So just over halfway through the transfer window and still no signings. What’s the holdup at Villa? The simple answer is money.
Now, like many of you, I’ve read and heard that money is available, budgets ranging from a respectable £20 million to a measly £5 million; however, the fact of the matter is this is not the budget we should be trying to find out about.
Lerner has proved time and again that he is willing stump up the cash to provide us with a marquee signing, so in actual fact the budget given for transfers is not what interests me. Transfer budgets and fees are nothing more than the bunting in the window, the yardstick for the media to compare assets. The nitty gritty in the transfer quest is wages—it’s all well and good paying a club £12 million for a player, but if he wants £50k a week and we can only offer £30k then I’m afraid it’s back to the drawing board.
I’m not saying that small wages cannot work, because they can. Swansea is a prime example, which, according to their fans, has a wage cap of £25k a week.
The problem with Villa is we have gone from paying Grade A wages to Grade C without first visiting Grade B, and the honest answer is you cannot do that in any business, yet alone football. The tap needs to be turned down gradually, not a sudden stop.
Furthermore our position at this current time leaves us in a quite a poor negotiating position. Other chairmen, players and agents are well aware of what battles await us, so the price to come to us goes up. Those players and agents may also want to know what other transfer activity we are pursuing in order to keep us up—after all they want to be sure that they or their client is still playing top-flight football come August.
This scenario, coupled with fact that the club are so adamant after the O’Neill era that they won’t get ripped off and overpay for players, leads to some slow-moving negotiations.
I still believe players will come, I just hope they are the players we need, and not some bargain-basement has-been or wannabe. I don’t think they will be, but addressing the youth-blended-with-experience conundrum is a tough one, and to be honest it’s not a cheap market, either.
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