davieG

Leicester Museums & Galleries is at Abbey Pumping Station. · Follow This Saturday over at Abbey Pumping Station its our Railway Day with Teddy Bears! Enjoy a ride behind Leonard the Steam Loco for just 50p or bring your favourite teddy along and enjoy a free train ride! Plus the 'Forget Me Not mini railway' will be running and the cafe will be open for light refreshments, why not bring your teddy and make a day of it. https://www.leicestermuseums.org/event-details/...

In case you didn't get the memo, a big focus for Villa this summer will be getting wages down. The UEFA's financial regulation, the Squad Cost Rule (SCR)has been phased in, which limits a club's spending on player and coach wages, transfers, and agent fees to 70% of their total revenue for the 2025/26 season. The limit was 90% for 2023/24 and 80% for 2024/25. Villa will be subject to a UEFA fine due to breaking the 2024/25 limit. Getting below the 70% limit will be interesting - Kamara, Martinez and Bailey are certainly looking to be front runners to leave. The big question is, how much will it restrict incoming big wage transfers? #AVFC

Not sure if true - from FB Aston Villa's dystopian big woke joke! Aston Villa’s latest move to intertwine its women’s football fixtures with the loyalty points system for season ticket hopefuls is a glaring example of woke overreach masquerading as fan engagement. With a waiting list swelling to around 45,000 eager supporters, the club has decided that the only way to climb this queue is no longer just by backing the men’s team, but by being “rewarded” for attending women’s matches as well. This is not a choice for the fans; it is a de facto requirement if they want any hope of securing a coveted season ticket. Aston Villa has effectively weaponised its waiting list to force its traditional fanbase into endorsing a political agenda under the guise of sport. The club’s justification is couched in terms of loyalty and engagement, but the reality is far less noble. By linking attendance at women’s games to the loyalty points system, Aston Villa is coercing fans to support a product they may not care for or even want to watch. This approach is reminiscent of the bungled attempt by AFC Bournemouth, which initially forced fans to pay extra for mandatory women’s matches before a backlash forced a partial retreat. Aston Villa’s strategy is more subtle but no less insidious, using the carrot of season ticket access to compel attendance. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to boost women’s football visibility, driven more by woke corporate pressure and league requirements than genuine fan interest. Adding insult to injury, this comes alongside a 5% increase in ticket prices for the men’s games, meaning fans are paying more yet being strong-armed into embracing women’s football whether they want to or not. The club claims this pricing strategy is necessary to remain competitive and comply with Premier League and UEFA financial regulations, but the timing and conditions suggest a prioritisation of woke optics over supporter experience. Aston Villa’s owner and management appear more focused on ticking diversity boxes and expanding the women’s side’s profile than respecting the traditional fanbase that has supported the club for generations. This is not about football; it’s about social engineering. Aston Villa is leveraging its huge waiting list to force-feed a woke agenda, blurring the lines between genuine sporting interest and politically motivated attendance. Fans who simply want to watch men’s football are being held hostage by a system that demands they also become cheerleaders for women’s matches. The club’s attempt to frame this as a “new era” of loyalty is disingenuous. It is a clear example of woke culture infiltrating football, turning what should be a matter of choice into a compulsory exercise in virtue signalling. In short, Aston Villa is not merely encouraging support for women’s football; it is coercing it. The waiting list loyalty scheme is a clever but cynical way to force fans into compliance, undermining the genuine passion and autonomy that football supporters have long cherished. This is woke nonsense dressed up as progress, and it risks alienating the very fans who have kept the club alive through thick and thin.

England Under-21s head coach Lee Carsley has signed a new deal that runs to the end of the 2027 European Championship.

Black raincoat, lost half of a front tooth wearing one of these. It wasn't belted up and as I was running the buckle swung up and wacked my tooth.

I'm an old git and I'm happy to leave behind all the middle aged whining gits that sat near me and hope that whoever took my place enjoys and sees as many highs as I did and perhaps not so many lows. Enjoy the season whatever your age and I sincerely hope it's a big success.

