When Villa Nearly Went Bust

Carl Chinn's Villa Fear

This is a short draft extract from my forthcoming book ‘Where’s The Money Gone?’ Constructive criticism welcome. Please share to your networks.

As I write this, Aston Villa are close to concluding their best season in years. They’ve reached the semi final of the Europa Conference League, and qualification for next year’s Champions League looks like a formality.

Under the management of Unai Emery, and fired by their goals of Ollie Watkins, their supporters' sense of entitlement, as the pre-eminent club in the West Midlands, has been justified.  Bastards!

It could all have been so different.  Just a few years ago, Villa really nearly went bust.

To find out more, I head to Billesley in the south of the city to meet Carl Chinn, social historian, broadcaster and lifelong Villan.

“Legend’ may be an overused word, but when it comes to Chinny, it’s bang on the money.  He’s a real ‘people’s hero’.

For several years we were colleagues on BBC local radio, but he’s also written books, made TV documentaries and filled newspaper columns telling the untold stories of everyday folk - factory workers, nurses, engineers, bus drivers, cleaners. 

For a time he was Professor of Community History at Birmingham University, highlighting the dreadful living conditions endured by the people whose sweat and  toil made the West Midlands.

He’s one of a kind, and if you walk down any street in the city, he’s likely to be greeted by people of all ages and every background with an enthusiastic “Orloight Chinny?”

“Orlroight mucker” he’ll respond in thick Brummie brogue, before halting and smiling for the obligatory selfie.

No one, before or since, has ever talked up the region’s working classes with such deep knowledge or enthusiasm.

Black, White, Irish, Pakistani - they all love him, and ‘Chinny’ loves them.

Yet however passionate Chinn is about chronicling the working class, nothing stokes him quite as much as his beloved Aston Villa.

We head into his study, which is cluttered with the bric a brac of a successful career - awards, framed photos with celebrities, certificates of merit.

Amongst it all, he declares that Aston Villa is, “everything.”  Arms waving, he passionately expands on what he means:  “I can't imagine my life without the Villa.  

“It's not just about the football. It's part of who I am as a person.  It's my family.”

Chinn means this literally.  He recently took his five year old grand-daughter to her first game, and gleefully recounts “she’s the fifth generation of my family on both sides to go to the Villa.”

At the stadium, another family has grown up around him.  Sitting in the same seat for 30 years, he’s acquired football mates he only meets on matchday, but whose joy and frustration chimes with his own.

“There’s blokes from Kingstanding, from Gloucester, from the Black Country….”

As he reels off the names of his Villa Park neighbours, you’re reminded that football is a unique communal experience.  

Powerful bonds of friendship are forged across decades between people from a huge variety of backgrounds with no common denominator other than a shared love of their club.  

In the stadium, hierarchies based on wealth or social status disappear.  Perhaps it’s different in hospitality, when you're eating canapes behind the smoked glass and minding your p’s and q’s.  

But in the stands, on the terraces, you’re all the same, united in a single identity.  

That’s how Chinn sees it, anyway: “I’m not a celebrity fan. I’m just a fan. I don’t sit in the corporate boxes. I don’t schmooze with the high ups at Villa”.

As if to underline the point, he refuses to call the section of the stadium where he sits ‘The Doug Ellis Stand’, even though that’s been its official title for more than 30 years, since it was redeveloped.

Chinn regularly locked horns with Ellis, a controversial former Chairman, and still refers to its previous name, the “Witton Lane Stand”.

Fans complained that “Deadly” Doug - who earned his nickname because of propensity for sacking managers - had failed to capitalise on Villa’s 1982 European Cup success during more than two decades in charge.

They were twice League runners-up during his long reign, but there was an undeniable perception that the club had fallen behind big city rivals in Liverpool, Manchester and north London.  It was punching below its weight.

New US owner Randy Lerner arrived in 2006, with high hopes and deep pockets.  In the event, he returned across the Atlantic with his tail between his legs, much poorer and a lot wiser about the strange ways of English football.

He enjoyed an early flurry of success, when manager Martin O’Neill achieved three three successive top six finishes. Once he departed, Villa sank to the lower reaches of the table.

They ultimately burned a £300 million hole in wallet and as he prepared to offload the club in 2016, they plunged into the Championship for the first time in the Premier League era.

In the circumstances, the arrival of Chinese ‘billionaire’ Tony Xia in 2016 was seen as a cause for celebration, not least by Carl Chinn.

“The idea that this massively wealthy Chinese guy was going to come in with massive backing was exciting, especially after the decline at the end of Randy Lerner’s ownership when everything seemed to be going wrong.

