Aston Villa announced the signing of Hibernian midfielder John McGinn, who joins Villa on a four-year contract for an undisclosed figure – probably around the £2.5m-£3m mark.
The all-action box-to-box midfielder had been a massive fan favourite during his time at Hibs and he isn’t short of positive references throughout his former club.
The Scottish international told Villa’s media team, it had been “a crazy few days” with the transfer, done and dusted in the first part of this week.
“I had the phone call on Monday night, I was around the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and jumped on a flight,” recalled McGinn. “I had a look around and met the manager and coaching staff.”
It seems the dinner he had with Steve Bruce that MOMS wrote about earlier today was a clincher, as was Villa Park.
“The one that got it for me was when I went and sat in the stand at Villa Park and I could picture myself playing there,” said McGinn.
“It just felt right.”
Deja Vu
In making the move from Hibs to Villa, the 23-year-old follows in the footsteps of one of Villa’s Class of ’82.
Back in 1979, one Des Bremner joined Aston Villa from Hibs for a fee of £275,000. Having played almost 200 games north of the border, he would soon etch his name in Villa history as one of the squad of 14 players used to win the League in the 1980/81 season and then as a member of the immortal Aston Villa European Cup winning team of 1982.
Bremner overlapped his former Hibs teammate Alex Cropley at Villa. Cropley had also started his career at Hibernian, coming to Villa via Arsenal from the Edinburgh team and leaving B6 in 1980.
Lets hope McGinn can be the kind of success that Des was at Villa. Winning a top tier league title and European Cup within his first three years might be a push, but lets hope he starts by helping Villa win promotion.
Good luck to him.
UTV
PS – I could have done an article on Ulises de la Cruz, who also joined Villa from Hibs, but I decided not to…
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Great signing did Villa manage this without talksport biggest bunch on numpties on the net.
And how did the club manage to loose Bryan as I’ve said before we just faff around instead of getting the job done, it beggars belief, and even today we are still talking about Snodgrass even though WH have said no go and the player himself has said he wants to stay at WH come on Villa wake up to reality, we need a striker and fast. But we’ve known that for weeks and nothing has happened.