Looks like Leicester & Leicestershire misses out again. Jennifer McKiernan BBC political reporter @_JennyMcKiernan Published 4 June 2025, 04:00 BST Updated 1 hour ago Billions of pounds of investment in transport infrastructure in England are set to be announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Wednesday. The money will be spent on tram, train and bus projects in mayoral authorities across the Midlands, the North and the West Country. The move comes before the government's spending review next week, which will determine how much money each Whitehall department gets over the next three to four years. Reeves has been under pressure from Labour MPs to spend money following criticism of relentless economic gloom, particularly around disability and benefit cuts, as the chancellor tries to stick to her fiscal rules in difficult circumstances. Trams form the backbone of the investment plans, with Greater Manchester getting £2.5bn to extend its network to Stockport and add stops in Bury, Manchester and Oldham, and the West Midlands getting £2.4bn to extend services from Birmingham city centre to the new sports quarter. There will also be £2.1bn to start building the West Yorkshire Mass Transit programme by 2028, and build new bus stations in Bradford and Wakefield. Six more metro mayors will receive transport investments: £1.5bn for South Yorkshire to renew the tram network as well as bus services across Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham by 2027 £1.6bn for Liverpool city region with faster connections to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Everton stadium and Anfield, and a new bus fleet in St Helens and the Wirral next year £1.8bn for the North East to extend the Newcastle to Sunderland Metro via Washington £800m for West of England to improve rail infrastructure, provide more frequent trains between the Brabazon industrial estate in Bristol and the city centre, and develop mass transit between Bristol, Bath, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset £1bn for Tees Valley including a £60m platform extension programme for Middlesbrough station £2bn for the East Midlands to improve road, rail and bus connections between Derby and Nottingham. The transport investment marks Reeves' first open move away from the stringent rules in the Treasury's Green Book, external, which is used by officials to calculate the value for money of major projects. The book has been criticised for favouring London and the south-east. Labour MP Jeevun Sandher, a member of the Treasury Committee, complained of its "hardwired London bias" in April. In a speech in Manchester later, the chancellor is expected to say that sticking to book's rules has meant "growth created in too few places, felt by too few people and wide gaps between regions, and between our cities and towns". Changing the rules will also mean more money for areas of the North and Midlands, including the so-called "Red Wall", where Labour MPs face an electoral challenge from Reform UK. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said the announcement "marks a watershed moment on our journey to improving transport across the North and Midlands - opening up access to jobs, growing the economy and driving up quality of life". North East Mayor Kim McGuinness said the £1.8bn funding for her area was a "game changer", while Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said the investment was a "massive vote of confidence in our region". But shadow chancellor Mel Stride said Labour's promises on transport "lack any serious plan". "They've betrayed pensioners, farmers, and hardworking families, all while making empty tax promises that simply don't add up," Stride said. "Between Labour and Reform, it's a race to promise everything to everyone - with no way to pay for it." Liberal Democrat Treasury spokeswoman Daisy Cooper warned the chancellor must now deliver, because "these communities have heard these same promises before, only to be left with phantom transport networks". "We must not see people led up the garden path once again," she said. "Extra investment in public transport must also focus on cutting fares for hard-pressed families being clobbered by a cost of living crisis." Reeves is not the first chancellor to review the Treasury's investment rules; former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also reviewed the book as part of the Conservatives' Levelling up agenda. Sunak had also announced some of these same projects, including the development of a mass transit network in West Yorkshire, in his Network North plan, intended to compensate for the decision to scrap the HS2 line north of Birmingham. Labour reviewed these projects when they came to power in July, arguing they had not been fully funded. Reeves' £15.6bn regional transport announcements are part of a five-year funding allocation from 2027/28 to 2031/32, which a Treasury spokesman confirmed would double the current £1.14bn spending allocation for 2024-25 to £2.9bn by 2029-30.