“I was thinking this could be good.  I don't think I'm speaking out of turn in saying that Aston Villa is the biggest club in the Midlands, in terms of history and fan base.

“I was looking around seeing all these huge companies and investors from across the world – and sometimes even nation states – were buying Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea.

“By now, the Premier League was a global force but it seemed like the North West had gone, London had gone - so if you wanted to be part of it, there was this huge gap in the middle.

“I just thought, ‘why hasn’t somebody grasped this opportunity?’  Not only was I excited, I felt ‘somebody has finally clocked this.  They realise that there’s this massive potential in the Midlands of England.’”

Xia, whose CV said he’d studied at Harvard, MIT and Oxford, certainly talked a good game.  He told The Guardian his target was to make Villa one of the “top three in the world – even the best well known in the world – in less than 10 years.”

Given that they’d just been relegated to the second tier this sounded a tad optimistic.

All the more so as it emerged that Xia’s conglomerate, The Recon Group, was reported to have recently made a loss of $77 million.

Keith Wyness, an experienced business executive who’d previously worked at Everton, was drafted in as CEO to work alongside Xia.  He quickly became unsettled by what he witnessed.

“I probably started to smell a rat on the very first day” confesses Wyness, recalling the drafting of the press release announcing the new owner.

“After telling us that he controlled five public companies in China, he said ‘No, let’s make it four.’

“And I thought, ‘how do you manage to miss a public company?’ It's not something I would have forgotten.”

Wyness was “amazed” that Xia’s ownership was approved under the Football League’s Owners and Directors Test, designed to weed out those whose ambition isn’t matched by their bank balance – although he acknowledges the difficulties in assessing prospective Chinese buyers.

“China is so opaque” he said.  “You can check on people in the UK and in America – do deep dive searches on them.  There are companies that specialise in doing it, but even those companies can't get through the secrecy in China.”

When Wyness questioned the source of Xia’s wealth, he was told that the owner’s shareholdings were distributed to various family members.  This would ensure that if he was ever attacked by a business enemy or fell foul of political machinations, at least some of his fortune would be preserved.

“I understood that to a degree” says Wyness, “but that’s also why it's so hard to check on people in China, and that was the biggest issue that the authorities had here.  Nevertheless, they took him at face value, and he was approved.” 

Villa initially invested heavily under Xia in an attempt to return to the Premier League.

Jonathan Kodja (£15 million) and Ross McCormack (£12 million) were the second and third most expensive signings in the club’s history.  

Kodja was a success, scoring 31 times in 106 matches.  

McCormack was a disaster.

The most memorable moment of his time at the club was the day he missed training because the electronic gates failed on the driveway at his footballer’s mansion, trapping him inside.

Manager Steve Bruce, already unimpressed by McCormack’s work ethic, drove to the house and took photos of the gates to show that they were only 4’ 6” high – easily scalable by a professional athlete.

McCormack later admitted the story was true, blaming the late arrival of an engineer to fix the fault.  

He was quickly bombed out of the squad by Bruce, but as if to illustrate the lax cost controls at Villa, it emerged that he was on a contract worth £2.3 million a year.  Had they won promotion in the 2017-18, he would have earned a £1 million bonus despite not playing for the club that season.

He was eventually released from his Villa contract a year early in 2019, after scoring just three times, the frittering of his career symbolising the scattergun nature of Xia’s early spending spree.  By that stage, financial feast had turned to famine as cashflow problems became apparent.

Wyness recalls that, “by the February of the second season the money dried up completely. 

“I had a real problem, because obviously the minute suppliers think there are financial problems, there are no sausage rolls on a Saturday.”

When Villa travelled to Wembley in May 2018 for the play off Final against Fulham, newspaper headlines were already discussing the club’s ‘financial nightmare’ if they failed to secure promotion to the Premier League.

In the event, a precise, left footed shot by Tom Cairney took the West Londoners up; leaving the West Midlanders staring into the abyss.

Villa were facing a tax demand of almost £5 million and Wyness, as Chief Executive, had a legal obligation to ensure they weren’t trading in insolvency.  He started sounding out potential new investors.

Wyness’ efforts were interpreted as undermining Xia, and his reward for trying to save the club was suspension from his job.

He later won a case for constructive dismissal, and in his absence, Villa courted disaster.

According to some accounts, they were only hours from going out of business.  Wyness agrees they were “probably a matter of days” from going into administration.

For supporters like Carl Chinn the existential threat to their club was all too real.  

He says, “suddenly, there was a fear. It felt like something was being ripped out of you.”

Listen to the ‘Where’s The Money Gone?’ podcast here.