Unai Emery

[Villan82]

MON can't be judged aside from you 'one moment of spite'; the c unt squandered millions.

For sure but Lerner should never have given him that level of autonomy in the first place. We blamed MON for years afterwards but it was still a very strong PL squad he left behind, in European football too. Given he had been making noises about leaving from the previous April a competent board should have had a decent contingency plan in place. Instead we ended up with that clown McDonald initially, who should have been nowhere near the club, and later the disastrous Houllier experiment.

Lerner ended up giving Houllier more than 30m to spend that January anyway on Bent and Makoun. For every Beye, Heskey or a Sidwell, there was still the likes of Young, Carew, Milner and Downing. The development of Gabby from an average enough young player to a very good PL forward. Also a very solid PL team for the duration of his time. The game moved on and left MON behind subsequently anyway but I think the end clouds a reasonable appraisal of his time at Villa Park.

When Lerner appointed Houllier it was the first worrying sign. And then McLeish a year later. MON is a convenient 'Bad guy; if you want to overlook the fact that Randy Lerner turned a club that was a premier league ever present into relegation fodder through a staggering degree of incompetence.

[rob_bridge]

Hiring Houllier was nuts. He was not in great health, semi retired and hadn't done any coaching in 3 years. We ended up a relegation scrap - don't think I have ever seen a manager with such rubbish excuses for underperformance and results.

I remember we lost to Wolves and he said something like the players hadn't got over the previous defeat. Baffling.

He came in clearly wanting to tell a few home truths about fitness and professionalism and ended up antagonising practically all the established playing staff.

[Dick Edwards]

In terms of professional achievements, Unai Emery is the best manager we've ever appointed. Sure, I loved Ron Saunders, I loved Graham Taylor, John Gregory, Ron Atkinson and Brian Little for what each of them achieved at Villa, but without belittling their own professional achievements, none of them had Unai's catalogue of success and experience on their cv when they attended their job interviews with Ellis. That's not to say Emery is guaranteed to be a success here but we are very fortunate to have been able to appoint him as our manager.

[brontebilly]

MON can't be judged aside from you 'one moment of spite'; the c unt squandered millions.

For sure but Lerner should never have given him that level of autonomy in the first place. We blamed MON for years afterwards but it was still a very strong PL squad he left behind, in European football too. Given he had been making noises about leaving from the previous April a competent board should have had a decent contingency plan in place. Instead we ended up with that clown McDonald initially, who should have been nowhere near the club, and later the disastrous Houllier experiment.

Lerner ended up giving Houllier more than 30m to spend that January anyway on Bent and Makoun. For every Beye, Heskey or a Sidwell, there was still the likes of Young, Carew, Milner and Downing. The development of Gabby from an average enough young player to a very good PL forward. Also a very solid PL team for the duration of his time. The game moved on and left MON behind subsequently anyway but I think the end clouds a reasonable appraisal of his time at Villa Park.

We were forking out CL wages to get into and then not bother with Europa League.

Liverpool came knocking for Luke young and he was on 60k p/w and they were only going to offer him 40k so we were stuck with him.
He, Sidwell, Shorey, Davies, Knight, Warnock. Beye, Heskey - a lot of dosh on wages for non delivery

Part of the problem was that MON didn't believe in squad rotation or sport science generally. So the likes of the players above saw little regular game time. Knight was bought as a backup and did well for us in that role when the likes of Laursen were out. Doubt we lost money on him. Warnock was first choice under MON until Valencia gave him the run around in Wembley. There was laziness in a lot of those dud signings, MON in the main was a bit lazy.

But the wage bill going out of control wasn't MON's responsibility. That was Lerner and a dud CEO not assigning MON a proper budget to work with and instead being cheerleaders.

[pauliewalnuts]

The real problem with MON was that we caught him at the end of that arc of time where his type of management - traditional approach to transfer market, not tactically driven, not involved in training, mixing motivation and old school tactics and relying on getting more out of individual players than other managers might have otherwise done so - was petering out as something that would work at the top level.

His failure to get us past sixth, for example, was IMHO a reflection of the fact that there was a glass ceiling on how far that sort of management could get you any more. Above us, with perhaps the exception of Moyes, we had more switched-on, modern managers, whereas we had someone who was fighting for the championship of ten years previously.

Look at what happened to him when he left us, he didn't change his management style one iota, and the same weaknesses and flaws were shown up increasingly until he just became irrelevant.

In that whole era, we were lucky we had lots of money to spend.

We were not so lucky that it was MON spending it profligately, and that Lerner, solid of intention though he was at the time, had no appreciation of how to run a modern football club and opted to let MON handle it.

The fact remains that if Lerner had not let MON rule the entire domain in the first place, seeing off any outsiders brought in to try and make us act like a grown up organisation, then when he did flounce out at such a damaging time, it wouldn't have had to be anywhere near as bad as it was.

I always say this whenever this gets discussed, but look at Man City, who came into their riches at more or less the same time. Their owners were extremely rich, too, but 100 times as much as Lerner was, with a licence to print money, and one of the first things they did was go out and acquire Barcelona's club leadership, because even they, people for whom money had no real meaning, realised they needed to run it properly.

Lerner went out and got someone from his call centre in.

[darren woolley]

I'm loving what Unai's done so far in such a short space of time I'm really looking forward to when he gets a full pre season to work with the old and new players he brings in.

[paul_e]

The real problem with MON was that we caught him at the end of that arc of time where his type of management - traditional approach to transfer market, not tactically driven, not involved in training, mixing motivation and old school tactics and relying on getting more out of individual players than other managers might have otherwise done so - was petering out as something that would work at the top level.

