aren’t match fit but sometimes you ride the wave. Still plenty to look forward to, starting on Friday.

That’s how you be a fan, no? Criticise, be annoyed, then look forward (with hope).
Gary AVFC, Oxford. (After The Darkness comes the light)

…We have conceded from our opponents’ first shot on target in 17 fixtures this season and from the rebound of first shot in 3 others (thanks AVFC Statto). No point paying big bucks up front when the foundations at the back are built on quick sand.

We won’t be getting Champions League qualification this season. We will be losing Asensio, Rashford when the loans are up and will have to sell Kamara at least to comply with PSR.

This isn’t a stupid Emery out post but he messed up massively this evening and we are allowed to call him out on it.

Changed formation to 3 at the back which has never worked for us.

Didn’t start Rashford or Asensio when we were crying out for them – why pay £300k each a week in salary and not start either?

Questionable subs made.

Massive defensive errors (again and again and again).

The best I can see us do next season is what Newcastle are doing this – regroup, no distractions and climb the league again and hope make it to the promised land again.

But we have rolled the dice financially and will have lost.
Paul

…I agree with TX Bill in the mailbox about VAR generally (and specifically – in the last week we’ve had 2 penalties and 4 goals ruled out thanks to the nerd magnifying glass)

But the most clear and obvious error on show last night was not due to the ref – and the on-pitch bloke was pretty good I thought – it was that we shouldn’t be playing Disasi at right back when Mateta is busy giving Konsa the stop-hitting-yourself treatment through the middle.

Closely followed by: we shouldn’t be piloting a W-M formation for the first time since the 2022 Glorious Revolution in a midweek game we desperately need to win.

Or, we shouldn’t be directing all our play through Tielemans when Palace have got 3 men on him all the time.

Or, we could try going long more often seeing as that produced our only (allowed) goal.

Or, we should be giving Rashford and Asensio more game time together if anything, not less. Are we resting them for Cardiff or something?

Or, if we hate Malen so much, we could have just sent him a Blues shirt for £70 rather than spending £16m to sign him, leave him out of the European squad vs loan players, and then bring Bailey on ahead of him.

Have I missed anything? That was an absolute shitshow. Admittedly this whole season has been a full slog of having to repair the plane while it’s in the air, but last night was the first time Leslie Nielsen’s ghost has hovered into view. Robin Olsen does look a bit like him actually. Thankfully Unai looked even more angry about everything than I did.

Worth saying that Palace were really good though. Mateta and Hughes especially. And Lucy Ward on TNT as usual.
Neil Raines, no I’ve been nervous lots of times

How is Olsen still there?
Seeing Robin Olsen come on for Villa last night and concede 3 goals made me look up his stats, as he does seem to concede an unusually high amount of goals for a top level goalkeeper.

It’s pretty grim reading – 20 games played for Villa, and 42(!) goals conceded. And when taking into account the fact that he has played a few cup games with weakened teams, it actually gets even worse rather than better – a total of 12 Premier League games for Villa, with 28(!!) goals conceded. And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does – he only played 45 minutes in 5 of those 12 games. How he is still at the club is beyond me.
David Horgan, Dublin

Mid-table misery
Not one result went as I’d wished  last night. It’s a simple desire of wanting the teams around us (above and/or below) in the Premier League table to lose.

Fulham win. Brighton win. Palace win. No bueno. The Chelsea Saints game is irrelevant (still playing but clearly a Blues win), however, hatred means I pretty much will always want those lot to lose.

We probably won’t beat City on Wednesday anyway. Four wins in a row would be very un-Spurs like and because we hold the current longest winning run in the PL of 3 whole games (lol) and we have some voodoo curse over them, there is the expectation we’ll win. So, of course we f*cking won’t. Cos, ya know, Spurs.

