Why Should Footballers Show Loyalty?

Whenever a player decides to leave a club for a higher pay deal at another club, fans always label them a ‘greedy, money-grabber’, who should have shown more loyalty to his current club. The latest big transfer of Fernando Torres from Liverpool to Chelsea is a prime example.


At Liverpool, it is believed that Fernando Torres was earning in the region of £110k per week. A large sum of money, but now he has made the move down south to Chelsea, he has increased that dramatically to an enormous £175k per week.

The response of former Liverpool striker John Aldridge today sums up the often-taken view of many people.

“Torres is simply a mercenary who has gone for a huge pay rise. Liverpool fans stuck by him this season. They made excuses for his poor performances, about his injuries still affecting him. But all the time Torres appeared to be taking the club and the fans for a ride.

“Once he had put in a transfer request Liverpool were right to let him go. There's no point keeping someone who doesn't want to be there. Maybe Liverpool are better off without him.”

The first point to make is that he then goes on to praise Andy Carroll and says that he is the right type of player for Liverpool and could give a lot more than Torres did. However, surely the same argument could be made about Andy Carroll as he made for Torres.

Carroll has said in the past that he is happy at Newcastle, but when it came to it, he was happy to make the move to Liverpool where he has over doubled his wages. He put in a transfer request when push came to shove. Yet, Torres is a mercenary whereas Carroll is progressing his career.

In his entire career at club level, Fernando Torres has only ever won one trophy – the Spanish Segunda Division back in 2001/02. For a player of his calibre, it is a fair desire to want to challenge for trophies and only the most deluded of Liverpool fans will claim that he would be more likely to win trophies had he stayed.


Even ignoring the ambition part of it, why should a player show loyalty to their club? Unless they have an actual link to the club, then at the heart of it, the club is merely an employer.

Why should Fernando Torres show any loyalty to Liverpool FC? A career in football is fairly short in the big scheme of things, so you have to make the most of it while you can.

If a high-flying lawyer was offered the chance to double his salary by switching to a rival company, he would and nobody would even think that he should have shown loyalty to his previous employer. So why exactly should a footballer be any different?

Loyalty also works two ways. It is difficult to argue that players should show loyalty to a club when the clubs so often show no loyalty toward the players. Liverpool showed little loyalty to the likes of Paul Konchesky, Albert Riera, Ryan Babel or Alberto Aquilani in recent months, shifting them onto other clubs because they weren’t in the club’s plans anymore.

If the club will show so little loyalty to players, then it is difficult to argue that the players should show any great loyalty in return. You are required to be loyal to your club, but only if you are able. They will certainly not be loyal to you when you are not able.

It is interesting to hear this from the wife of former Cameroon international footballer, Lucien Mettomo. She described how she had been shipped out to a dozen cities over a few years with no control over where she lives or how long she will live there.


People look at the likes of Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard as being role models for being one-club men throughout their careers. Further afield, we see the likes of Paolo Maldini at AC Milan, Iker Casillas at Real Madrid and Francesco Totti at Roma. All players who have spent their whole career at the same club.

These players have a close affinity with the clubs, having come through their academies, and in most cases, being supporters of the club since they were young. However, there is also a common theme amongst those players. They are all playing at the top clubs in the world.

Do people seriously think that if Paul Scholes had been at his home-town club, Oldham, he would have shown the same loyalty? Of course he wouldn’t. He is a top player and wants to win trophies and succeed. To do this, you need to play for the top clubs.

For a top quality player, the only time they will show loyalty is if they have an affinity with the club and are already at a top club. But then, can we really call it loyalty? Could they really find a better deal and be more likely to win trophies elsewhere? Or are they just already at the peak of their chosen profession?


In the end, fans have a great loyalty to their own club. They automatically assume that the players at the club should show the same loyalty. But offer almost any of those fans the opportunity to switch jobs in exchange for doubling their salary and I can guarantee that 99.9% of them would jump at the chance.

For professional footballers, football is their job and the club is their employer. There is no more loyalty from them than from any other professional to their employer. So we should not expect them to show any great loyalty to their club.

Could Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll mark the end of the bubble in football and can Chelsea now satisfy UEFA's new regulations?

