The 10-Year Anniversary of Aston Villa’s Nightmare
On 2 June 2016, Aston Villa appointed Roberto Di Matteo as the man to get them out of the Championship. Ten years on, Aston Villa have just won the Europa League and have played in the Champions League. Spoiler: the Italian ex-Chelsea player had nothing to do with it.
There is no polite way to describe what Aston Villa were in June 2016.
Villa had just been relegated from the Premier League for the first time in 29 years. They were bottom of the 2015/16 Premier League table by some distance, on a sorry 17 points. Looking back from where Villa are today, it’s a genuine toss up for what retrospectively was the biggest surprise of the season – Leicester City winning the league or Villa registering just three wins.
Managerial Merry-Go-Rounds
Four managers had rotated through the dugout in a single season – Tim Sherwood, interim manager Kevin MacDonald, Rémi Garde, and interim manager Eric Black. Randy Lerner, who had owned the club since 2006 and watched it slide from European football into the Championship, was finally finding a buyer. The buyer was Tony Xia. Nobody knew yet what that meant.
The clues came early though. Even before the relegation season had ended with the inflatables being cleared off the pitch in Villa’s last home game, the 0-0 draw with Newcastle (ironically the most entertaining game of the season due to the fan protest), the managerial situation for the following season had seemingly been locked in.
The no nonsense Nigel Pearson had been in talks with Randy Lerner and had been seen at Villa Park too. He was a shoe-in and potentially a pragmatic choice considering the shake-up Villa needed, but the appointment fell through as soon as Tony Xia took over.
The man who got the job was Roberto Di Matteo, with Steve Clarke as his assistant. A Champions League winner with Chelsea to manage Championship Aston Villa was the headline that seduced Xia.
At the time, Steve Clarke’s credentials were the most promising factor of the Villa revamp equation. Di Matteo’s European Cup-winning pedigree as an interim manager at Chelsea appealed to Tony Xia’s ambitions for the club’s profile in China. As MOMS highlighted at the time, Di Matteo had never completed a second year as manager anywhere. He lasted four months at Villa.
For those who remember back in 1987, when a determined Graham Taylor joined Villa from Watford, with the laser focus of getting Villa back to the top tier in the first attempt, this did not feel close to that.
While Taylor swiftly and astutely assembled an all-action, dynamic team you could really get behind, Villa recruitment under Di Matteo and Xia seemed under-realised. MOMS couldn’t believe some of the simplistic logic offered up at Fan Consultation meetings by senior figures at the club. I’m paraphrasing, but in signing both Jonathan Kodjia and Ross McCormack, who between them scored 40 goals the season before, apparently that meant Villa would be guaranteed 40 goals too. You only had to see them try to play together once to work out that was highly unlikely to happen.
Despite Villans on Twitter drinking the Dr Tony Kool-Aid, Tony Xia’s Villa was a slow-motion disaster. Late night My Old Man Said podcast recording sessions, tended to end with internet searches to see if Xia’s supposed company Recon was actually a real company.
A Parachute Payment Loophole?
Later on, MOMS contributed to the Fan-Led Government Review of Football Governance, the notion that there was a potential loophole for overseas buyers of recently relegated Championship clubs to essentially gamble on getting the club promoted with the parachute payments the clubs received once relegated. The fit and proper means test of overseas ownership essentially only required a two-year business plan, despite there being a major drop-off in the third year in parachute payments.
So, essentially, if the owner failed to get the club promoted in the first two seasons, there could be serious ramifications if the owner didn’t have the financial infrastructure in place for a third season.
Doctor Tony Red Flag
The alarm bells started to ring as early as February 2017, when Tony Xia quote-tweeted a reader recommending the MOMS article published on February 16th 2017 entitled What’s Going Wrong With Aston Villa and Should Bruce Stay? with a seemingly paranoid outburst.
The article hadn’t actually ‘insulted’ him at all, but seemed to have touched a nerve mentioning ‘parachute payments’ in each of the opening two paragraphs. For example:
Xia has certainly put the money into his gamble, whether it has been covered by parachute payments and player sales, the intent has very much been there. In fact, you couldn’t ask for more.
A guilty conscience? The Doctor doth protest too much.
Villa’s Crazy Decade
The club descended further – Championship mid-table, HMRC winding-up petitions, players going unpaid. The nadir came not in 2016 but in the years that followed. The sale to Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens in 2018 stopped the bleeding, and there’s no doubt they couldn’t quite believe they got to buy a prestigious club at such a distressed asset price. Which subsequently, after cleaning up Xia’s mess and owning it outright, then benefiting from the Midas touch of Unai Emery, is now worth according to Forbes over ten times what they paid.
Dean Smith got Villa promoted in 2019. Emery arrived in November 2022 and three-and-a-half years later, Villa have won the Europa League and have played Champions League football.
The 2016 version of Aston Villa – the one appointing Championship managers, being sold to a buyer nobody had heard of, MOMS posting pieces about whether Nigel Pearson or Roberto Di Matteo was the better option – could not have imagined Istanbul. Nobody could.
That is what ten years in football can look like.
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