https://www.saddlers.co.uk/news/2026/june/05/saddlers-to-welcome-aston-villa-during-pre-season/
Yearly run around against the Villa confirmed.
Fixtures so far:
Worcester (A) Tuesday 7th July
Aston Villa (H) Tuesday 21st July
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Death, Taxes and Aston Villa at home.
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Good chance we beat them again, majority of their squad will be away at the World Cup, so they’ll only play kids and players that haven’t gone to the tournament.
Always one of the highlights of the summer and sure to be another sell out audience. Wonder if they will bring their Europa League trophy to display to the audience?
I know you don’t mean any harm but I’m really not in the mood for this nonsense today,
I’ll try and take it in the spirit it is meant though.
SOTV
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Maybe we can bring along our Champions of Trinidad trophy too?
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Trivela Cup runners up.
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So maybe someone at the club is really scrutinising what we say on UTS … 
Funny how we have complained about club silence and the lack of information on the friendly games, and then voila …
sorry me just being a little critical of the club.
Don’t care about any friendlies personally, and the Vile do donate the proceedings to us, I know it grinds a little, well it does on me, it’s like helping out poor little Walsall 
… but they are I suppose, just need the club to put it to good use, or tap them up for some decent loans off them.
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Do they? I know they did for a season post covid and we made a big deal of it but I thought we split the proceedings again now.
If they do still thats a great gesture.
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Well if they don’t any more, i’d rather we didn’t play them tbh, imho.
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They are touting it as our first pre-season so pretty much confirming that the Worcester game will be mainly our kids rather than the main squad. Will still go though.
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The club has monitored this site for years, even back to the Bonser & Whalley years.
They’ve probably got an old filing cabinet labelled the “UTS Files” with dossiers on those they consider the biggest troublemakers. 
What other criteria have they got, lets be honest
We’ve only officially announced one friendly and looking at alot of teams around us that would be decent away trips and local teams to us, these aren’t available to play:
Hereford, Hednesford, Chester, Rushall, Solihull.
Only Tamworth, Kidderminster and Telford really available
Would love Hereford away on the rattler if it was on a Saturday. Another long awaited trip to Edgar Street
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Sorry misread this 
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I may be in a minority but the villa pre season game doesn’t grab me in the slightest. I much prefer going to Kidderminster or any other non league ground. There’s no doubt it provides much needed income for the club which is always a good thing but aside from that it’s of no great importance to me personally.
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Agreed, surely we can get some other team down at the Bescot that can attract a crowd. Liverpool for an example. Other clubs can do it
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The fee a club like Liverpool would want would smash out of the water any gate receipts. I think I remember us approaching Celtic quite a few years ago and they wanted a million quid.
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Even when we had Ajax, there was only 2000 there.
Don’t have an issue of us playing Villa every year infront of a sell out crowd, get everywhere open and milk them as much as we can.
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