Guardian
Martin O'Neill quits as Aston Villa manager after transfer funds row• Club stunned by O'Neill's exit five days before season
• Block on spending money from Milner sale the final straw * Stuart James
Aston Villa were thrown into turmoil last night after Martin O'Neill resigned as manager just five days before the new season starts. Villa have refused to disclose any reasons behind the decision, which was confirmed in a statement yesterday afternoon, but the tipping point for O'Neill was when he learned he would not be able to reinvest the majority of the money generated from James Milner's move to Manchester City.
Although O'Neill's decision to end his four-year reign does not come as a great surprise – he admitted he was considering his future four months ago as his relationship with the chairman, Randy Lerner, began to unravel – the timing has come as a shock. Villa play West Ham United on Saturday and unless Lerner can make a quick appointment, Kevin MacDonald, the reserve-team manager, will take charge in a caretaker capacity.
Perhaps of greatest concern to Lerner and Villa's chief executive, Paul Faulkner, is that there is no obvious candidate to fill O'Neill's position. Mark Hughes would have been nailed on to get the job had he not taken over at Fulham a few weeks ago, and the Welshman must be cursing Martin Jol's decision to remain at Ajax rather than move to Craven Cottage. Jol has now been linked with the Villa position while Bob Bradley, the United States coach, has also been touted.
How much money the new Villa manager has to spend will be of great interest given the manner of O'Neill's departure. Lerner has invested £179m since assuming control in 2006 – his arrival coinciding with the appointment of O'Neill – but he made it clear at the end of last season that he was no longer willing to bankroll huge spending sprees. Villa posted a record pre-tax loss of £46m for the 2008-09 season as the wage bill during that period climbed to £71m, up 42% on the previous 12 months. Last season's accounts are expected to be even worse.
O'Neill was told in January that he would have to offload players to reduce the financial burden but only Craig Gardner was moved on. The first cracks in the O'Neill-Lerner relationship began to appear during that period and by the time the season came to a close the two men, at one time so close, had become increasingly distant and no longer shared the same vision for the club. O'Neill was informed he would have to work within a "sell-to-buy" policy that he described as "not ideal".
Last Friday night, following the friendly against Valencia and with Milner's transfer edging closer, O'Neill was asked how much he would be able to spend of the money that Villa received from City. He replied that he would "need to speak to the chairman and chief executive about that". The answer O'Neill subsequently received from Lerner and Faulkner appears to have convinced him he would be unable to make Villa a competitive force again next season, following three successive top-six finishes.
Villa's players were completely unaware that O'Neill was about to quit. The manager reported to Bodymoor Heath as normal yesterday and was out on the training field working with the squad in the morning. He gave no indication he was going to resign, leaving the players to find out when rumours began to spread and the odds on O'Neill being the first manager to leave his job this season started to tumble.
O'Neill was given far more control at Villa than many of his Premier League counterparts, although his replacement will not be allowed to operate from the same powerbase. Lerner and Faulkner, who has more responsibility since taking on the role of chief executive, have learned lessons after seeing a number of squad players pick up huge wages but rarely contribute. Six of them were put up for sale this summer but five remain at the club due in no small part to their salaries.
Yet O'Neill can point to the signings of Milner and Ashley Young as success stories. Villa will more than double their money on Milner, whose transfer to City is expected to go through in the next few days with or without Stephen Ireland moving in the opposite direction. Young would also command twice as much as the £9.5m Villa paid for him. Tottenham are considering tabling an offer as they seek to capitalise on yesterday's events.
"I have enjoyed my time at Aston Villa immensely," O'Neill said. "It's obviously a wrench to be leaving such a magnificent club. I would like to pay tribute to the Villa players, my coaching staff and the Villa supporters for all the support and encouragement they have given both the club and me personally during my time as manager.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/aug/09/martin-oneill-quits-aston-villaGUARDIAN/Paul Hayward
Martin O'Neill - the charming dictator who finally lost patience
Aston Villa and Randy Lerner have managed to drive away their most important assetIt was a febrile day at Aston Villa's Bodymoor Heath training ground and you could feel a rift coming. In the aftermath of his team's 7-1 hammering at Chelsea, Martin O'Neill was trying to pull off the hard PR trick of affirming passion for the job while also using a large media gathering to warn the club's owner his fidelity to the claret and blue was finite.
This was no easy mission. Realising his threat to leave was a bit too stark, O'Neill later issued a statement restating his loyalty to Randy Lerner's philanthropic mission. But there was no mistaking the Villa manager's agitation later in a private conversation as he contemplated the possibility that Gareth Barry's sale to Manchester City the previous summer had started a trend that would turn Lerner's parish into a dispenser rather than an acquirer of talent.
