Monchi escapes Aston Villa as Emery left in the lurch with 'umbrella' no match for monsoon

Monchi is leaving Aston Villa after two years as the club’s President of Football Operations. “I think it is a project that is growing,” he said upon his unveiling. He could not have been more wrong.

One might have expected more extensive due diligence from such a highly-respected, world-renowned transfer guru when joining a football club which admittedly on the surface will have looked like a top opportunity when he arrived in the summer of 2023, but was evidently on the brink of disaster had he scratched even slightly beneath the surface.

Unai Emery had taken Villa from relegation peril back into Europe having taken the reins from Steven Gerrard, and one season of the Emery-Monchi partnership saw them safely into the Champions League. But progress was being made amid a ticking wage bill time bomb which has threatened to blow up spectacularly ever since, with Monchi hamstrung by UEFA regulations in his bid to build a squad to compete at the highest level.

UEFA’s squad cost rules (SCR), which state that a club can only spend up to 70% of its revenue on player wages, have f***ed him, but he’s arguably been the one f***ing Aston Villa by continuing to offer huge salaries with no great care for the consequences. They’re currently paying Jadon Sancho £200,000 per week to sit on the bench having paid more than that for the services of Marcus Rashford last term.

While at the end of last season Tottenham were spending 46% of their revenue on wages, with Manchester United and Arsenal at 51%, Villa’s wages-to-revenue ratio was a whopping 91%, which led to a £9.5m fine in July.

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The 57-year-old’s tendency to refer to himself in the third person – “I am Monchi, for better or worse,” he said when arriving at Villa, whatever that means – suggests he’s not a man lacking in confidence. And while we don’t yet know whether he’s quit on been pushed for his hand in the mess Villa now find themselves in, our guess is he won’t be all that sad to have jumped from what looks to be a sinking ship.

After a summer in which the club spent just £26m on new players, the legacy of their crushing failure to qualify for the Champions League last season is now being seen through their insipid Premier League performances having denied them any movement of note in the transfer window. Their first league goal of the season on Saturday brought little joy against ten-man Sunderland.

“My first idea was to go home and rest because I have a high level of stress,” Monchi said before revealing how Emery persuaded him to join the Villa project. “When it rained more, they brought an umbrella,” he added.

He surely regrets not acting on instinct after two years in which we’re guessing those stress levels have reached previously unseen zeniths in a monsoon that no umbrella is a match for at Villa Park. And you’ve now really got to wonder how committed Emery still is to the Villa cause.

He looked short of ideas and frankly tired of it all against Sunderland, and may also be glad of the opportunity to “go home and rest” like his closest confidant.

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