Johnny Phillips: Eight years on and Aston Villa are the club going places
For this, my final Express & Star column, I have decided to look back on the changing times at Albion, Villa and Wolves since I first began writing a Saturday football feature eight years ago.
It has been a colourful and fascinating intervening period for all three clubs.
Digging back through the archives to August 2016, when penning my first column, the subject was ownership and expectation. What did Albion, Villa and Wolves fans expect from their new custodians?
As the 2016/17 season got under way, Guochuan Lai’s Shanghai Sports Development Ltd bought Albion from Jeremy Peace for a figure in the region of £180million.
In the first season of Lai’s shareholding, the Baggies finished 10th in the Premier League. Lai endeared himself to fans in those early days of his ownership, with a free drink and scarf to matchday supporters. All appeared rosy in the garden.
Down the road at Villa, the Randy Lerner tenure had ended when Tony Xia’s Recon Group purchased the club. The valuation was much less than half what Lai paid for Albion, at £75m, but there were mitigating circumstances: Villa were in the Championship.
It was a testing first season of ownership, with Roberto Di Matteo dismissed in the autumn before Steve Bruce eventually guided Villa to a lowly 13th-place finish.
Wolves, too, had moved into Chinese ownership, with Fosun International purchasing the club from Steve Morgan in July for approximately £45m.
Unlike Villa (who had been in the top division since 1988 before relegation) and Albion (who were embarking on their seventh consecutive season of Premier League football), Wolves had endured a chequered recent past having spent only three of the previous 12 seasons at the top and dropped down to the third tier as recently as 2013/14.
The 2017/17 campaign was truly chaotic at Molineux. Manager Kenny Jackett departed on the eve of the season to be replaced by Walter Zenga. The former Italian World Cup goalkeeper lasted until late October before being replaced by Rob Edwards, on an interim basis. Then former Villa manager Paul Lambert came in and guided the club to safety after the team had flirted perilously close to relegation.
On face value, it was Albion who looked in safest hands. But a calamitous 2017/18 season on the pitch which saw Tony Pulis replaced by Alan Pardew mid-season, before Darren Moore oversaw the final throes of relegation, led to Lai making sweeping changes.
The most notable first-team incident was what became known as ‘Taxi-gate’, when four senior players were alleged to have stolen a taxi during a mid-season training break in Barcelona.