James Milner's move to one of the Manchester monsters was already being touted and the talk around Villa Park was of Lerner being spooked by the rise of Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur and how few rungs an £80m investment in players raised a club on the Premier League's greased ladder. The word was that the Quiet American had looked at the financial crash and decided English football was merely a bonfire for his bucks.
O'Neill turned his thoughts to the possibility that Milner, Ashley Young and others might be auctioned off along with Villa's recently restored ambitions. "If that situation did develop that wouldn't necessarily mean I would go and down tools and say, 'Well, listen, we can't go any further,'" he said. "What you would do is see if you can come up with some other ways, maybe through the scheme here with the younger players coming through, maybe with a bit of trading here and there, maybe taking a risk with a major player to be transferred [out] to sort things out. You wouldn't just down tools. It's not been in my nature to do that.
"I couldn't envisage that sort of scene – just throwing the toys out of the pram. I feel maybe I should have a say in my career as much as anyone else – that was the point I was trying to make [in his earlier press conference]. Actually I didn't make it too cleverly, but it doesn't really matter."
Five days before the start of a new Premier League campaign, O'Neill's willingness to compromise expired, with dire implications for Villa and not especially good ones for him. At 58, he has at least one top appointment left in him but in the last few weeks two major boats have sailed without him. Fabio Capello's survival as England manager was one puff of receding smoke and Roy Hodgson's elevation from Fulham to Liverpool shut down another ideal vacancy.
Spend proper time with O'Neill and you see that his main managerial quality is a superhuman talent for motivation, for making journeymen feel like royalty, for unlocking football's spirit in players who may have been more used to making up the numbers. This sounds a good antidote to the malaise of England's low self‑esteem and to the moroseness that settled over Anfield before Hodgson arrived to blow it away. The saddest note in O'Neill's sudden resignation is that none of the elite managerial jobs in Britain look to be heading his way any time soon unless Sir Alex Ferguson stands down and Manchester United turn from Scotland to Northern Ireland for their inspiration.
Mourinho-esque career plotting has never been O'Neill's style. He was employed at Villa on a rolling one-year contract and calls himself a "typical Irishman without a long-term plan". On that tense day at Bodymoor Heath, he was plainly wounded by a surge in hostility from some Villa fans and bloggers in the wake of the collapse at Stamford Bridge on 27 March. He said: "I don't have an agent, I've never had an agent, I might be the only manager in Europe who doesn't have an agent. I've got a lawyer who would look over my contract at the end of the day, but I do the negotiations and therefore in terms of self-promotion I don't think I would have ever done that.
"What I should do, I should really consider my value a wee bit more. That's sounds big-headed, because I said in my time of trying to fight back that I have been a breath of fresh air to these people, because this club was totally disaffected four years ago."
His message was that managers "should not be self-deprecating to the extent that what happens is that people hammer the crap out of you". In retrospect the parting was foreshadowed by that cri de coeur. Each day of summer brought Milner's departure closer. A law graduate, O'Neill's nose for evidence was telling him Villa were becoming dis-investors just at the point where City and Spurs were redoubling their efforts to break up the cartel.
He is not a promoter of youth for its own sake. He welcomes to first-team action only those youngsters who are ready to contribute to points accumulation. The rest can amuse themselves with their studies or at Alton Towers. So he was never likely to agree to an influx of teenagers into the starting XI while a machete was applied to the wage bill.
An autocrat with a winning way – a charming dictator who observed the power of psychology in his playing days under Brian Clough – O'Neill might be accused by some Villa fans of protecting his own reputation by bailing out now. City's huge investments and the Harry Redknapp-authored transformation of Spurs hardly enhanced Villa's chances of improving on three consecutive sixth-place finishes: a respectable return, given the weight of money in front of them.
But self-interest will have played only a small role in the ending of the Villa revival. This looks more old-fashioned: a rupture based on principle. Milner was not Villa's greatest asset, nor Young. That honour belonged to O'Neill and now they have driven him away.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/aug/09/martin-oneill-aston-villa
That's good news for USA fans! Very disappointing from Lerner for Cleveland Browns and Villa fans. The Browns had a Villa type season 2 or 3 seasons back, then went back to being sh!t. This year they've brought in a washed up quarterback with a bad arm to lead the team 
Sad cause a couple of year's ago I thought Lerner was about something, now it appears he's just a cheap imitation of the folks that run Man U and the Tampa Bucs. Props to O'Neil for telling them to stick it where the sun don't shine, and **** Dubai City while we're at it 
