A wholly reliable (from my perspective) anecdote about Villa sums up the decay and listlessness of the club, that has pervaded for a number of years.
A good friend of mine was the account manager for the beer supplier to Villa Park. They were known for hopping from one supplier to another whenever the 24 month contract came to an end. Relationships and familiarity counted for very little when it came to the time to renegotiate. Every two years it was like clockwork. Anyway, my mate was asked to requote for the account, and he did so based on a certain number of barrels a year. Villa were perplexed by this figure because it was around a third higher than they were aware of. Much too-ing and fro-ing went on until it transpired that there were four delivery points for the beer at the stadium and one of them was used by a decent sized number of employees exclusively as a stepping-stone for kegs being wholesaled via the back-door in white vans into various bars and pubs in the city centre. Approaching a third of their beer volume was bypassing the club and no-one at Villa picked up in it, instead paying the invoices as they fell due, without any form of audit or meaningful stocktake. Fucking clowns.
Casting a glance at Villa simply serves to accentuate how iniquitous, capricious and arbitrary fortunes in football can be. Get taken over by the wrong owner and your fortunes can reverse in the blink of an eye. When fans of other clubs talk about us being lottery winners they say so pejoratively, but they conspicuously miss the point. Except in the most anomalous of instances, lottery winners don’t care how they came by their good fortune; they are too busy enjoying the trappings of wealth and punching above their weight sexually to remotely care how their good fortune came about. That state of mind certainly crystallises my current perspective on City.
In the meantime, as they slide further into the abyss, I’m sure Villa fans can console themselves about the fact that their club’s hegemony when football was free from corruption and venality, as it indisputably was in the early 20th century.
If, you know, your history....
