Hobsons Choice

Not just the prem, but at the moment I'd go with: 1. Man U 2. West Brom Then quite a big gap down to 'merely dislike' 3. Arsenal 4. Liverpool 5. Blues 6. Leeds (Mainly for that sequence where they played on after our player got injured in the Championship).

Fair point but would you confuse Sheffield United's badge with Chelsea's? No one in the league would have a round badge with our colours. Burnley have a similar baby puke blue background to our current (and proposed) badges, and also have a shield. Wycombe (whilst a roundel) have the same colour blue, but our round badge had a huge dose of claret. Also seven other teams use a lion as their emblem, in the case of Middlesborough the lion is rampant like ours. The chelsea lion is regardant, which looks different. Finally, I would also say that if you are talking about unique badge shapes, only Man U, Watford and Wolves have a crest with a unique shape, and you could argue Man U's is a distorted roundel. The remainder of the 'others' simply don't use a crest at all, and just have a logo on it's own (again like spurs). FWIW I wouldn't mind a unique crest shape, but I've yet to see one I liked. The diamond and gas lamp shaped ones did nothing for me at all. I don't mind having the gas lamp in the badge somewhere, but mostly weird shapes look weird. I could get on board with no crest at all, perhaps. No one has done that with a lion.

31 of 67 teams from the PL, Champ and League 1 have shields in some form. (46%) 21 have roundels (sometimes with embellishments) (31%) The remainder I would call 'other' (i.e just a logo like Spurs, or hexagon like Wolves) (23%) Shields are the most popular crest by a distance.

SMH

I thought we were rebranding to become 'unique' from a marketing perspective? To do that and then copy a Crystal Palace kit would be batshit crazy.

Exceptionally good point.

From Heck's perspective, if he's being judged on overall Club Value, then the stand redevelopment adds relatively little when compared with value added due to our standing in the game results wise. If he's being judged on commercial turnover, again, looking at sponsorship deals etc will likely increase revenue more that increased attendance. According to Forbes, Matchday revenue makes up around 8.1% of our turnover (£61M) inclusive of stadium debt, compared with broadcasting revenue which makes up 61.9% (£468M), and sponsorships/brand which make up 13.4% (£101M). It's likely that he just doesn't care about the attendance increase. Compare our breakdown with that of, say, Man United, where brand makes up 16.7% (£1,003M), and broadcasting 33.2% (£1,991M). You can't really compare matchday revenues as it is reported with stadium debt, and the club owns their own stadium. The biggest disparity I can see is with the sponsorship/brand, which is 10 times our income, and broadcasting income, which is around 3.5 times ours. I can see why Heck is prioritising these elements from a commercial perspective, although I would point out that fan involvement is intrinsically linked to all of it (call it popularity). Also, I don't see how what he is doing (or not doing) so far will have a significant positive impact on brand.

Me neither for most of the last decade.

Honestly I mostly follow football BECAUSE it's largely meaningless and is a welcome distraction from the utter horror show that is most of the rest of the world and its inhabitants.

The abominable double post. I cast thee out.

If you exclude the various shades of red/claret, our colours have radically changed approximately 10 times during our history. Probably at the whims of the incumbent custodians at the time. If you can't see why team crests are part of our heritage and the exact same argument then fair play, but I and many others can.

He used HP laptops. No wonder he was sacked. Surprised VP hasn't overheated and burnt down by now. Actually I can hear the fans from here in shropshire.

I do think the newer 76ers logo looks better, but imo you have sort of hit on the issue. He had a decent base to work from there. Unfortunately in the case of Villa, if you use dog turd as an ingredient, the best you can hope for is dog turd pie.

I've been thinking about this since it dropped, and I think Heck has been working on the basis of a flawed initial scope. If you look at what he did with the 76ers logo, he took the previous one, in place before his arrival: Whacked it in a roundel to create: No question it looks better, but the core design inside the roundel is almost identical. It's also similar to the one they used between 1977 and 1997, so there is a lot of history with this. The problem at Villa is that he inherited a badge that most disliked, and almost no-one loved. During the consultation in 2022, out of 21,500 voters, 8% (eight!) opted to keep the crest. He appears to have applied a similar formula to his redesign of the Villa crest, redesign, tidying, and modernising of the previous design. But to do this he's put on hold the rebrand that 77% of 21,500 people voted for, and applied his formula to the wrong badge. The one that 92% of people wanted to ditch. If he'd done this with the most recent one, he'd have had much, much more support, and I bet it would have been a hundred times better.

As a counterpoint, we change too often because we never get it right.

It's not design by committee, though. The last one was. This one is not, because pretty much most of the things previously discussed (and voted on) during the last consultation have been chucked in the bin in favour of the opinions and tastes of Heck (amounting to a nominal rejig of the existing badge).

As someone who isn't au fait with things Nintendo, what is the 'Nintendo Direct' referred to on the video? Is it like a streaming version of the switch (similar to Playstation)?

Errrr. I take it you didn't work on HS2 or the 2012 Olympics? Contractors we worked with on those projects jacked up their price 4-fold, because they knew the Government could afford to pay it. And they (allegedly) colluded to avoid price undercutting.

Possible, but the costs don't just start with physical works. Before we'll have even heard that this was a possibility, they would have needed to engage architects, planning consultants, traffic management consultants, environmental consultants (that's me), geotechnical consultants (also me), etc etc etc. They would have already spent a butt load of money. These days when you build, especially projects like this, you can't just wing it, or change your mind half way through, you need to be all in or not at all. Otherwise you've wasted a butt ton of money. Unless you are HS2, but then you've wasted other people's money.

How many years of consultation? Nah, **** it off and use the old badge everyone hated and add a drop shadow. If this is true, he actually thinks we have c*** written across our foreheads. It's a f***ing scam. It must be wrong. It must be. It has to be, right?

What the actual ****. That is proper wank.

Is that Liam Ridgewell in the bottom left corner?

Just wondering- How long have you put into it so far. Must admit it's initially quite impenetrable, since nobody explicitly tells you how it works- ie that it's mostly an internal dialogue between aspects of your personality, and you approach things differently depending on which is dominant. If you've bounced off it a couple of times I'm not super surprised, I think I did too, but when I finally got what it was about, it had me. Also, if you speak to Cuno early on it's a bit off putting, as I despised that character to the point of wanting to throw him in the canal. I just feel bad that having played it I can't really do it again as I'll know the story.

In fairness, Liverpool could just save their money and replace Salah with a giant weeble which they place in the opposition penalty area and which flops over when lightly touched.

Rooney had 0.67 ppg. Yeesh. How does that stack up with other terrible managers?