Too Little too late?

If you still trouble yourself to keep up to date with Villa news you will know that we have appointed two new members to our board. David Bernstein, former chairman of the FA, and Brian Little, former Villa player and manager, have joined Lord Mervyn King on the board, which is a positive sign. Is it too little late?

In short, yes. Aston Villa Football Club is very much a sinking ship bound to hit the rocks of relegation and employing two men who know English football and what Aston Villa means to its fans is not going to turn Garde’s squad into a group of players worthy of staying in the Premier League. Essentially, the appointments set us up nicely for when the end comes and we drop down into the Championship.

Rebuilding a relegated club the size of Aston Villa is hard work and the American clones who have run this club into the ground would not be able to do it. With Bernstein and Little in the mix, the rebuilding process might run a little more smoothly and fans will, hopefully, be kept in mind when decisions are made. Brian Little’s arrival is particularly welcome, as he is a man with Villa at heart, having spent a decade playing in claret and blue before returning to manage the club between 1994 and 1998. In that time, he achieved two top five finishes and saw the Villans lift the League Cup in 1996, beating Leeds United 3-0. Success like that is but a distant memory and fans will hope Little can play his part in reawakening a sleeping giant.

The fans of Aston Villa have been saying for the last couple of years that what we need on our board is someone who knows football. We said it when Paul Faulkner was our Chief Executive, earning a fifth of what the more useless Tom Fox earns, but the owner, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to fix the board now when anything we do is going to make no difference to our survival chances.

The Aston Villa board has been comprised of people who don’t know anything about football has for a few years now. You’d think the benefit of that is they must be business people and that the club will at least thrive commercially but this has not been the case and the club has reported significant losses. It was always likely given our position, although it does demonstrate the all round failure of our executives. Tom Fox earned a million pounds. No matter what he tells us about shirt sales, the man has effectively been paid a million pounds for ruining a once-great football club. I can only hope that the new faces in our boardroom prove to be more effective than those who have murdered Aston Villa Football Club.