The Maths of Louie Barry Leaving Villa on a Permanent
Villa have sold Louie Barry to Sheffield Wednesday to get his wages off the books. That a player who managed one senior game in a cup game was earning as much as he was is a concerning story, and it isn’t UEFA’s fault...
Aston Villa have sold Louie Barry to Sheffield Wednesday on a four-year deal. On its own, that is a footnote: a young forward who never made it at Villa, off to find the regular football he never got at Villa.
Look at the numbers, though, and it fast becomes an important clue to Villa’s recent wage-to-income ratio problem. Barry reportedly was on more than £35,000 a week, a player who never played a single Premier League game for Villa.
Louie Barry’s Villa Wage Waste
It answers the question plenty of supporters keep asking: how does a club posting record revenue end up scrapping against Squad Cost Ratio limits and a UEFA settlement? If a player who has barely kicked a ball for the first team is earning at least £35,000 a week, the wage bill is not being strangled by bad luck. It is being strangled by poor planning and accounting.
The sale tells the same story. A season or so ago, £3m+ was the figure floated for Barry’s transfer, the fee Villa will actually collect is thought to be well south of all of that. The player originally cost Villa £880,000, in a deal that could have risen to £3.5m with add-ons. The fee though isn’t really the issue here, it was getting the wages off the books.
Barry spent over a decade in West Bromwich Albion’s youth ranks before a move to Barcelona for the 2019/20 season, the sort of transfer that marks a teenager out as one to watch, even if the COVID period that followed did his development few favours. Villa brought him home, and at youth level he delivered, lifting the FA Youth Cup. Senior football was another matter. His single game was the FA Cup third round of January 2021, when 10 first-team Villa players had tested positive for COVID and a Villa academy side was thrown to Liverpool. They lost 4-1. The highlight, on Barry’s only senior appearance in claret and blue, was his breakaway finish to get Villa’s goal on the night.
That was as good as it got. Villa extended his contract a couple of times, as he drifted through nine loan spells across all three divisions of the EFL.
Like with Adama Traoré before him, it seems Villa were ultimately caught drinking the Barcelona academy Kool-aid.
Ex-Villan Returns to Wednesday
At Sheffield Wednesday, Barry joins another former Villa man, Barry Bannan, who this week signed a one-year deal to return to Hillsborough. Bannan is closing on 500 appearances for the Owls after more than a decade at the club with 477 appearances in all competitions.
Balancing the Books
When it comes to squad cost ratios, some Villa supporters like to play the victim card, and the club is happy to let them: UEFA, the settlement, everyone else’s spending, all offered up as the reason Villa cannot kick on.
Some of that is fair, but even with no limits at all, nothing about Villa’s recent transfer business suggests they would spend well. The Harvey Elliott shambles was not UEFA’s fault, nor was deciding taking on Jadon Sancho’s wages. The Barry wage situation is far from an isolated incident. The wage structure, the recruitment, the value for money: those are home-grown problems, there long before any UEFA settlement arrived to expose them.
Selling Louie Barry is sensible housekeeping, and there should be more of it, in terms of Villa casting a sharper eye to the older end of the spectrum of their youth ranks to cull unnecessary spend.
Hopefully, more waste can be cut and lessons learnt, as Villa are not only a club hemmed in by rules they resent. They are a club that handed £35,000 a week to players who never played, and then wondered why the sums would not add up.
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