The new owner of Aston Villa has vowed to transform the recently relegated club into one of the world’s top sides, pumping up to £50m into their coffers before next season and shunning talented but lazy players.Xia Jiantong, a 39-year-old millionaire from east China who uses the English name Tony Xia, was unveiled as Villa’s new owner on Wednesday, one month after the club dropped into the Championship following one of the most disastrous seasons in their 142-year history.Aston Villa agree sale of club to Chinese businessman Dr Tony Xia Read moreSpeaking on Thursday afternoon at his 19th-floor office in Beijing’s financial district, Xia said he was preparing to embark on an extensive revamp of the club in an effort to secure immediate promotion back to the Premier League. Once that was achieved he would fight to turn Aston Villa into a global footballing force.“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 told the Guardian in one of his first face-to-face interviews since the deal was announced.“At least [until] now what I have planned [in my career] everything has been achieved. Nobody believe in the beginning but I made it happen no matter how many years it took.”Asked for his message to Villa fans, Xia said: “Forget the past and think we are going to enter into a new age.”However, Aston Villa’s new chairman admitted his immediate challenge would be fighting a way back to the top flight. “The first priority is to get promoted. I feel a lot of pressure. I think a lot of Villa fans are eager to get back up to the Premiership, so the next one year will be very tough for me. I hope we can do it.”Xia said his main concern was finding the best manager and confirmed he had held discussions with a number of candidates, including the former Chelsea and West Bromwich Albion manager Roberto Di Matteo and the former Southampton and Leicester City manager Nigel Pearson.“We have several very good candidates … I have talked to all of them,” Xia said, adding that the decision would be made in the next two weeks. “The most critical thing now is to get the right manager … [We] need a really good coach who knows how to play in the Championship. It’s even harder than the Premiership. We need to figure out how to reorganise the team.”The incoming manager would be given transfer funds of between £20m and £50m, depending on how many players he believed were needed, Xia said.“For now, I am confident. I think we will add six to seven players in maybe six or seven positions [before the start of the season] and we are going to bring some young talented people from the academy to play in the first squad … I think a lot of them can play very well in the Championship.”The businessman, who returned to China from England this week, said he hoped the devastated Villa fans would look to the future and throw their support behind his plans.He defended the highly unpopular Randy Lerner and said some of the abuse directed at him by fans was “unfair”.Randy Lerner is a nice guy and does have a passion for this club. He really wanted to make the club much better“Actually, he is a nice guy and he does have a passion for this club. He really wanted to make the club much better. He invested a lot of money.”However, in an admission of the toxic relationship that developed between Lerner and fans, the new Villa chairman recognised he would need to build a much better dialogue with fans than his distant predecessor. “Communication will be a very important part,” he said.Having watched Villa’s last home game, against Newcastle United on 7 May, Xia said he planned to become a well-known face at Villa Park and would move to Birmingham with his wife and 18-month-old daughter in an attempt to win over fans and help with the push for promotion.“I am going to spend a lot of time there, especially in the first season,” he said, adding: “I think I will buy a house maybe in the next month.”Xia was born in Quzhou, a mid-sized city about 400km south west of Shanghai, to an agricultural technician father and a housewife mother.“I grew up in a very normal family,” he said – but according to reports in China’s domestic media he was far from a normal child. They describe Xia, who was one of three children, as a child prodigy who left home to study at university in Beijing at the age of 14.Five years later, aged 19, Xia packed his bags and crossed the Pacific to spend six years studying at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.He also spent five months as an exchange student at Oxford University in 2002, during which time he said he had become a fan of Aston Villa after watching a game at Villa Park. “I’ve been a fan of the English football league for many years,” he said.Asked about his first match at Villa Park, the entrepreneur said: “You know the feeling there. It’s not like excitement, it is like a shock when you are in that environment.”Xia said he made his fortune working on infrastructure projects across a rapidly urbanising China and had taken over Recon Group, the Beijing and Hangzhou-based holding company behind the purchase of Aston Villa, in 2004.Perhaps appropriately for the new owner of a crisis-hit football club, he said the company’s name was an abbreviation of the word “reconstruction”.According to the Financial Times Recon Group has controlling stakes in companies that include a soap maker and a Shanghai-based company that produced 150,000 tonnes of the food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG) last year. That firm reportedly made a net loss of $77.7m last year.In an interview with Sky News, the former Villa midfielder Ian Taylor described Xia’s takeover as “great news” but admitted he was “a bit reserved about the qualifications of the new owner”. Tony Xia Tony Xia says Aston Villa ‘will add six to seven players in maybe six or seven positions’ before the start of next season. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/ReutersSpeaking on Thursday, Xia insisted he was the perfect man for the job. He described himself as a hard-working, self-made millionaire who would have little patience with overpaid players who were not pulling their weight.“For a lot of Chinese now, they think the only way you become rich or become successful is because you have grown up in a rich family or you have a whatever daddy – a rich daddy, a powerful daddy or whatever,” he said. “At least from my experience, if you keep working hard you still have a chance … I think attitude is more important than talent. So that is one of the basic principles for me to give advice to the [new] coach to choose players to revamp the team.”Aston Villa’s Randy Lerner says blame for relegation rests solely with him Read moreXia promised to pump significant funds into the club but said he would not attempt to copy what he called the “money-burned” model of teams such as Manchester City. “I don’t think that’s a healthy model and it can’t last long,” he said.Xia said he would return to Birmingham in the next fortnight in order to start the rebuilding process and engage with the fans.“They need to know that I am one of them,” he said. “I will do whatever I can to promote the club. I hope we can bring everything back on to the right track as soon as possible.”The current situation at Aston Villa “could not be worse,” Xia admitted. “So I hope all the Villa fans can really stand up together. I hope after one year we will be happy.”
Top 6 in five years sounds sensible.Then he blew it.
These comments are worryingly reminiscent of the early utterings of the previous owner.
Why do I see Elton John when I look at him?
He says "forget the past" why may I ask should we?We have had from time to time a glorious past!
Quote from: Des Little on May 19, 2016, 03:43:42 PMWhy do I see Elton John when I look at him?I see Buggles and Video Killed the Radio Star, which is not something I want to be reminded of every time I go down the Villa.
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Topic: Tony Xia interview in The Guardian (Read 44427 times)