Anyway, it seems to have gone under the radar a little but how salivating does the CL qualy race look? Especially with that 5th place up for grabs. Just imagine Forest, Brighton and B’mouth nabbing those spots.
Glen, Stratford Spur

New benchmark
Ed will love this I’m sure but the new yardstick for Premier League quality is “can you do it on a wet winter evening at Selhurst Park”?

Forget the Stoke bollocks, Palace is the benchmark. What a performance last night.
Fat Man (dammit, should’ve said Premiership…)

How VAR works
How have we got to this stage – 2025 – VAR been in place for 5ish years and still people don’t understand its remit.

Offside decisions are binary – onside or offside – they are not subject to the ‘clear and obvious’ threshold that fouls are.

VAR is shit – it has been worse than even the biggest critics thought it would be, but the discourse isn’t helped by people like TX Bill simply being ignorant.
J Belfast

More on where INEOS f***ed up
Just over 12 months ago Sir Jim Ratcliffe held a big press conference to announce his plans as the controlling (minority) owner of Man United.

First on the agenda was picking a ‘style’ of play that would lead the club forward, and presumably play a key part in any decision making regarding the playing list and the coaching style.

It was a great idea. Align the entire club, from seniors all the way down to the bottom age juniors, playing one style of football.

The only problem being, United spent a good nine months deciding on their playing style. Now I don’t have a particular issue with INEOS spending a few months deciding how UNited will presumably be playing for the next twenty years.

My issue is that United:

1. went on a fruitless manager search, that no one seemed interested in, because no one could tell them what style of play they would have to implement.

2. extended Ten Hag’s contract by twelve months, because no right minded manager wanted the job. Only to fire him less than six months later.

3. spent 150 million pounds on players, without knowing if they would fit into their ‘style’.

4. Hired and then fired the man hand picked to lead the football department. Because he didn’t agree with the ‘style’ of Ruben Amorim and how it fitted with the profile of the current playing list.

I wonder how many low paid staff would still have a job, if Sir Jim and INEOS had just followed their own plan and decided what kind of ‘style’ they wanted to play, before wasting all that money?

I’m not sure what other Man United fans think, but more than anything I would like a billionaire owner who is rich enough to pay for his own mistakes. Not one that has to sack the tea lady because INEOS forgot to stick to their own plan.
Cliff, somewhere in Australia

READ: Sir Jim Ratcliffe is ‘dinosaur’ and ‘asset-stripper’ in the Elon Musk mould

On contracts for the aged
I’m about to make an argument regarding Salah and Van Dijk’s contracts but really you can apply it to any player in their career twilight.

I dunno what Salah or Van Dijk’s ask is, some people say it’s regarding contract length some say it’s about pay. But when a player reaches a certain age the likelihood of them replicating their previous season the following season decreases. That’s just a fact of life as a football player.

Leaving that aside for a minute, research also shows that players performance increases when playing for a new contract and decreases for the two years following the signing of a contract.

One thing everyone gets wrong about contracts in football is that a new contract is a reward for how well you’ve done. If that is the way your club does contracts, it’s wrong. A contract is reflective of how you believe someone is likely to perform in future, not a reward for past performance – that’s what the previous contract was for.

With that in mind, how likely is it that Salah for example will replicate this season in the next two years (assuming he gets at least a two year contract)? Does anyone, even the staunchest Liverpool and Salah fan believe he will perform equally or better the next two years as he has this year?

Nobody does. So why would you pay like you believe he will? I’m not saying we shouldn’t re-sign him I believe we should but the terms should reflect how we believe he will perform next year, not how well he has performed this year.

Personally as players get older id make contracts more heavily bonus weighted with low basic salary. Fire in 23 goals and get a huge bonus, win a team trophy get another huge bonus, make 32 appearances longer than 60 minutes and get another. But low basic salary. This will essentially give both parties what they want, the player can earn a huge payout but he will need to play well to get it and often.

If you really believe in your ability it shouldn’t be an issue. If you’re asking for a high basic salary guarantee perhaps that’s because you know you’re not going to meet those targets.

