Where Did It All Go Wrong....

[Nii Lamptey]

Apart from the obvious..... Smith and co out of their depth, I'd put the blame mainly on recruitment - Suso's door.

We had to sign players to fill out the squad, but this season has if anything else proved, less is more.

Loan signings aside, this is a list of our purchases from the Summer and January windows:

Wesley - £22.5m
Mings – £20.07m
Douglas Luiz - £15.12m
Matt Targett - £13.95m
Ezri Konsa – £11.97m
Marvellous Nakamba – £10.8
Mbwana Samatta - £9.45m
Trezeguet - £9m
Anwar El Ghazi - £8.1m
Tom Heaton - £7.92m
Bjorn Engels - £7.2m
Jota - £4.05m
Kortney Hause - £3.06m

A grand total of £143.19m - ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY THREE MILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY THOUSAND POUNDS!!

Is quantity necessarily better than quality? For example, I'd much rather have seen Callum O'Hare getting game time over Trezeguet or El Ghazi. And what did Steer do wrong last season to get pushed out again this season - You could argue that his heroics helped to get us promoted and had earned that #1 jersey?

Doing a little digging, here are just 5 players I think would have had a positive impact on our performances this season.

Neal Maupay - £19.8m - Nasty little shit who cost less than Wesley
Aaron Mooy - £5.4m - Tidy player who likes a tackle... would have brought much needed steel into our midfield
Jarrod Bowen - £19.7m - Quality player, dad has links to Villa. Ended up signing for the porno dwarves.
Gary Cahill - FREE - Previous ties with club. Rumours that he didn't want to leave London, but surely the Villa link and close ties with Terry could have persuaded him?

and the final one -

Kalvin Phillips - £Whatever they want! - Can't believe nobody went in for him. A steal at whatever price.

Just the 4 players mentioned above would have cost just shy of 100 million pounds LESS than our current crop of misfits. And each one would have improved the team.

....and don't even get me started on the loan signings!!

[Villan82]

It went wrong in December 2019 when it was clear to everybody that the manager was out of his depth but the powers that be stuck their fingers in their ear instead of firing him.

[Nii Lamptey]

Yep. Agreed.... pretty much a perfect storm of wrongness!

Wrong manager, wrong director of football, wrong players.

[Nii Lamptey]

Yep. Agreed.... pretty much a perfect storm of wrongness!

Wrong manager, wrong director of football, wrong players.

Sickening to think that sorry lot cost that amount of money though. For Smith to not be able to get a song out of a squad that cost that much money (they've got to have something about them to command those transfer fees) is inexcuseable surely?!

[eamonn]

Some of those prices are exaggerated. £128m was the combined sum most accurately reported last summer. We didn't really over-pay, we just chose some wrong ones.

[Ads]

2015 we sell Benteke and don't replace him. We cobble together a divided squad, with quality, but poorly utilised and organised and suffer a real abject relegation. The most rotten this club has perhaps ever been.

We are taken over by a snake oil salesman, with poor shoes. We chuck a lot of money at the problem and add a lot of wages onto the books relative to income. By October it all goes wrong and we are fire fighting for the rest of the season, with more mismanaged spending in January.

The following summer we go for short-termist policy and gamble and lose. The squad needs replacing while the club falls to the edge of oblivion, only to be rescued at the last minute. More bumbled recruitment takes place, with some solid gems in McGinn, Tammy, decent players for that level in AEG and another howler in Bolasie. Critically we leave ourselves beyond short in defence. Another window of desperate recruitment.

Smith comes in steadies us, improves us, falters and then does something pretty spectacular. We're left with promotion and a squad of around 14 players, because of the continued and persistent mismanaged recruitment strategy.

So we have to purchase 10+ players out of necessity and not design. The consequence is that we are left with a squad who are not good enough. The strikers we have recruited are not good enough for right now. Wesley maybe, Samatta perhaps, Davis never, but that is just one area and sadly the most crucial area where our recruitment failed.

Aston Villa do not have a cohesive and consistent transfer policy. That is where it all goes wrong, time and time again.

[cdbearsfan]

No pace, no creativity.

No defender ever dreads playing against Wesley/Samatta/Davis/El Ghazi/Trezeguet.

Stop Grealish, stop Villa. That was the case in August when it was apparent we weren't going to be able to get Abraham back, we didn't address it. We clung onto a position where we could still stay up in January if we addressed that problem, again we failed to do so.

If teams have the lead against us, they have no fear that we will come back because we have so few frightening players.

When we have the lead, teams can camp in our half as we have no speed. When was the last time we scored on the counter attack? That's absolutely essential for nicking points at the bottom of the table. For all the stick our defence get, I think their goals against record isn't bad considering how little help at relieving pressure they get from our "attackers".

I don't expect us to be competing with Liberpool and Man City in the first season up. There is no reason whatsoever why nonsense teams like Watford and Southampton can have far better attackers than us.

Refusal to bring in attacking players of sufficient calibre has relegated us.

Our priorities for spending the Grealish money should be pace, pace and fucking pace.

[hilts_coolerking]

From the moment Lerner turned the taps off too far and too fast, the decision making at this club has been atrocious.  Owner after owner, CEO after CEO, manager after manager, transfer after transfer, it never seems to get any better.  One of the worst, in terms of how it will affect the club for the future, was not sacking Dean in December.

[DB]

The new guys bought in were over-priced. Most were either not 1st choice for their previous clubs or from mediocre teams. Not enough quality PL players bought in. Piss poor recruitment and a manager who is not up to the job as top flight manager. He should have gone in Dec and we should have sorted it out in Jan window. Suso and Smith have to go.

[SoccerHQ]

Day after promotion.

Smith and Purslow on their soapboxes at VP crowing after promotion. Yes we were all delighted to go up but that's never been what this club is all about, getting giddy from being promoted from the second division.

Had Purslow saying we were too big and clever for loans anymore and DS saying we'd attack every team in the division home and away. Naive words then, naive words now.

I simply hope the club has learnt from this. Next time we get promoted to the premier league can we please try and attempt and sign a couple of experienced international standard players? The opposition we played today did that and they seem to be pretty good nowadays.

[Damo70]

You can go back to MON's walk out on the eve of the season. I also think that was when Lerner started to think he didn't want or need the grief of owning a club. Then we had a dodgy owner (the most positive thing in recent years is how relatively quickly we were shot of him and taken over by what I still consider to be very good owners). As for where it went wrong this season the answer is it never went right from day one. We had to assemble a whole new squad and percentage wise we bought more misses than hits. Apart from the fact we clearly needed to bring in another proven striker our recruitment look solid and promising. Thirty two Premier League games later our summer recruitment (and indeed our January recruitment) is not looking very clever.

[olaftab]

Yep. Agreed.... pretty much a perfect storm of wrongness!

Wrong manager, wrong director of football, wrong players.

Let's not leave Purslow out of this. General feeling was that this bloke knows football but he has either made or allowed some very poor decisions. He is more culpable than others IMO.

[CT]

2011. MON walking out 5 minutes before the season started.

[David_Nab]

2011. MON walking out 5 minutes before the season started.

I used to think that but he was a busted flush , even if he stayed we would of struggled.His jobs after us have shown he was limited and as football developed he has been left behind.

[cdbearsfan]

1901, introduction of the maximum wage.