Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
If greed & gambling can cripple an institution like Villa,it can destroyanyone
WITH respect to the many worthy clubs who have suffered financial trauma, this is Aston Villa we are talking about.
An institution.
Never mind the Big Six, Aston Villa were part of the only Big Whatever that matters. The Big Twelve, the founding fathers of the Football League.
This is the club of seven titles and seven FA Cups.
This is the club of Rotterdam, 1982. “Shaw, Williams prepared to venture down the left. There’s a good ball in for Tony Morley. Oh, it must be … it is … Peter Withe.”
This is the club whose stadium reeks of grand tradition, home to footballing splendour long before you could pay three hundred quid to peer at players through oneway glass.
This is Aston Villa we are talking about.
And last week, to meet the payroll, they went to Burnley
– a fellow member of the Big Twelve – and asked them to bring forward a payment due on the sale of Ashley Westwood.
In return, Villa lopped off a percentage.
It was the equivalent of emptying the change jar to pay the gas bill.
With more demands looming
– and they have somehow managed to satisfy another from the taxman for £4million – Tony Xia’s people insist they are working to find short-term solutions, at least.
In other words, they are looking under cushions, down the backs of settees, in old coat pockets. Xia’s largesse has dried up and if you are
thinking of making an offer, you are buying a club that will need a £100m hole plugging. Why? Because of the reckless pursuit of the Premier League’s golden egg.
And because an owner was obsessed with the inflated kudos that goes with it.
“My ambition is to bring Villa to the top six in less than five years and I hope it can be (one of) the top three in the world – even the best well known in the world – in less than 10 years,” Xia said when he bought the club two years ago.
Like the daydreaming. But you don’t own a club like Aston Villa, you should be its guardian. It is a club ‘owned’ by the community, by its heritage. The overriding ambition of the person in financial possession of the club should be to safeguard its healthy future.
Instead, Xia took an almighty punt and everyone, executives including the suspended chief executive Keith Wyness, who should have known better, stood by, believing Chinese money never stops flowing.
Well, it does. Right now, the Chinese government is cracking down on levels of overseas investment and that could yet affect the likes of West Brom and Wolves.
That is another story with very serious ramifications but the bottom line is if you accept investment from China, you are, to a large extent, at the mercy of the Chinese government.
That issue is for the future but, in the here and now, Villa are left with tax bills and wage bills they will, at best, very soon be struggling to meet.
They paid Premier League salaries to players they thought were Premier League standard but simply were not.
Henri Lansbury on 40 grand a week with three years of his contract left to run, Ross Mccormack on the same with two years remaining, Mile Jedinak has one season to go on £50,000 a week.
It was not just a gamble that failed, it was recklessness, it was playing fast and loose with a great club’s future.
Of course, had they won the play-off, the scenario might be different, but only a little. They would have to borrow against future Premier League earnings and the squad would be nowhere near good enough to survive at that level.
The simple truth is, no matter how rich the owner seems, spending money so far out of line with the level any club is at, is a road to ruin.
It is a lesson gone unheeded in the past but if it happens at an institution such as Aston Villa, it might finally hit home.