Morgan Rogers, Aston Villa and the numb inevitability of transfer window heartbreak

Forget any notion you might have of Villa holding on to the crown jewels in the summer transfer window. Those days are gone and everyone but the supporters is fine with it.

PROOF

Gareth Barry left Aston Villa under a cloud. More than a decade after his senior debut and a Premier League appearance for every day of the year, Villa’s former captain joined the ranks of the loathsome departed.

Villa supporters were familiar with the experience by 2009 but seeing a player who joined the club as a youth agitate so openly for a transfer was no easier to stomach because we’d tasted it before.

Lots of supporters have seen a favourite player move on in a manner unbefitting their status and their contribution to the club. Barry was one of those.

Gareth Southgate’s reasoning on his exit for Middlesbrough was badly received. Dwight Yorke and Mark Bosnich both went to Manchester United, which was offensive enough in its own right at the time.

Jack Grealish divided opinion when he left Villa. I made a bit of a pantomime of my disgust but it was all for show and its truthful roots were more to do with Manchester City than Grealish, whom I love dearly.

Morgan Rogers will leave Villa

What links the likes of Yorke, Bosnich, Barry, even Fabian Delph to a degree, is that Villa didn’t have to sell them. Villa might have wanted to sell them, it might even have been sensible to sell them, but they didn’t have to sell them.

That’s where times have changed.

The summer transfer window opens on 15th June. Two days later, Morgan Rogers is likely to be in the starting line-up for England against Croatia at the World Cup.

Rogers has been a brilliant signing for Villa. He came in from the Championship and took to the Premier League and then the Champions League like a duck to water. International recognition was inevitable and both Rogers and Villa manager Unai Emery can take credit for it.

He’s an easy player to like. He’s great to watch. He works hard. There have been some dips in form this season and last, no doubt, but Rogers is one of those players who can do things nobody else at his club can.

The 23-year-old seems to have developed a genuine affinity for Villa, yet I’m not entertaining the idea that the club will retain his services into next season even if they do qualify for the Champions League for the second time in three seasons.

Rogers will make his preference known one way or the other. There’s no massive step up from Villa nowadays – if a player wants to win trophies and play at the top level there are few guarantees and he might as well stay put – but money, prestige and perception still matter.

The club won’t stand in Rogers’ way

Villa supporters scoffed earlier this season at the idea of a food chain in football, not because there isn’t one but because it came from Very Online fans of Tottenham Hotspur.

The things that motivate the top players don’t always funnel them towards some definition of ‘up’ but they do funnel them… somewhere?

Leaving the specific details of Rogers’ potential transfer fee and his actual value to one side, the difference between 1998 or 2009 and 2026 is the financial environment in which Villa have to operate.

In the last few days alone they’ve announced an updated plan for the redevelopment of the North Stand, been in the news regarding the sale of the Warehouse and nudged themselves closer to qualifying for the Champions League and snagging that delicious revenue boost.

This is football now. Money’s always been part of the game but it has such a direct impact on the day-to-day now that it’s basically impossible to fully grasp why decisions are made without some understanding of the financial workings that underpin them.

That’s one of my biggest complaints about football. I still live and breathe the sport. It literally pays my bills and I’m not one of those gnarly old hacks who seem to hate every match they have to sit through because of it.

I love football but the calcifying linkage between spreadsheets and the pitch bores me to tears.

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In that context, a serious transfer bid for Rogers might be welcomed or even craved when in years gone by the club would have wanted to tell City or Chelsea or whoever to take a long walk off a short pier.

Today, Villa are up against the buffers of Premier League and UEFA financial regulations that mean flogging their most sellable player could easily appear at the top of Roberto Olabe’s to-do list in the summer.

The long-term impact of a big transfer fee for Rogers is important

Selling players because they force the issue or because a bid comes in that can’t be refused makes sense to me. I’ll never think especially fondly of Barry or Yorke but there was logic to their sales even if I didn’t agree with or enjoy them at the time.

Selling players proactively who are vital on the pitch and at the peak of their value is logical too. Clubs around the world have built and maintained their entire models on it.

Yet Villa weren’t a selling club when Southgate and Barry and Yorke and Bosnich left. The very phrase suggests a level of intent and process that didn’t exist.

Every club at the top level is now a selling club, and a buying club, and a club generally engaged in this rancid and tedious satellite industry whose outsized influence on the game is bleeding it of romance.

Rogers is the sort of player whose departure would have been devastating thirty years ago but here’s the truth: Villa need to succeed in the world of player trading, arguably more than any comparable club because of their low revenue and desire to stay at their level, and any transfer fee they’d accept for Rogers would amount to course-correcting money.

In many ways, not being able to sell high this summer is a bigger risk than losing Rogers even to a direct competitor. Ah, the beautiful game.

The cold hard facts necessarily take the edge off the emotional side of such matters and that’s a shame. Football’s much better when supporters are able to care.

When Rogers saunters off into the sunset this summer – it is a case of ‘when’, in my view – it’ll be sad. I’ll be sad. But absolutely everything about it will add up.

I won’t despise Rogers like Yorke. I won’t be furious about it like Barry. I won’t be disappointed like Southgate. I won’t find it difficult to watch him play for England like Grealish.

I’ll just be numb. That in itself is a tragic indictment of the financial framework of top-level football. It’s not supposed to be like this.