When Remi Garde was appointed Aston Villa manager, I thought they would start to show signs of recovery. Villa are one of the country’s biggest teams, I thought, probably too big to go down, and remember, they reached an FA Cup final last season.
On top of that, they’d sacked Tim Sherwood who, in the end, really seemed like a caraciture of a manager, a parody of the overconfident ‘cheeky chappy’ who had been thrown into football management and didn’t really know what to do. After an initial period of success, the act wore thin, and some awful tactical decisions were made.
That, I believed, was the key to Villa’s league position. And when Garde came in – the kind of manager you’d expect to sign the plethora of young, technical (mostly francophone) players who grace the Aston Villa squad – I genuinely thought he was the man to save Aston Villa. The poor tactical decisions would be reversed, and the players would start to show their quality.
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But that’s not what happened. What happened was what I would have predicted if Sherwood had stayed on as manager. Villa continued their downward spiral, and when you’re in 20th place, there’s nowhere left to spiral apart from right into the Championship.
Villa are acquiring more evidence every week that they are the worst team in the league. In fact, they’re starting to acquire evidence that they are one of the worst teams in Premier League history.
They’re starting to look like breaking some sort of record this season, managing the sort of points tally we saw Derby and Sunderland acquire all those years ago.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough, being just bad enough to be relegated this, of all seasons, is one of the worst fates imaginable. The embarrassment isn’t the only punishment.
Thanks to the new TV deal, which comes into place next season, the clubs finishing in the Premier League’s bottom three in May will essentially be handing somewhere in the region of £80m to one of the teams promoted from the Championship next season. Now is not the time to be relegated, and especially not if you’re a club whose last three decades or so has been played out exclusively in the top division.
The money difference over the last 15 years especially has been growing year on year, and the financial shock for a club who has only ever experienced the Premier League since its inception could be akin to boiling water on a chilled glass.
But here’s the more urgent, current problem: how do Villa go about the rest of the season? After all, there are still six months of it left. Even though they’re cut adrift at the bottom and look doomed, there is still – perhaps only theoretically – a chance of a great escape. After all, in the first half of the season, Arsenal managed nearly 40 points.
Villa might only need 30 or so to stay up. A similar points haul to Liverpool is what’s needed. Which seems very unlikely, but when you’re faced with the prospect of losing out on so much money, you could understand wanting to splash the cash in desperation in January.
So what happens if they do that? Presumably, Villa are only attractive to players who don’t mind a season in the Championship starting in September. Either that or to players who are swayed by a big wage. The sort of wage it might be possible for Villa to pay now, but probably not if they got relegated.
And so January will show us exactly what Villa are thinking. Do they go for broke trying to stay in the division? Or do they accept their fate and prepare for life in the Championship next season?
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It might be hard for Villa fans to take – and probably hard for most football fans to take, given Villa’s many years as a quality Premier League side – but it might be time to accept the drop and build for next season. And that involves lowering wages, somehow, trying to shore up the talent they have, giving the manager the chance to look to the sort of squad he wants to have in the lower division next season.
If they do that, they might be able to get a running jump at the Premier League next season, and perhaps that’s what makes footballing sense at this point. Forget about the league, try to generate some good vibes with a cup run, and set up for next season.
Given the promise of so much money in the Premier League next season, it’s natural to fear the drop just that little bit more than it would be for purely footballing terms. But seeing so many big clubs littered around the lower leagues after falling out of the Premier League, Villa might fear never coming back.
The temptation to throw all their money at this problem, to bet everything on black, must be overwhelming. But the more Villa spend, the more determined they are to beat the drop, the less likely they are to bounce back next season if they’re unsuccessful.
I though Garde would be a success, but it’s time to start accepting that he hasn’t been and probably won’t be. And it’s probably time to start prudently planning for next season in the lower division for Villa. If they don’t, the downward spiral will only continue further.
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