In one incredible day, three Premiership clubs turned what had been a relatively quiet transfer window on its head. With over £130m spent on new players in the space of around two hours between 9pm and 11pm, it delivered a hammer blow to the argument that an era of austerity and financial management was beginning to edge into football in England.

With the upcoming implementation of the new UEFA Financial Fair Play regulations at the beginning of the 2011/12 season, it was believed that clubs were beginning to prepare for them by curbing their spending and cutting large earners from their wage bill. Instead, it seems to have served to create the most incredible and volatile transfer window in history.


The deal to bring Fernando Torres to Chelsea from Liverpool was in the region of £50m and makes him one of the most expensive footballers in history. Whether or not it can be argued that there is some value in that deal, it is an incredible amount of money. If we add in the signing of David Luiz from Benfica, Chelsea splashed out almost £75m in the space of about 30 minutes late on Monday night. All this came only hours after the club announced losses of £70.9m for the previous season.

And if the Torres deal seemed overly extravagant, the £35m deal to bring Andy Carroll to Liverpool from Newcastle is surely the most overpriced transfer in history. He cost well over twice what Newcastle paid to sign Alan Shearer fifteen years ago. Almost £10m more than Wayne Rooney cost. You could have signed arguably the best striker on the planet – David Villa – and had a couple of million left over.

It is crazy that the British record transfer is for a player with only 80 senior matches under his belt and with only one international appearance to his name. Indeed, he cost more millions than he has scored goals in his entire career since making his senior debut five years ago.


However, Liverpool are hardly a club to worry about in this situation. Despite spending over £58m on new strikers in one day, when you factor in the sales of Fernando Torres and Ryan Babel, they have a net spend of only £1m. Whilst the fees that they have been paying are over-inflated and simply obscene, financially they have spent almost nothing.

Chelsea are the club that are under most scrutiny today. £75m spent despite announcing huge losses seems almost unthinkable to the average person. Chairman Bruce Buck announced recently that the club were on course to meet the regulations once they are implemented.

The club slashed the wage bill by around £20m in the summer by selling and releasing the likes of Deco, Joe Cole, Ricardo Carvalho, Michael Ballack and Juliano Belletti, but given that Fernando Torres is on a reported £175k per week, that increases the wage bill by over £9m per year.


We can assume that David Luiz must be on fairly decent wages. If we conservatively assume that he is on around £60k per week, which is likely to be on the low side given that he is a Brazilian international signed for over £20m, we can add another £3m to the total.

That means that the two new signings have increased the wage bill by a minimum of £13m. If we include the wages from their only summer signing, Ramires, who is earning a reported £4m per year, this takes it to £17m. In other words, they have almost completely cancelled out the savings they made in the summer.

So, where is the savings likely to come from? Under the new regulations, injections of money from owners will be limited to €15m per year (around £12.8m). So we can write off that much from the deficit, making it a far more manageable £58.1m to cover.


Success naturally leads to more money – it is a general rule of not only football, but business in general. However, last season Chelsea won the double. So realistically, no further domestic success would be possible, and to budget on achieving that feat every year would be highly unrealistic.

They only reached the last 16 of the Champions League, which would have led to a large fall in revenue, given that they have become accustomed to reaching the semi-finals at least in recent seasons. The loss of two home games, plus the additional revenue that comes from success in this competition would potential help to cancel out some of the losses, but relying on continued success in this competition is a risky proposition.

Finishing in the top four of the Premiership is an absolute minimum for Chelsea to even think about meeting these new regulations. Without the Champions League and the money that comes with it, Chelsea would be in severe problems.

However, another problem they will now face is how the new regulations deal with player transfers. Chelsea cannot simply write off the spending from this transfer window as a simple lump sum payment now. Rather, they must amortise the fee over the course of the player’s contract.

Therefore, given that both Fernando Torres and David Luiz have signed five year contracts, the transfer fee would be split evenly over the period of the contract. In other words, they must mark down a cost of £15m per year for the next five years for these transfers.


This adds another £15m each year that Chelsea must try and cover in order to break even and fulfil UEFA’s new regulations.