Ask United if they still think giving rashford that massive contract on the back of one good season was a good idea. Mane is a good example at Liverpool, his best season was the year in which he played for his final contract.

I get that players want guarantees, who doesn’t? The club also wants a guarantee.
Lee

READ: Why ‘bad example’ Virgil van Dijk should get new contract ahead of Mo Salah…

Make your mind up on injuries
Cast your mind back, if you dare to December 2020. It was a weird time. A Covid Christmas beckoned for all, with families being separated. Shops were quiet and restaurants were closed. Leicester were second in the league, Everton were 4th, Arsenal were 15th, City were 8th, actual Southampton were above them in 7th and even more bizarrely, Man United were 3rd (yes, really). I sat at home, watching Liverpool batter Palace 7-0, holding my baby son in my arms. He’d been born 9 weeks early and had just come home after a 5 week stay in the hospital. The world outside was horrible, but for me it was a wonderful time. My wife and son together under one roof, and Liverpool top of the league at Christmas. It looked very likely that Liverpool would retain the Premier League.

Then it all went wrong. Not for my son, he was fine (and to be honest, completely irrelevant to the story, it’s just a nice memory) but with the football. Van Dijk got injured. So did Matip. And Joe Gomez. Naby Keita missed 20 games, as did Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Thiago. Milner, Fabinho and Henderson also picked up injuries at various points of the season.

All sorts of weird combos played in defence. We ended the season with Rhys Williams and Nat Philips (Now out on loan and Mocambe and Derby respectively) as the centre back pairing. And how did rival fans react? Did they say, unlucky boys, your dip in form is completely understandable. Or did they say WORST CHAMPIONS EVER, Klopp is a fraud! Well if you read the mailbox, you’ll know.

The point being that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t slag off Liverpool one year, make absolutely no account for injuries, call Klopp a useless manager and slate the team for not defending their title then a few seasons later talk about how lucky Liverpool are because they’ve had no injuries this year. So make your mind up. Are injuries an excuse or not?
Mike, LFC, Dubai

Arsenal fan angry at other Arsenal fan for their disappointment
You’d think we’d have exhausted the ‘Liverpool’s success does not mean Arsenal failure’ stuff by now, but from a self-professed Arsenal fan Jason, that is weirdly self-flagellating.

If you want a clift notes summary of ‘Does Slot humble Arsenal process’ the answer is ‘No, because taking over a team with one of the best forwards, centre backs, deepest front line, which came 3rd the previous season having led the league for large parts of it is not the same as taking over a tire fire scaping 8th place’.

That would actually be all you need to say; everything else is redundant. Slot has succeeded in a completely different set of circumstances, so you don’t have to make any conclusions about Arteta.

But you will ‘cast doubts’ like a milquetoast sorcerer, not even braving a hard take.

This continuous tripe is pushing me pretty close to abandoning this place to be honest and given riling Arsenal fans now feels like the commercial model for F365, you might not want to overegg the pudding or you’ll lose even us and be left with Stewie screaming into a void of trolls.

There are so many good insightful websites and blogs on football and this pivot to banter columns which say nothing meaningful (along with a proliferation of nonsense soundbites from nobody ex-pros to gambling sites dressed up as news) is really pushing you guys further down.
Tom, Leyton

F365 being woke again…
Dear F365 love the site, but please stop your ideological attacks on JC, what he has said it’s true and the hand wringing from your site is so hypocritical, you know that a goal scored from a real madrid/man utd/ liverpool player counts more than from another team, and you know that drives revenue and all the other things your site love, the Equity in DEI should be in equity in opportunity not outcome, if it’s so important maybe when Afcon ,women’s football tournaments come along maybe direct more attention to them, instead of being like disney and promoting inclusion then removing characters in markets that will hit their bottom line, rant over keep up the good work.
Nathan Hewitt