View: Brutal fashion of Marc Albrighton exit from Aston Villa will still haunt Paul Lambert
The riches and success that Marc Albrighton went on to achieve after being released by Aston Villa in 2014 will still haunt the dreams of Paul Lambert to this day.
As the boyhood Villa fan readies himself for a hostile reception at St Andrews with his West Brom team on Friday night (10 February), it seems only right to look back at the brutal circumstances that led to Albrighton’s exit from Villa Park almost a decade ago.
Overall the Englishman spent a remarkable 16 years at Bodymoor Heath and went from a boy to a man after making his first-team bow under Martin O’Neill on the opening day of the 2009/10 season.
He quickly became a fan-favourite among the claret and blue faithful as he looked to fill the void that Ashley Young had left on the left wing for O’Neill’s side when he moved to Manchester United in 2011.
Albrighton would go on to make 102 appearances for Villa under five different managers before Paul Lambert sanctioned his exit to Leicester City on a free transfer in 2014. This was despite Albrighton pulling up trees while on loan at Wigan in the previous season and Lambert being short of firepower in the final third.
Speaking to the Claret and Blue podcast in 2021, Albrighton opened up on the brutal fashion of his departure, saying: “Two days after the season finished, my agent phoned me and said, ‘There’s nothing on the table from Villa.’
“In my head, definitely naively, I trusted everything that they said. I don’t know whose decision it was, I still don’t know now. In my head it was, ‘Yeah my contract’s sorted, (Lambert) said it would be sorted towards the end of the season, keep playing your football, keep doing what you’re doing, keep doing well.’
“So that’s what I was doing and I just expected a contract. I didn’t expect anything massive because I hadn’t been playing every game, I’d only played bit parts.
“But whatever was on the table for me I would have accepted, 100 per cent; a one-year or even a pay-as-you-play or whatever. I didn’t even think in my head that I would leave Villa.”
Despite this initial upset, Albrighton would go on to scoop up further riches away from his boyhood club than with them, as he proved himself to be a key cog in the miraculous 2016 Leicester City team who defied all the odds to win the Premier League.
The following season, he scored twice in the Champions League before the Foxes were knocked out in the quarter-finals by Athletico Madrid and went on to play for the Midlands club over 200 times.
Now at 33 years old, the former academy graduate has moved on loan to West Brom in the January transfer window in one last attempt to roll back the years and prove that the old-fashioned winger is by no means redundant in the modern-day game.
In other Aston Villa news, the club are set to revive interest in an Athletic Bilbao player in the summer after a failed January swoop.