The most famous football team in the world: Tottenham Hotspur v Aston Villa preview and team news

Villa need to shake off the unwelcome, unnecessary and unacceptable political distractions of the week to focus on Premier League matters

As potential distractions go, this week has been an absolute doozy.

Aston Villa are the most famous football club not just in the Premier League but in the entire world. Okay, maybe it’s because of something that had nothing much to do with the club, but it’s about time.

The Maccabi Tel Aviv Europa League debacle has put Villa’s name at the top of the hit list for every bad-faith shitbird on earth and I’ve spent the last two days writing about Keir Starmer playing politics at Birmingham’s expense when the only involvement a sports writer should have with politicians is laughing at them when they pretend to understand football culture.

Starmer and the utterly reprehensible Kemi Badenoch have dangerously misread the temperature of this situation.

Going after the kind of cheap political points awarded by the worst human beings there are has Streisand Effected this thing right up to its eyeballs when really they should have kept their fucking mouths shut and listened to the guidance of the people who’d spent more than ten seconds dealing with the matter before it went supersonic.

I have so many complaints about how all this threatens to affect Villa and Villa supporters but the most immediate is that it could be – not necessarily will be, but could be – a distraction entirely outside the club’s control.