Made In Leicester Jayne Wills

https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/inside-king-power-stadium-leicester-10235666 ByJordan Blackwell 15:58, 3 JUN 2025Updated16:08, 3 JUN 2025 Dyke leaves to join QPR The club’s released list last week only took in players from the senior and development squads, but there will have been further departures from the under-18s. That rundown, which is due to be released early next week at the latest as the Premier League’s full retained lists are published, will include midfielder Kaleb Dyke, who is leaving to join QPR. The 18-year-old midfielder played 19 matches for the club’s under-18s this season, scoring three goals and providing two assists, only missing the final five fixtures, perhaps after it was made clear he would not be offered a deal at City, where he has been since the age of seven. After a month’s trial, he’s now signed a professional contract at Loftus Road and will join QPR’s development team. “This is exciting,” Dyke told QPR. “It’s a new opportunity, something I can really dig into, something I can just attack and basically try to make my mark. I have really enjoyed my short time here already. It's been fantastic.” Grist quickly gets new club Centre-back Ben Grist was one of the eight development squad players to be let go by City, but he has quickly found himself a new home with National League side Boston United. Grist, who was signed from Grimsby’s academy four years ago, played four games for City’s under-21s this season but then spent the second half of the campaign on loan at seventh-tier Worksop Town, helping them to achieve promotion through the play-offs. The 20-year-old impressed enough in those few months, winning young player of the year, to get a move to the fifth tier with Boston. City ninth for academy minutes With the emergence of wonderkids Jeremy Monga and Jake Evans, the former becoming the second-youngest player in Premier League history, and with the potential for a foundation of academy talents in the squad next season, the progress of City’s homegrown contingent has been one of the few positives of late. But where did they rank in the Premier League this season for minutes given to academy graduates? Research by the Press Association puts City in ninth place with 2,526 minutes. They didn’t actually include Jakub Stolarczyk in their calculations, the Polish goalkeeper joining City aged 16, but even if they had added in his 900 minutes, the club still would have been ninth, 54 minutes behind Southampton. Luke Thomas and Kasey McAteer were the two players pulling City’s total upwards, both getting more than 1,000 minutes of Premier League game-time over the season thanks to runs in the team towards the end of the campaign. At the top of the leader board were title-winners Liverpool, the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Curtis Jones taking them up to 6,922 minutes. Wolves were bottom, not handing a single minute to an academy graduate.