Chelsea are hoping that they have cut the deficit by recent changes, including having increased ticket prices by over 10% over the summer, reduced bonus payments for the players, a new deal with Adidas that will increase sponsorship payments from around £10m per season to around £20m per season, and increased income from TV revenue.

However, the bright point for Chelsea is the question of whether UEFA will actually stringently enforce the regulations. Currently, the likes of Chelsea, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Barcelona would all fail under the regulations. Would UEFA really ban them from European competition? Would they have a Champions League without a number of the biggest names?


Even if they do enforce it, there are a number of caveats built in. For the 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons combined, clubs can overspend by €45m so long as it is covered by an injection of equity from the club’s owner. For the next three year period, they can overspend by another combined €45m, then €30m for the next three years, then €15m, and only then must clubs actually break even.

In other words, clubs do not actually have to break even for another 14 years. They can continue to make losses, albeit steadily reducing losses all the way until 2025. And to add to this, if clubs can show that they are heading in the right direction and moving toward breaking even, UEFA would reduce the sanctions.

As far as I can tell, that is a major get-out-of-jail card. For example, if Manchester City replicate last year’s losses of £121m in the first year of the new regulations, but cut this to a mere £110m in the second year, they could avoid being banned from Europe because they have cut their losses and are moving in the right direction. No matter that they have lost a nine-figure amount – they are trying hard.


The new regulations are a good thing in so far as they look to curb the spending in football which have risen to even more unbelievable levels in an incredible couple of hours on deadline day. However, there are other problems with them that will be explored at a later date.

Chelsea face a major battle to meet these regulations and their long-term plan of breaking even by 2010 has clearly failed spectacularly. Whether they can continue to look to cut their costs without sacrificing success on the field is unknown, but they have to try to fulfil the new requirements or risk the wrath of UEFA and Michel Platini.

Again, whether he would follow through with his threats remains to be seen, but can the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City take that risk. Surely not, which means that the 31st January 2011 could be marked down as the final peak in the ridiculous bubble that has been seen in football over the past decade.

Torres to Chelsea? Should we believe what we read in the papers?

As the season comes to a close, attention once again turns to the transfer window. Fans expectantly wait to discover who their club will bring in over the summer, and which players are deemed surplus to requirement. The problem is that clubs generally keep their transfer dealings quite private. This means that fans resort to following the rumours published in the daily newspapers. However, it is difficult to know how reliable these rumours actually are – do they actually know something or have they simply made them up? And are some papers more reliable than others?


The tabloids are by far the most prolific rumour-starters. In particular, the News of the World has produced an average of 6.94 rumours per day, since the beginning of the 2006 summer transfer window. They are followed by the People (3.27 per day), the Daily Mirror (2.97) and the Sun (2.12). Unsurprisingly, the broadsheet press publish far less rumours – the Daily Telegraph produce only 0.29 per day, followed by the Guardian (0.32), the Independent (0.36) and the Times (0.65). These statistics are not really that surprising. It is common knowledge that the tabloids tend to print more rumours, compared to the broadsheets, which tend to post more analytical material. However, is there any correlation between the type of newspaper and the accuracy of their rumours?


Despite printing by far the greatest number of rumours, the News of the World has the lowest percentage of correct rumours. A correct rumour is defined as one that has led to either the player making the transfer mentioned in the rumour, or signing a new contract as specified in the rumour. The News of the World has a success rate of only 12.19%, although it is generally more accurate for the larger teams, such as Manchester United (20.41%) and Chelsea (18.18%) than some of the smaller clubs like Stoke (4.55%) and Hull (4.00%). The People is only fractionally better with a success rate of 13.25% and the Daily Mirror scores a 18.05% success rate.

The most accurate newspaper in England is the Guardian, which accurately predicts 30.34% of its rumours. It is closely followed by the Independent (26.69%) and the Times (25.79%)


Therefore, it is noticeable that the broadsheets, despite printing far fewer rumours, are actually far more accurate. It seems to suggest that they are generally far more careful with the rumours that they print, taking more time to research them, rather than the somewhat scattergun approach of the tabloid press, who are more likely to publish their ‘big scoops’ solely to attract new readers.

