Aston Villa must Lerner from past transfer mistakes

18Jan 2013

England - Premier League

Aston Villa have become a selling club under the ownership of Randy Lerner says Hannah Duncan, but is the American entrepreneur the only man to blame for his club's current gloomy situation?

Only seven clubs have featured in every Premier League season since its inception in 1992, but that figure could drop to six by next season, with top flight stalwarts Aston Villa languishing in the relegation zone.

There's no denying that historically Villa are a 'big club', but as Newcastle proved in 2008/09, the saying 'we're too big to go down' simply has absolutely zero foundation in reality. And for Villa fans, it could be coming to a club near them soon, with their side at 2.1 for the drop.

It's easy for fans, pundits and the media to look at a club in crisis and blame the current set of players or management. But in Villa's case this simply does not hold true.

There can be no doubting Paul Lambert is a very good, fairly young manager who is capable of doing a solid job - much like he did at Norwich - at many a Premier League club.

And it's also impossible to point the finger at the players. Lambert fielded a starting XI with an average age of just 23 years and 120 days in their draw against Swansea on New Year's Day, with injuries to the experienced heads of Ron Vlaar and Gabriel Agbonlahor, as well as the on-going absence of Stiliyan Petrov decimating the squad.

They face local rivals West Brom on Saturday who themselves have lost their last three league outings, but Paul Lambert's side are big outsiders at 5.7 to win at the Hawthorns - something which would have been almost laughable a few seasons back.

So who is to blame for Villa's plight? A club that reached the League Cup final in 2010 and were battling for a Champions League spot at the same time are now entrenched in an unsightly relegation battle with the likes of QPR, Reading, Wigan and Southampton.

And while they've fought their way to this season's Capital One Cup semi-finals, the Villans suffered a crushing 3-1 defeat in the first-leg against League Two Bradford last week. Yet they remain 1.86 favourites to beat the Bantams and progress to the final and are at 5.5 to win the trophy.

Randy Lerner will cop a lot of the flack for not putting his hand in his pocket, but looking back at his short ownership of the club, can anyone really blame him?

When he bought Villa from Doug Ellis in 2006, Lerner inherited Martin O'Neill and a group of promising players.

But this was where Lerner made his first mistake, as he allowed O'Neill to take full control of playing matters, from team selection through to contracts and wages. The former Celtic boss took the bait of high transfer fees and handed out long-term, highly salaried deals as easily as Roman Abramovich hands out P45s.

But the new arrivals weren't all shrewd acquisitions. The now Sunderland manager signed the likes of Nigel Reo-Coker for £8.5m, Stephen Warnock for £7m, Steve Sidwell for £5.5m and Curtis Davies for £10m - to name but a few. All in all, Lerner forked out a net spend of just under £82m on transfer fees with O'Neill at the helm - a figure which could simply not be recouped when it came to sell-on fees.

And while Villa made a tidy profit on the likes of Stewart Downing, James Milner, Gareth Barry and Ashley Young, the sales of these players pushed Lerner towards turning the Villans into a selling club - and even then they struggled to do that well at times, letting the likes of Gary Cahill and Craig Gardner go for a pittance.

So it's little wonder Lerner is shirking what many consider to be his responsibility to put his hand in his pocket and buy Villa out of the mess they've found themselves in.

Spending £7m on Christian Benteke over the summer seems to be as far as he's willing to go and while the Belgian looks a formidable force on his day, the lack of service and general ups and downs faced by any striker - let alone one as young and inexperienced as Benteke - means he can't always be relied upon for goals.

There can be no doubting the uphill battle which faces Lerner, Lambert and Villa as a whole. The mess they find themselves in has been years in the making and could take as long to recover from.