Villa Boss Worries On Transfer Costs

Martin O’Neill is obviously getting badgered in the press conferences with questions about transfers, or maybe more appropriately, the lack of transfers?

This time he has suggested some prices are just too high and that he isn’t in the business of bankrupting a football club.

‘In this day and age you have to be very careful because things are escalating at such a rate. Trying to find value for money is exceptionally difficult, but if all those things are there, we’ll try to do it.’

He then explains that he hasn’t ruled anything out but he wants to build a strong squad to compete and ‘not someone who might come in for two games and be an ‘impact’ signing and not really be value for money.’

Adding on the official site: ‘You see the escalation in prices and someone who you thought you’d be able to get for ‘x’ is now ‘x plus y’. Part of you questions it and part of you thinks do you go along with it because other teams are strengthening their sides.’

Well, erm. Yes if you want to compete in the top five to six surely? I would have thought – from a laymans point of view – that a manager would say the players he wants and the board would do the deals, if the board think the price is too high, they reject the deals?

O’Neill carried on: ‘I am going to do that – the owner has given me the responsibility for want of a better word to do it and this is what I’m looking at. I’m surveying all options and I’ll see what develops. The owner has put a bit of trust into me and I want to make the team as exciting as I possibly can.’

He is also going to look at the last few games where, in his words, Villa ‘were really flying’.

Not an easy job being the manager, we need new quality players, that is for sure, but then what happens to the good young players we already have coming through. On the bright side, I’m not paid the £1million a year so it isn’t my worry. On the down side, I’m not paid the million a year!!