The final interesting thing to look at is which teams’ transfer activities are usually most accurately captured in the rumour columns of newspapers. Interestingly, it is Burnley, Wigan and Birmingham that come out highest in this. Manchester United are the first big team to show up in the list in 4th, with 26.3% of rumours printed about them turning out to be true. Liverpool are the only other big spenders to appear in the top half of the table, with a 25.5% accuracy rate.

Chelsea languish down in 18th place in the table, with only a 18.15% success rate. Other upper half Premiership sides, Manchester City, Tottenham, Aston Villa, Everton and Arsenal are all in the lower half of this table. This is interesting as it suggests that the more successful a side is in the Premiership, the less accurate the rumours concerning their transfers. This could potentially be because more obscure links begin to spring up concerning the bigger sides, especially those that tend to spend larger amounts of money in the transfer windows.


For example, in the past couple of months, Chelsea have been linked with Fernando Torres, Angel Di Maria, Sergio Aguero, Frank Ribery, David Villa, Edin Dzeko, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Kaka on more than one occasion. Clearly all of these are not going to be true – indeed, it would be surprising to see more than about two or three of these at Chelsea next season.


It is only natural that the big sides should have more rumours printed about them – it is these big sides that sell newspapers. As a result, it would only appear natural that fewer of these rumours are correct. It is not the case that big sides buy more players than the small clubs – if anything, it is the reverse. However, it is interesting to see that it is the broadsheet newspapers that are the most accurate, despite printing the fewest rumours.

(Data from http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk)

Finance in Football - Heading for Crisis...

Over the past season, clubs’ finances have come under increasing scrutiny throughout the divisions. From Portsmouth and Manchester United in the Premiership, down through the likes of Cardiff and Southend, Notts County to Chester, there have been increasing instances of clubs struggling under the burden of debt. English fans look enviously toward either the Germany’s 50+1 model of ownership or the fan-ownership style at Barcelona. However, it is not simply the actions of owners that have led clubs into the situation that they currently find themselves in.

This issue has come under major scrutiny this year, but it has been lurking for many years. During the past decade, the economy has been booming. This has meant that it has been very easy to borrow money from banks, and so very easy to finance takeovers in this manner. Furthermore, if you ran into trouble, it would have been very simple to sell it on to the next buyer. However, then the recession hit. Suddenly, borrowing was no longer a simple matter and banks did not want to renegotiate existing loans – they needed their money back. This scared off new buyers, meaning that club owners that had run into trouble could no longer offload the club so easily. The situation with Mike Ashley at Newcastle was an excellent example of this.

In a report looking at the 2007/08 season, UEFA revealed that the combined debt of 18 of the Premiership clubs was just under £3.5bn. This figure does not include the debt of either Portsmouth or West Ham – two clubs that have had financial difficulties recently. This makes the Premiership the most indebted league on the planet, more than four times the figure of the next most indebted league – Spain’s Primera Division. Indeed, the debt held by Manchester United is greater than all 36 Bundesliga clubs combined. These figures begin to give an idea of how heavily Premiership clubs were in debt.

Commercially, the Premiership is by far the most successful league on the planet. It has recently sold the overseas broadcasting rights for 2010-13 for around £1.4bn, following a year after selling the domestic rights for £1.8bn. These figures are staggering and it is little surprise that it is the most indebted league. Debt is generally proportional to income – the most you make, the more banks will allow you to borrow. Being the highest earning league in Europe, we would expect the Premiership to have the highest debt.

Since this report, Premier League debt has actually fallen by around £1.5bn. This is partly due to the lack of availability of further credit, rising asset values, but a major part is the changing approach of clubs and owners. With the upcoming UEFA regulations potentially prohibiting clubs from competing in European competitions if they have outstanding debts, owners have been converting soft loans that they have made to the club into equity. This wipes out the debt that the club owes their owners. This approach has been taken by both Roman Abramovic at Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City.

However, it is important to note that debt is not always bad. So long as you can meet the repayments, then the debt is sustainable, and there are no problems. Arsenal fell into debt in financing the new stadium, but the solid business model that they follow has meant that they are easily able to meet the repayments on the loan without it severely impacting the business as a whole. It would be difficult to argue that there is anything wrong with this.