His failure to get us past sixth, for example, was IMHO a reflection of the fact that there was a glass ceiling on how far that sort of management could get you any more. Above us, with perhaps the exception of Moyes, we had more switched-on, modern managers, whereas we had someone who was fighting for the championship of ten years previously.

Look at what happened to him when he left us, he didn't change his management style one iota, and the same weaknesses and flaws were shown up increasingly until he just became irrelevant.

In that whole era, we were lucky we had lots of money to spend.

We were not so lucky that it was MON spending it profligately, and that Lerner, solid of intention though he was at the time, had no appreciation of how to run a modern football club and opted to let MON handle it.

The fact remains that if Lerner had not let MON rule the entire domain in the first place, seeing off any outsiders brought in to try and make us act like a grown up organisation, then when he did flounce out at such a damaging time, it wouldn't have had to be anywhere near as bad as it was.

I always say this whenever this gets discussed, but look at Man City, who came into their riches at more or less the same time. Their owners were extremely rich, too, but 100 times as much as Lerner was, with a licence to print money, and one of the first things they did was go out and acquire Barcelona's club leadership, because even they, people for whom money had no real meaning, realised they needed to run it properly.

Lerner went out and got someone from his call centre in.

...because someone from his call centre was about the only person he could find that would be ok with MON being the real power at the club.

We had Bob Kain for a while remember and he at least had the right credentials. I seem to remember a few other names from that period as well.

[eamonn]

Faulkner did his best considering his lack of qualifications for the job. He's well-regarded by most people who I've read had interactions with him. No call-centres for him no more. 

[Risso]

...because someone from his call centre was about the only person he could find that would be ok with MON being the real power at the club.

We had Bob Kain for a while remember and he at least had the right credentials. I seem to remember a few other names from that period as well.

Yep, there was Kain and others with a similar pedigree, then we ended up with his credit card office manager and his mate the General.

O'Neill was just a dinosaur and I agree entirely with paulie's post above. I think of his 50+ transfers, only two or three were bought from outside either the English or Scottish leagues. Wasn't his final flounce at least partly to do with the fact that Lerner wouldn't sanction the £10m transfer of Aiden McGeady, a player who went on to be utterly shit at Everton and who then played mainly in the Championship and League 1?

[PeterWithesShin]

From memory Guzan, Salifou and Carew were the only players MON signed that weren't from British clubs. And Carew was offered to us rather than MON was after him.

[Risso]

From memory Guzan, Salifou and Carew were the only players MON signed that weren't from British clubs. And Carew was offered to us rather than MON was after him.

Exactly right. Guzan was only 23 when we signed him and so was only really a youth team/reserve prospect at that time, as we signed Friedel to be number one. Salifou was a deadline day last minute punt based on O'Neill sort of remembering seeing him at the World Cup.

[AV82EC]

Superbly summarised as to why both Lerner and MON utterly squandered the opportunity that presented itself. Lerner was a dilettante owner more interested in history and treated the whole project like a museum and words cannot hide my utter disdain for O’Neill and his abject failure. 3 x 6th place finishes and a League Cup final was nowhere near good enough for the money spent.

[paul_e]

Superbly summarised as to why both Lerner and MON utterly squandered the opportunity that presented itself. Lerner was a dilettante owner more interested in history and treated the whole project like a museum and words cannot hide my utter disdain for O’Neill and his abject failure. 3 x 6th place finishes and a League Cup final was nowhere near good enough for the money spent.

Lerners biggest problem was that, despite being a very wealthy man, he got a bit starstruck, pandering to mon, the fergie recommendation letter and a few other things over his time suggested a guy who was just happy to be in the same room as these people, and it blinded him.

[pablo_picasso]

And yes, I understand that O'Neill got us 3 top 6 spots & a League Cup final, but he also spent untold millions on players, swapped Gary Cahil for Zatiyah Knight & purposely made the signings of Steven Sidwell, Emile Heskey & Habib fucking Beye...

That's a bit #RootMaths.  If you take away the things he achieved with us, he didn't achieve anything with us.

But thats not what I said. I specifically highlighted what he achieved with us. I also highlighted the negative elements within his reign & why he actively purchased players like Knight, Beye, Sidwell, Heskey etc while walking away to ruin us so he could claim he did a magical job & nobody else could have done what he did. He build our foundations on quicksand so that as soon as he strategically left us in the shit, we would sink & he would be happily onto his next role, building on quicksand...

[paul_e]

And yes, I understand that O'Neill got us 3 top 6 spots & a League Cup final, but he also spent untold millions on players, swapped Gary Cahil for Zatiyah Knight & purposely made the signings of Steven Sidwell, Emile Heskey & Habib fucking Beye...

That's a bit #RootMaths.  If you take away the things he achieved with us, he didn't achieve anything with us.

But thats not what I said. I specifically highlighted what he achieved with us. I also highlighted the negative elements within his reign & why he actively purchased players like Knight, Beye, Sidwell, Heskey etc while walking away to ruin us so he could claim he did a magical job & nobody else could have done what he did. He build our foundations on quicksand so that as soon as he strategically left us in the shit, we would sink & he would be happily onto his next role, building on quicksand...

I think you're suggesting too much malice there. I don't believe he went into things looking at it in that way and I believe he truly wanted to be a success. The problem was that after the first 6th place he ran out of ideas and instead of adapting his style, altering the coaching, etc he just threw money at it (with the clubs backing) and that wasn't really what was needed. The last season though I do believe he was looking at ways to protect his reputation because, as mentioned above, he'd clearly reached his ceiling, I just don't think he was doing it when he signed players like Knight earlier in his time.