Rumours have been escalating about a potential change of owner at Villa Park. Energy drink giants Red Bull have admitted that they are considering buying a Premier League club. Names such as Newcastle and Everton have been thrown around, but it’s Aston Villa that have now been added to the list. Former Villa boss Gerard Houllier is head of global soccer for Red Bull and he has a say in any future purchases from Red Bull.
Randy Lerner has been received lots of stick in regards to his owner ship of Aston Villa and the lack of investment over the years. This would surely change under Red Bull, the company owns over 15 different sports teams including a very successful Formula 1 team and football teams in America, Austria and Ghana.
However, when Red Bull bought FC Salzburg in 2005, the team has lost it’s history and has become a new club with no history. The team has undergone massive management changes, and staff changes but to this day, fans are unhappy.
Would fans accept this? Is it worth changing ‘Red Bull Aston Villa’s’ History for a possible brighter future? Aston Villa would definitely receive that much needed cash injection but it does come with a cost. You are selling your self to a drink-company. The stadium name would change, a long with the clubs colours and badge. But I’m certain it will result in success. If Red Bull spent the time to develop their football team, I reckon it has the potential to be as successful as their Formula 1 team.
Yeah it’s not likely ooh ah but in reality that’s all it will take, all it needs is Lerner to say to Lambert go and buy who you want none of this u21 stuff anymore. It’s so easy yet seems to be so difficult, even for a multi billionaire!
Yep can’t see it Adam we will never be more than a mediocre club treading water now. Unless Lerner sells we could be stuck like it for years
I’d not heard this rumour until yesterday and happily there doesn’t seem to be too much substance to it.
It has to be admitted that watching the Villa these days isn’t quite the pleasure that it used to be and it’s nigh-on impossible to see the club achieving anything in the current climate. It’s extremely difficult, in fact, to see any non-Champions’ League club achieving anything in the current era – in years to come we will, no doubt, look back on the CL as the tournament that destroyed the once beautiful game.
A few years back, a megabucks injection would have pretty well guaranteed a place in the Euro-elite, it certainly worked for Chelsea. Today, though, there’s no shortage of clubs that have become the personal Subutteo sets of various oligarchs and it’s quite conceivable that any club spending an additional couple of hundred millions could do so without seeing a significant return on the investment.
At the same time that we are sympathising with fans of clubs like Cardiff and Hull City, where ego-maniacal owners place their personal whims above the histories and traditions of their clubs, a sell-out to a mega-corporation could see us in the worst of all possible worlds. Stripped of our name, our colours and quite possibly our home, we could see ourselves replaced by a side in blue shirts, emblazoned with advertisements for canned industrial waste, playing in Coventry as the Birmingham Jaegerbombs, still failing to make it to the top table as an assortment of oil sheikhs, airlines and “legitimate businessmen” continue to pour endless fortunes into various other clubs. We’d simply be seeing the death of Aston Villa with a very real possibility that there’d be no phoenix rising from the ashes.
Football is broken but selling the soul of one of its most important clubs would do nothing to fix that.