Over the years, two out of three football league clubs have gone into administration at some point in their history. It has almost become a strategy of football clubs and their owners. The insolvency law in this country makes it relatively easy for companies to write off their debt, paying 10p in the £1, then set up again the following day under a different name. Indeed, football particularly looks after itself in this respect. If a club goes into administration, the players will still be paid, and any other clubs that are owed money will receive the money.

Clearly, something has to be done to regulate finances in football more closely than they currently are. Pressure is building on the Premier League, UEFA and FIFA to introduce new measures to achieve this. However, in the most general terms, all of these organisations are simply football competition organisers. They must all work within the legal and regulatory frameworks that are provided by the governments of the countries’ that they work in.

On the 1st March, 2010, the Premier League’s new sustainability measures came into force. These were voted in by league chairmen back in September and set new guidelines and rules for clubs. Clubs have to submit future financial reports, and if the league does not believe that they will be able to meet their liabilities, they can impose sanctions, ranging from transfer embargoes, a moratorium on future contracts or even the forced sale of players. Clearly if the Premier League tried to impose these sanctions, it would be a controversial move, but it would be interesting to see how clubs react to these changes.

The debate over the style of ownership has become almost synonymous with the discussion into football finance recently. With the influx of foreign owners – 9 of the Premier League clubs are foreign-owned, and 7 of the top 9 – questions have been raised over the motivation of these owners. The Premier League itself reiterates that it is ownership-neutral. In other words, the actual style of ownership, whether it be an individual, a leveraged buyout, a fans trust, etc, is not important to them. Rather they are concerned over the sustainability of how the club is run.

The situation at Manchester United has been in the news recently with the growth of the ‘Red Knights’ movement to buy out the current owners – the Glazer family. The Glazer takeover was a leveraged buyout, and has saddled the club with a debt of over £700m. A recent £500m bond sale was pointed to as proof that the club is struggling to service their debts. The sale was over two times oversubscribed, and the Glazers have pointed to this as vindication of their business model. It shows that investors globally looked over their accounts and were still happy to buy the bond, showing their confidence in the future financial stability of the club.

Further uproar was seen when it was revealed that the club is paying a 14% interest rate on some of their PK loans. However, an interesting point that is not widely appreciated is that this increased spending on interest payments actually takes them into a lower tax band. As a result, the club actually saves money by paying this slightly higher interest rate, than it would by paying a lower rate. Whilst fans may dislike the style of Malcolm Glazer, he is a highly successful businessman, and it is unlikely that he would knowingly jeopardise the financial future of the company.

Despite this, there is a growing feeling that traditional English ownership by a single individual on whom the club is completely dependent is no longer sustainable. In Germany, there are regulations restricting any single owner to a maximum of 50% of the ownership of the club. Furthermore, a majority of the club must be German-owned. This is designed to prevent football from becoming divorced from its cultural and local roots and run purely as a business operation. In the USA, there are regulations restricting the purchase of a franchise based on a set amount of debt.

Under the new regulations that are expected in the coming years, patience will be required to build a club. It is possible to build a successful club, whilst also ensuring solid financial management. If we look at the Championship, there is relatively little correlation between the wage bill of clubs and the points accumulated over the course of the season. Indeed, clubs will small revenues are able to achieve success through good management – Burnley had the 23rd lowest revenue in the Championship last season, yet still achieved promotion to the Premiership. It may take longer than a quick-fix spending spree, but it will reward greater management skills in the long run.

There are a number of strategies and regulations that could be brought in to try and promote good financial management. Taking one example from the banks, there is no real bonus culture in football. In the banks, employees receive their salary, but a large proportion of their earnings come from bonuses, dependent on success. For example, the highest paid director of HSBC receives a salary of £800k per year, but received a bonus of £9m last year. On the other hand, footballers are generally paid the same, whether they win, lose or draw. So, a system could be introduced that pays a lower basic salary, but has the potential to reward players for achieving success. It is noticeable that a lot of the highest paid players in the Premier League are both at loss-making clubs, and under-achieving clubs.

