As fans often approach me in order to ask if I can establish better communication between our beloved club and those of us who support it in sporting and financial terms, I regularly have to explain how things just aren’t how they used to be.
Over the past 20 years, the face of football in this country has changed yet stayed the same. On one hand, the football clubs in the top flight, especially those who have maintained ever present status, are richer than ever, bolstered by the hundreds of millions that Sky television has poured into the game.
On the other hand, progress of the national sport outside of the domestic league has sat suspended in time, perhaps having even regressed as England seem to continue to promise much and deliver little.
What does this have to do with Aston Villa I may hear you ask? Well let me explain.
In their present incarnation the club is, in real terms, more disconnected from the fans than ever. Whilst trite content is trotted out in the form of club TV station AVTV, or banal tweets by the club’s official Twitter account, insight is often lacking with a swirling vortex of emptiness regularly filled with the proverbial nonsense that is spread around social media platforms like wildfire.
As a pragmatic observer, it is easy to understand why the club is reticent to give out any true insight into its operation. When I am faced with questions such as those I posed at the start of my article, I reply with an answer that doesn’t always sate the desire of the person asking them.
“The club don’t speak because they simply don’t have to, just the same as any privately owned organisation.”
Despite Villa’s transformation from locally owned former European champions to billionaire owned also-rans, some fans still don’t want to accept the modern Aston Villa. They look back through rose-tinted glasses at Doug Ellis’ brash-but-open style and many fans wish they could get the same information out of the rather more reserved Randy Lerner.
Personality wise, Ellis and Lerner could be seen as diametric opposites, the former consistently wanting to be in the limelight, whilst the latter could sometimes be mistaken for even existing such are the limited nature of his communiques.
On the other hand, there is no doubting that both men are intelligent individuals with a major differential being the use of hyperbole by Villa’s former chairman. After all, you don’t tend to be in a position of owning a top flight football club by being an ignoramus.
Getting back to the nature of communication, or rather the lack thereof, I sympathise with fans who can perceive the club to be akin to an impenetrable monolith-like structure. It is hard to retain a common sense of identity with an organisation when conversation is either absent or peripheral – some may vaunt opportunities like the supporters group as an arena to develop insight into the club on some level, but the reality is that briefs on refreshments and other small topics will hardly sate the desire of a fan wanting to relate with his lifelong supported team.
For fans, perhaps the easiest way to deal with matters is to get to a position of acceptance. Just as psychological grief scale the Kübler-Ross cycle charts the progress of a person through emotional states in response to loss, so fans have experienced, and are still experiencing, a disconnect akin to the dying of the club they used to know.
Despite it being challenging for fans to accept the current setup, stark realities show evidence that billionaire ownership is the only way to compete effectively at the top. For every fan who may have grown despondent of Lerner’s mostly silent tenure at the club, others have grown to realise that Villa’s forecast would be far more bleak minus their far-from-brash American owner.
Other fans continue to display critical views of Lerner for his aim to push the club towards self sufficiency, presumably due to the fact that these people think football investments should roughly equate to throwing one’s money into the proverbial bottomless pit.
With Financial Fair Play looming larger and larger as time progresses, and coupled with the comparative majority of owners who don’t own anywhere near as much liquid capital as that of Messrs Mansour and Abramovich, it would be far from surprising if the Premier League’s American owner contingent press for a rebalancing of operating costs. Whether the view is being taken by Lerner, by John W. Henry, by Stan Kroenke, or by the Glazer family, all four would be in favour of levelling the playing field.
Doing so may not prompt any change in the communication policies of Villa or any other club but it would open the door to an environment of understanding revolving around profit and loss, and one far more in line with a possibility of club’s, one day, being able to return to the control of local people who can simply operate the books of a multi-million pound enterprise.
Whether such a move would prompt a return to the vocal engagement of Ellis or current Wigan chairman Dave Whelan is far from clear but, in the mean time, those fans who have been unable to reach the final stages of acceptance of a closed Villa will only serve to end up wound up further by the deafening silence.
Fans may not appreciate the lack of true information emanating from Villa Park but the reality is that, for the medium term at least, a billionaire is required. When contrasting Lerner with other owners who have been far more open, but also far less successful, consider this – things could be a lot worse at Villa than the small frustrations that extended silences can cause.
Context, my friends, is an invaluable asset, especially coming so quickly after Villa diced with relegation for the past two seasons. As an old saying goes “Be grateful for what you have, not jealous of what you don’t.”.
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