Alan Hutton demands Aston Villa recruit better after facts emerge
We’re delighted to welcome former Aston Villa full-back Alan Hutton as our exclusive columnist. Each week he’ll be giving his views on the biggest talking points at Villa Park…
Aston Villa were the Premier League’s biggest overspenders of the past decade and Alan Hutton wants to see better recruitment be the focus.
The CIES Football Observatory compiled a detailed analysis of every top-flight side’s transfer business since July 2012 and indicated that only Manchester United had overspent by more than the Villans.
Their calculations suggest that Villa have spent £130million more than they should have on signing new players over the time period assessed by the Swiss-based international centre for sports studies.
Hutton, a former Aston Villa right-back, was blunt in suggesting how the club go about changing their ways with Steven Gerrard not responsible for any of the numbers compiled having arrived after the final date in the study.
“Make sure your recruitment is better,” Hutton said exclusively to Villa News. “You go and look for targets in areas you think are weak.
“But when you spend £10million on Sanson, for example, it hasn’t worked out for whatever reason. He didn’t settle so you end up spending quite a lot of money on these guys and it isn’t quite working.
“Your recruitment has to be on point to make sure you’re not wasting money and even when I was there, there was a big turnover of players season after season after season which is not ideal.”
January could be a good place for Villa to start trying to right the wrongs of the previous decade with a number of players potentially on the chopping block and bargains to be found if they look hard enough.
In other Aston Villa news, Gerrard’s men earned a hard-fought draw at Leeds United on Sunday and there was plenty to learn from the stalemate.