Another suggestion that has been discussed by UEFA is that club spending on wages should be capped at a certain percentage of either revenue or gate receipts. Indeed, they have announced that this will be introduced in the coming years. Originally intended to be in force by 2012/13, it has recently been pushed back by three years. However, there are a number of problems with this. They need a legal way to ensure that it does not disadvantage European clubs against other global clubs. Secondly, and more importantly, they need to try and ensure that it does not simply lock in the current order of the clubs. The likes of Manchester United and Liverpool with their high revenues would always be able to pay higher wages than other clubs, meaning that they will always be challenging at the top. There is a worry that this would bring a guillotine down on 120 years of football development.

We now have an overview of the financial situation in English football. A clear example of financial mismanagement has been Portsmouth, and yesterday they released a document laying all of their debt bare to the public. The overall figure of the debt stands at £105m - £91m to unsecured creditors and £14m in secured debt to their owner, Balram Chainrai. They actually owe £119m in debt, but are owed £14m by Inter Milan, Liverpool and Tottenham from the transfers of Sulley Muntari, Glen Johnson and Jermain Defoe.

The document itself details all the debt that the club owes to various parties. The club owes £17.3m in unpaid transfer fees to a variety of clubs, including £1m to Chelsea for Glen Johnson and over £3m to Udinese for Sulley Muntari – players who have both already left the club. Tottenham are owed a further £3m for the transfer of Kevin-Prince Boateng, and £1m in a sell-on clause for Asmir Begovic, a player who never even played for Spurs.

They also owe £1.9m in unpaid bonuses to their players, including £280k to Peter Crouch, £265k to Glen Johnson and £338k to Sylvan Distin – again, players that have all left the club. They owe almost £10m to agents and scouting agencies, including over £2m to Israeli super-agent, Pini Zahavi, who was involved in the multiple sales of the club this year. Furthermore, over £38m is owed to former owners of the club.

Finally, the club owes £17.1m to HMRC in tax, NI contributions and VAT, whilst there are a huge number of other creditors to whom money is owed. The likes of St. John’s Ambulance is owed £2701.91, a local school is owed more than £40k, whilst some of the more bizarre debts include 20p owed to Qatar Airways, £4.34 to a local printing agency and £1725 to a local firm that design individual fruit cases, aimed at increasing children’s consumption of fruit. These are amongst a few of the over 400 trade creditors that the club has.

The next step for the club is a meeting on 6th May, coincidentally the same day as the General Election – a deliberate ploy by Andrew Andronikou, the administrator, to try and bury the news. At this meeting, he will set out his offer to creditors, expected to be between 20p and 23p to the £1. He will need to agree a deal with creditors holding 75% of the total unsecured debt within a month to allow Portsmouth to emerge from administration, and be reborn in the Championship next year. If he is unable to secure a deal, the club faces a serious risk of beginning next season with a points deduction, making an immediate return to the top flight a distant dream, and a relegation battle more of a priority.

All of this has hopefully provided an overview of football finance and mismanagement, including the most obvious example from this season. It is difficult to see how the future will pan out – the Premier League can only implement what its twenty member clubs want it to do. There is a growing case for an independent regulator to provide the leadership and drive for the change that football needs. Perhaps, the shock of what has happened to Portsmouth will lead chairmen to introduce the change that is required. Either way, something has to change, but how that will be achieved is unclear for now.

Post Mortem of a Crushing Defeat

As a Villa fan, I am clearly devastated about the result on Saturday. Having gone into the day with quite some optimism that we might at least be able to grab a point, the final result was a bitter pill to swallow. Admittedly, a defeat is a defeat, but it was the manner of it that was so embarrassing. As O’Neill admitted, the team seemed to give up after the third, which for a professional football team, is simply unforgivable. However, it is only a single defeat and the overreaction that has been seen on forums and message boards is quite ridiculous. Demands for O’Neill to be sacked, for the entire team to be dropped and fined, or boycotting the cup semi-final will not help anything, and there is a lot to be positive about for Villa fans.

