It would be fair to say that their fans are long-suffering and have had to put up with a relative lack of success for far too long. Villa are a big club with one of the largest catchment areas in Europe (the West Midland metropolitan area has 3.7 million people). They have seven league championships and a European Cup, all won in the pre- Premier League era, that was equal with Manchester United when the Premier League first started. So, what's gone wrong?
The club has been badly run for an awful long time. Both the previous owner, Doug Ellis and the current one, Randy Lerner, have failed to invest properly in the club. And managerial appointments have mostly been very poor, with the honorable exception of Martin O'Neill. O'Neill himself was very unlucky, Villa always seemed to come unstuck in the Spring while going for the Champions League places, and let's not forget the 2010 League Cup final against Manchester United and Phil Dowd's terrible decision not to send off Vidic for a clear professional foul within the first five minutes of the match. United eventually won 2-1 and O'Neill, such a talented manager, later resigned citing a lack of backing from Lerner in the transfer market.
Fast forward to 2015 and Villa sold their two best players over the summer without being able to properly replace them. Again, a familiar pattern of bad luck and bad leadership emerges; They were incredibly unlucky to lose their two players in the same transfer window, any club would be severely knocked back by that, but they should never have been relying so heavily on them to begin with.
Villa fans deserve much better than what they've had to put up with recently. But maybe if relegation results in a change of owner it might not be such a bad thing?
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