Former Aston Villa hero discusses 'chaotic' times under Dr Tony

Former Aston Villa midfielder Conor Hourihane has discussed his time at the club under the leadership of Dr Tony Xia. Speaking with Aston Villa fan and freelance journalist Dan Bardell on the 1874 Podcast, the Villa play-off hero has provided detail on what was going on behind the scenes in the three years that Chinese businessman, Xia, spent at Aston Villa.

Brief recap on Dr Tony Xia's time at Aston Villa

Owner of the Chinese Company Recon Group, Villa became part of the Recon Group's sports division when Dr Tony agreed to buy the club from previous owner Randy Lerner for £60 million. As a result of the purchase of the club in May 2016, Xia became chairman of Aston Villa Football Club.

After years of decline under Randy Lerner due to his lack of willingness to invest any more money into the club, which saw Villa relegated to the Championship in 2016 having been on the cusp of Champions League football when the American took over in 2006, Xia brought a sense of hope to the club.

Despite investing large sums of money into the club, and posting humourous messages for Villa fans on his Twitter page that created a bond between the Chinese man and the fans, it all went downhill fairly quickly. It turned out that, despite his good intentions, Xia had been having problems moving money out of China and the club went on to miss the deadline for a £4 million tax bill in 2018. This resulted in the club facing a winding-up order and being on the brink of bankruptcy.

Dr Tony and the club were saved from going out of business by NSWE, who bought Xia's majority stake in the club in July 2018. Xia and the Recon Group's remaining minority shares in the club were bought out in 2019, spelling an end to his reign at Aston Villa and the beginning of a new era under Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens.

Hourihane describes the 'chaotic' time at the club

Hourihane signed for Aston Villa from fellow Championship club Barnsley for a fee of £2.5 million in January 2017. The former Ireland international quickly became a fan favourite at the club and would go on to register 52 goal involvements across 151 games in all competitions for Villa. Hourihane was a crucial part of the midfield alongside Jack Grealish and John McGinn that helped the club seal promotion back to the Premier League in 2019.

Hourihane eventually left Villa in 2022, following loan spells with Sheffield United and Swansea, having fallen out of favour as the club began to push to the next level. The man with a wand of a left foot, remains a Villa fan and often talks of his pride at being an Aston Villa player.

Speaking with Dan Bardell, Hourihane firstly describes the first time that he met Dr Tony Xia at the time of his signing for the club.

"I think the first interaction was a Twitter message, he messaged me quite a lot to be honest, not sure if he did that with the other players. It was interesting."

During his time at Aston Villa, Xia spent a lot of money on transfers. Jonathan Kodjia, Scott Hogan and Ross McCormack were bought for a combined total of approximately £40 million, which at that time was a huge sum of money for players in the second tier of English football.

Including Hourihane, Xia and the club signed a huge flurry of players, 17 in total, during the first season in the Championship for a total of £71 million. Hourihane said that this was a tough time for the club:

"The big thing for me was that they bought a lot of players without a plan to fit everyone in. It was a case of 'who's on form?' let's buy them and there was no plan. It was a case of just chuck them all together and they will be okay because they are good players. It obviously doesn't work like that."

Villa's first full season under Xia's ownership, and first in the Championship, saw them finish 13th in the league, only 11 points above the relegation zone.

Bardell himself shared a story about Xia's ownership early on, referring to former Villa defender Tommy Elphick. Elphick has previously been on the podcast himself and told of a time that Dr Tony Xia had asked to see Elphick at the training ground to give him a 'special present'. As strange as that sounds, Elphick arrived at the meeting with Xia who then said there was no present and instead asked Elphick whether he should sack manager Roberto Di Matteo.

"There were a couple of times when he would give presentations to us players at the training ground, which was tough anyway because of the language barrier. His stories would be about an inspirational man, later revealed to be about himself, and we were like 'What on earth?'"

- Conor Hourihane

Horuihane revealed that as this was his first time at a 'big' club in a first team environment that he accepted this approach as the way things must be done. It was only when the ownership changed under Dean Smith's management that he realised how chaotic it really was under Xia.

"He used to message me a lot, like every day. I was just finding my way into football media and I did think it was really weird that the owner of Aston Villa keeps messaging me asking for my advice on things. You scored a hat trick against Norwich and he showed me the messages that he had sent Steve Bruce that said he (Hourihane) had to start. He was basically trying to take the credit for you scoring the hat trick almost saying 'I should be manager'. It was just mental. "

- Dan Bardell

Bardell also went on to say that Xia would message him to let him know what the team would be at the weekend and about potential manager changes. Bardell described a discussion they had over the potential appointment of Steve McClaren and how Xia had been proved wrong by Bardell about the history of a particular coaching partnership in the past. The discussions over McClaren coming to Villa ended swiftly after his discussion with Bardell, who as a reminder, is a regular Aston Villa fan, not a coach!

The fact the owner of such a big football club was regularly messaging fans about team news, transfers, manager appointments and so forth is a real indicator of how chaotic that period was under Xia's ownership.

Play-off heartbreak

One of the biggest occasions during Dr Tony Xia's reign at the club was the Championship play-off final in May 2018. Aston Villa had finished fourth in the Championship and went on to defeat Middlesbrough in the play-off semi-finals, setting up a meeting at Wembley with Fulham in football's richest game.

Hourihane describes the pressure that was on the team to secure promotion during a time of financial difficulty for the club:

"The pressure of going up didn't really mount until we got through the semis. After that, there was definitely in-house chat of 'we need to win this game otherwise the club are in trouble'. We obviously lost the game, and the rumour was Dr Tony locked himself in his room and no one saw him again. After that night, no one ever saw him again."

Despite this Xia still owned 50% of the club heading into the new season but was not seen at Villa again before he was fully bought out of the club in 2019.

Summing up Dr Tony's reign at Aston Villa, Hourihane said:

"It was just a strange time. Because we can compare it now to the phase we went into and how professional that was [under NSWE], the Dr Tony time was just chaos. "

In the end, as Villa fans know, the defeat to Fulham in that final was a blessing as it spelt the end of Dr Tony's time at the club. Villa, under the new ownership, would go on to achieve promotion the following season and are now playing Champions League football under world-class ownership and management five years on.

UTV