I am not claiming that everything is rosy at Villa Park. A previous article looked at the growing discontent with Martin O’Neill, and this defeat is only going to exacerbate the situation. As a fan, I try to support the management and the players as much as possible, but there is nothing achieved by permanently looking at things through rose-tinted glasses. We have just suffered our worst defeat for a generation, and despite having been unbeaten this calendar year, performances have been poor and we came into this game on the back of consecutive home draws against two relatively mediocre sides. O’Neill has said it is his most devastating defeat in his managerial career, and I suspect a lot of fans are in agreement with him.

The result keeps up Martin O’Neill’s unwanted record of still having never won a Premiership game in March in his 4 years in charge of Villa. Is it merely an unfortunate coincidence or a sign of something systematically wrong at the club? The team relies on playing a high-tempo, high pressing game, which becomes difficult when players become tired. The team is not renowned for playing possession football – indeed, the players do not look after the ball particularly well at all – meaning that there is a lot of chasing, requiring a high work rate. Against Chelsea, five players had fitness tests on the day of the game, with four of them playing. Furthermore, the players have looked tired in recent matches – a point picked up on by Chelsea and John Terry. So, considering the style of play, it only seems right to question the decision to play tired, injured players.

Richard Dunne has been clearly struggling with injury recently, yet O’Neill decided to drop Carlos Cuellar to bring in the fresh Luke Young. James Milner has been taken off in both of the previous two games with injury, yet he played all 90 minutes against Chelsea, despite being out on his feet by the end. He made a change by bringing in Steve Sidwell to replace Stewart Downing, and was rewarded by a good performance. He was excellent in the first half and was one of the only bright points for Villa in the game.

However, this situation is nothing new. We saw a spectacular collapse last season, which was blamed on our European excursions and a small squad. This season, we lost in the qualifying round for the Europa League and invested in a number of squad members over the summer. However, the situation is the same. He has failed to rotate his squad at all over the course of the season thus far, playing the first team players into the ground to the point where they are virtually all exhausted or carrying injuries. Despite regular claims that he intends to rotate, he has used the second lowest number of players in the league this season – players such as Fabien Delph, Habib Beye, Nathan Delfouneso, Nigel Reo-Coker, Mark Albrighton and Curtis Davies have made a grand total of 28 start and 22 substitute appearances between the six of them in all league, cup and European games.

He also seems to have a tendency to play players out of position. We have two quality right backs in Luke Young and Habib Beye, both of whom have impressed when given the opportunity, yet he continues to persist with Carlos Cuellar in that position. Whilst Cuellar hasn’t disgraced himself, he is a central defender by trade and severely limits our attacking ability down that flank. The conversion of James Milner into a central midfielder is not ideal either. Whilst he has impressed against the smaller sides, he has looked out of place against the leading teams and leaves us with a situation of having Stiliyan Petrov and three wingers in midfield. This is exacerbated by the fact that Petrov is an attacking midfielder by trade, but has been converted into a holding midfielder at Villa. Using Milner alongside two other natural central midfielders would work, enabling him to use his creative abilities, but having the cover of two other midfielders.

However, despite all the negatives, it has not been a bad season for Villa. They are in seventh place in the league, having played all of the top 6 twice, with the exception of Manchester City. Realistically, it could be argued that this is position that we belong. The teams above us have all spent a lot more money and have a better squad, so should be above us. There have been victories at Old Trafford, Anfield, and the derby at St Andrews to enjoy, as well as victory over Chelsea at Villa Park. Before the Chelsea game, Villa had the joint best defence in the Premiership with Manchester United and every team but Chelsea has lost more games. One cup final has come and gone, whilst there is the FA Cup semi-final coming up next month.

Hopefully, the 7-1 to Chelsea is simply a freak one-off result and it will act as the kick-in-the-teeth that both Villa and Martin O’Neill need to finish the season well. A victory against Bolton next weekend will provide 3 points from the two games – more than would have been obtained from two draws. If you remember, Everton got hammered on the opening day of the season and have bounced back strongly to have an outside chance of a European place for next season. With games against Bolton, Hull, Portsmouth and Birmingham to come, there is the potential to bounce back and secure the points needed to ensure European football next season. The Champions League may be beyond them, but a top six finish is still a realistic possibility.