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/leicester-city-big-problem-change-expensive-3728050?ITO=newsnow OPINION By Daniel Storey Chief Football Writer Leicester City have a big problem: change is expensive The overspend on wages, the poor recruitment, the strategic failings - supporters deserve to learn how recovery will be planned June 04, 2025 6:00 am (Updated 6:01 am) Monday, 7 April was the low point of Leicester City’s desperate season. It wasn’t just that they became the first team in the top four tiers of English football to lose eight home league games in a row without scoring. It wasn’t just that Ruud van Nistelrooy had talked about a fast start in a must-win game and they found themselves 2-0 down after 11 minutes. Leicester’s starting XI that evening contained only one of the 10 players they had recruited since promotion at a cost of roughly £80m. It contained only one outfielder who had been signed the previous season – Conor Coady. Eight outfield players who had proven themselves incapable of survival in 2022-23 started the match and they were two years older and seemingly less wise. There is rolling a die and hoping for the best and there is rolling a die and hoping for a seven. The decline of Leicester can be reasonably spun as a cautionary tale for every ambitious non-elite club who achieves their miracle. You assemble a brilliant team, you fight at the top, you win and you inspire. But then you quickly learn that yesterday means everything and nothing. The memories of 2015-16 and beyond cannot be taken away. It is just as well: everything else has been ripped up. Jamie Vardy is a free agent after leaving the Foxes at the end of his contract (Photo: Getty) But that lets them off the hook: blame the players, not the game. High-end success may not have been repeatable or sustainable, but competence, in the right hands, is. This is a case study of following bad decisions with worse ones. It ends in toxicity, a plane buzzing over your own stadium with a message of mutiny pulled along behind it. Leicester (with the help of Nick de Marco QC) ran from their problems and now they have nowhere to hide. The charges that every rival felt were overdue have now landed and are likely to produce a heavy points deduction. Leicester argued that they existed in a hinterland, neither Premier League nor EFL. No man’s land is the natural habitat for now. Paying the price for past excess is no fun. The greatest damage to Leicester’s reputation and financial health was done three, four, five years ago: the wage increases to keep key players, the pursuit of the Champions League under Brendan Rodgers, the poor transfer business of 2021. Relegation with the seventh-highest wage bill in the country was a gross negligence issue. And, most gallingly, the players who retired or left for nothing: Wes Morgan, Youri Tielemans, Kelechi Iheanacho, Dennis Praet, Marc Albrighton, Caglar Soyuncu, Jonny Evans, Ayoze Perez, Nampalys Mendy, Christian Fuchs. Each was either a marker of a dying age or proof of a recruitment misstep. Some clubs can absorb this number of failures; Leicester never could. The great frustration of supporters is that a difficult situation has been exacerbated by every guilty party. Losing Enzo Maresca was unfortunate – appointing a former Nottingham Forest coach who had kept a club up through defensive football was not. The inability to attract Graham Potter and David Moyes, and the extraordinary gamble upon Van Nistelrooy, was a death knell for the season. This week, Van Nistelrooy let it be known that he is still to talk to his employers about his future. The expectation is that he must leave, but his contract runs until 2027 and thus will be costly for a club who can ill-afford any extravagance. Any sensible replacement might want to know the extent of the likely points deduction damage before signing up. That is expensive too: the only effective way to offset caution is with money. Jon Rudkin, the now unpopular director of football, has enough questions to answer to last the entire summer. But the most pertinent is why a club who knew they were sailing close to the wind spent £20m on a central midfielder (Oliver Skipp) a fortnight before the transfer window closed, £13m on an unproven central defender in Caleb Okoli (three league starts since November), used one of their two loan spots on a forward (Odsonne Edouard) who played 25 league minutes, and spent £4m on another central midfielder who played less than a minute in all competitions (Michael Golding). The usual advice is to look up the food chain, but many of Leicester’s players deserve their own censure here. Perhaps the defining image of the season was the grainy video of players on a Christmas party in Copenhagen in November while someone held a banner that read “ENZO I MISS U”. You need fight and unwavering commitment to survive as a promoted club. That night gave the impression that too few here possessed the will or the stomach for it. Leicester’s biggest immediate problem: change is expensive. The managerial situation will be costly. The loss of Jamie Vardy (another free transfer) means that the highest goalscorer from last season still at the club is 33-year-old Jordan Ayew. There are two players with obvious sale value (Bilal El Khannouss and Mads Hermansen), but Leicester have already lost two goalkeepers and El Khannouss was their highest chance creator and assist provider. This is how failure lays across you like a weighted blanket; it doubles over and folds and tucks into the spaces where potential is supposed to build. The wage bill has been greatly reduced but is still too high vs performance. The players that Leicester would like to move on most are likely to have few takers on permanent deals at prices that would avoid only causing more pain because they have to be replaced. And so the principal task for this summer becomes far less tangible: reforming trust and a connection with supporters who have just sat through the worst home run of any English league team in history. Leicester’s statement regarding their charges led with a lede-burying “is pleased that it successfully defended” line. I think that was a mistake. Supporters know more than anyone else how much has gone awry here. They have seen the wastage in action and have watched, in gory detail, its results. Running a football club, particularly over the summer, in an exercise in PR and excitement titillation. Here, they have seen too much for that to work. Leicester fans need the truth. This club flourished because it punched above its weight and took supporters on a journey. Only by reconnecting the disparate, discorded strands can it realistically hope to take them on a journey of recovery. Nobody should pretend that what comes next will not be painful. Talk them through the hardest calls and why they are necessary. The new manager cannot be sold a dream. Every player must buy into a rebuild. Shortcuts should be abandoned. Academy players should get their chance. Leicester found out what happens if you try to come back quicker. Now it is only important to come back stronger.

I’ve just watched a documentary, one of many I’ve viewed and there’s so many subtle and not so subtle many instances that are so reminiscent of the rise of the Nazis. Not suggesting we’re heading the same way but the methods are there.

I don't think you can use that as excuse other than the loss of attendance ££s we still had an LCFC with a CE who's sole responsibility and energy was to maintain the success of the club.

Probably make Amazon's own batteries

I'm sure if I was paid to come up with options I'd spend more than 10secs doing research mind you that would probably be more than KPFC seem to do.

The proposed timetable for North Stand redevelopment at Villa Park. #AVFC

Attendances 1956-57

Made In Leicester Rob Hubble This part of Abbey Park was used as a Plant Nursery up until 1930.

I think that's part of it, the decline in our status obviously lowers the range of managers we might consider would be interested. We're scraping the barrel with players and managers, I know we've been there before but we've never fallen from such a great height in such a quick time it's worse than the Taylor collapse for me.

Don't fancy any of them but I couldn't offer another option.

I'd like to think they'll have gone even further having agreed in principle on a manager and sorting the players out without publishing.

Wasn't thinking of the leaders/countries more individuals that disagree with her being there. The audacity of a Chinese national and a woman as well suggesting bad things about a country she's guest in. Tut tut.

Made In Leicester Rob Hubble Granby Street 1910. Not sure if already posted.

Will she be free to speak or even alive by the end of the year?