VILLA TAKEOVER: Much ado about reheated nothing

If you check out the Aston Villa section of NewsNow right now, you'll be awash in a flood of stories about the club now being dirt cheap. They all seem to be coming from a Mirror report that says Randy Lerner would be willing to part with his slightly-less-than-beloved toy for a mere £150 million now. That report talks about some possible buyers for the club. That's new and interesting! Let's have a look:

Potential bidders include American outfit the Phoenix Group plus a Qatari consortium, members of whom recently attended the Chelsea game.

So, to recap: according to the Mirror, the club are down to £150 million and a mysterious poorly-researched Phoenix Group are interested in buying.

Except we've seen all of this before. It was widely circulated that Randy Lerner had dropped the price of the club to £150 million all the way back in June. The source of those reports? Why, none other than the Mirror.

As for the Phoenix Group, we heard about them yesterday. The rumour that started with a tweet from The Secret Footballer is now doing that thing that rumours in the football press do: getting reprinted so much it starts to become accepted fact. Don't let that happen.

If there is anything of note here, it's the Qatari consortium that gets obliquely mentioned. We've heard rumblings of that before, and if they were at the Chelsea match then that could be a good sign of interest. But it's just that, a sign of interest. If you're buying a house, you look at lots of houses. Simply looking at a thing tells us nothing.

So yeah, there's plenty of news in the Aston Villa takeover saga. Plenty of news so long as you don't mind your news reheated and unsourced, that is.