Well, we didn't have a bottomless pit of money and he spent it all on those players. And yes - Dunne and Collins physically threatened a Villa legend, for one thing, and they and Warnock spent a lot of the GH and Eck years mouthing off at the young players whenever he messed up. Those three were a poisonous influence, for which privilege, thanks to MON, we paid six figures a week. The current mob are just cheap and trying their best. That's not to mention the money spent on the likes of Sidwell, Heskey, Harewood, Shorey, Carson, Davies, Knight. Yes he also signed good players, but they were hardly amazing finds - everyone in the league knew about Milner and Young, and he inherited Stan Petrov at Celtic, he didn't go out to find him, as he inherited Henrik Larsson, Martin Laursen and Gareth Barry. His scouting was UKIP-esque and his spending was like Mike Tyson's circa 1995.
As for guesswork, well, look at Moyes and Pardew - hardly the game's greatest thinkers but they assembled teams more cheaply than MON which played better football, had better squad depth and finished higher.
Martin O'Neill wasted the best opportunity this club had had in years, and he did so in such a spectacularly obnoxious, gratingly dislikable and flouncingly prima-donna-ish way that I can't believe he still has even one defender among Villa fans.
Spot on Monty.
Yes,we finished 6th under MON.
Yes we spent like a big club in those first few years.
Yes it was exciting, even exhilarating at the time, but.......
As others have said, we could have achieved the same on far less money. Why the hell we needed so many expensive non playing squad members, when baring injury, if you were one of the favoured 11, your job was safer than a bank director in the early 2000s.
The one thing that's been missing from day 1, has been someone with oversight of the squad and managing the value of these assets, because that is precisely what a player registration is, an asset that is dropping in value from day 1of the contract. Unfortunately that's something that MONs ego would never have accepted.
With regards to the funding, I may be mistaken, but I'm sure I remember reading that funding wasn't from Randy's personal fortune, but from the Lerner family trust, in which case it's not solely Randy who's making the decisions.
I'm convinced that the plan (somewhat naively) was to qualify for the Champions League within 4 to 5 years by investing in the 1st team squad.
When it became apparent that this wasn't going to happen with MON they didn't know what to do.
That particular problem solved itself, but created a new one. I know he wasn't popular at the time, but I think that Houllier was a pretty good shout at the time. And although he never really "got us", he had the right idea and had identified the bad eggs in the squad pretty quickly. The same bad eggs that we have spent 3 years cleaning out.
It's with the exit of Houllier, that I think it really went to ratshit, with the decision that will never be understood.
Again the lack of oversight of the management of the squad showed itself, with the drastic change of direction to a manager whose "style" was completely inappropriate for the squad that was in place.
The constant changes of managers and style have had the inevitable effect on performance, and with each fall in performance, came further retrenchment as the desire to get the wages down to a percentage of turnover, until you end where we are today.
I said under McLeish, that the problem was, that as performances fall, so does the income, which leads to further cuts in wages, which results in poorer performances etc. Repeat until relegated, unless you can find someone who can get a group of lower quality players to over perform,which is pretty much where we are now.
The truly interesting point will come if we do finish 10-12th, if that will induce an increase in spending again.
