A few weeks ago, Aston Villa announced that the club and Ross McCormack had reached an agreement to speed up his impending release by a year.
News of Ross McCormack’s leaving was understandably well-received by Villa fans, who were already on a high from promotion to the Premier League and some early promising transfer incomings in the shape of Jota and Anwar El Ghazi.
The truth of the matter is the whole McCormack situation has been a farce, particularly over the last two years where he’s been picking up thousands of pounds per week for not doing much at all.
He started off ‘okay’ when he was initially transferred, scored a couple of early season goals and although expensive, (a 4-year-deal for a reported £12 million on a near-30 year old at the time) he was seen as having the x-factor in the Championship, a proven scorer whose goals would take Aston Villa up.
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We now know that this didn’t materialize, and in a way, McCormack’s Villa career appears to have huge parallels with Tony Xia’s two-year reign of power: it started well, then faded, and in the end both proved hugely expensive failures. McCormack’s contract had a clause which entitled him to a hefty salary increase should Villa win promotion, and the cash flow problems emanating from Xia’s gamble with the future existence of the club is a time no Villa fan will ever forget.
The aforementioned ‘gamble’ included splurging lots of cash on the biggest names in the Championship without a coherent plan as to how they would fit in at the club.
Villa threw Premier League money at Championship-standard players and paying them Premier League-level wages. Scott Hogan and Henri Lansbury are examples of two players still at Villa who were bought in the middle of this line of thinking. They were both performing very well for their previous clubs and Villa paid whatever was necessary to get them in, just because they felt that if they could perform for Forest or Brentford, then that form will obviously transfer over to Villa. It didn’t, and the two players have never come close to recreating the form that made the claret and blues want to purchase them over two years ago.
This summer has heralded the start of a new transfer strategy. Fresh from being promoted, the club has released a number of older, out of contract players (McCormack included) and instead of attacking the market as aggressively, and recklessly as the previous regime, they have so far acquired their targets with poise and patience. The signing of Kortney Hause is a case in point. Hause joined in January on loan and though he didn’t feature a lot, he performed well when needed last season and his versatility in defense at centre-back and left-back, his age (23) and the January window insertion of an option to buy clause for around £3 million made him an obvious purchase.
This is the type of forward planning and astuteness that hasn’t been seen in a while at Villa, long may it continue!