Chapter 82: Premier League, Here I Come

"GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! It’s over! This match is finished! Villa... the victory belongs to Aston Villa!"

"Rocher! Villa’s fourth goal of the match!" Seventy-fifth minute, and Rocher cut inside from the flank to extend Villa’s advantage even further.

"Villa’s board might want to get a new contract in front of him before this summer’s out." Rocher’s current deal, signed not that long ago, already looked laughably below his true value given everything he’d shown since.

It wasn’t only Rocher, either. Lavelle and Rami had both performed superbly across this whole run-in, and between the three of them, Premier League scouts had long since taken proper notice.

"Premier League! We’re back! Villa are back!" The moment Rocher’s fourth went in, Villa’s away end lost themselves completely.

Up in the executive box, Whitlock and the rest of the board had abandoned all pretence of composure. Football has a way of stripping the polish off even the most reserved businessman.

This was, notably, Whitlock’s first appearance at a match since handing Saint the job back in the winter.

"Chairman, your instincts were spot on with this one." Results speak for themselves in this sport, and Whitlock’s gamble on Saint had just delivered about as complete a vindication as any owner could ask for.

Before Rocher’s fourth goal, Whitlock’s box had also hosted a couple of guests from Wigan’s own boardroom. The moment that goal went in, both slipped out quietly, taking the rest of the room’s company with them.

"So... what do you all make of my proposal from before?" Whitlock had actually gathered his own board here partly to sound them out on something specific: the summer transfer budget he’d promised Saint.

Ten million wasn’t an enormous sum by the standards of the game’s true elite, but Whitlock wasn’t operating at that level either, English football ownership came in plenty of tiers, and his sat solidly in the upper-middle of the Championship rather than among the billionaire class reshaping the Premier League.

English football’s finances had grown increasingly volatile over recent years, plenty of clubs, even storied ones, had found themselves in genuine crisis after overreaching on spending they couldn’t sustain.

Villa’s own summer spending this season had, in a roundabout way, traced back to Saint’s influence, though the actual investment decision itself had never really been his to make. That belonged to the boardroom alone.

Given everything Saint had produced this season, other clubs would inevitably come calling with their own offers eventually. Realistically, though, that interest wouldn’t stretch as far as the Premier League itself; not yet, not after one Championship season, however spectacular. And with Villa themselves now heading up, there was no reason for Saint to look elsewhere regardless.

Play resumed on the pitch. Before the restart, Saint made his first substitution of the match, veteran Mannering coming on for Delgado, who’d more than earned his afternoon off.

At the same time, Loach, having completed his emergency centre-forward duties to perfection, dropped back into his natural position, and Villa reshaped into a 4-5-1.

The message behind that reshuffle was unmistakable: Wigan had nothing left to give, and Villa weren’t going to chase further goals purely for the sake of it.

Wigan, in truth, had no attacking threat left to offer regardless. Even their own manager had visibly given up on the touchline, resigned to the inevitable.

What followed turned genuinely flat, almost anticlimactic, the kind of stretch that feels like it’s running purely on the clock. Even so, neither set of supporters seemed to mind in the slightest.

Villa’s end kept singing straight through to the final whistle, buoyed by Rocher’s fourth. Wigan’s end had gone almost entirely silent, save for the occasional muffled sob.

Harmony, in its own strange way, both sets of fans lost entirely in their own separate realities, while the players on the pitch simply waited out the closing minutes by unspoken agreement.

Elsewhere, Derby’s rival pulled one back late in their own match, though it changed nothing meaningful for either side by that point.

Wigan’s relegation was already sealed. Villa’s promotion no longer carried any real variable left to resolve. And in the same round, elsewhere in the table, the final automatic spot had been decided too, a late, dramatic swing that settled the picture completely.

Football has a way of rewarding patience in the strangest fashion, the side occupying that final spot had been briefly knocked out of the top four only a few rounds earlier, only to complete a genuinely improbable recovery right at the death.

When referee Boyle finally blew for full time, it wasn’t just the stadium that erupted, half of Birmingham seemed to erupt with it, every corner of the city given over entirely to this one moment: Aston Villa, back in the Premier League.

The instant that whistle sounded, Villa’s players turned as one and sprinted straight for the touchline, straight toward one man in particular.

"What... hey, what are you all doing?" Watching the whole squad barrel toward him, Saint’s instincts flared with something close to genuine alarm.

A second later, he understood exactly what they intended, because Villa’s players had already made their intentions unmistakably clear.

Up he went, tossed into the air, caught, and thrown up again, the whole squad lost entirely in the moment.

"Oi... put me down... someone get me down. I’m scared of heights, you absolute animals!" Saint’s protests only seemed to energise them further.

"There’s Villa’s players thanking their manager in the only language this squad’s ever really spoken," Curtis said, laughing through the commentary.

Had Saint been asked to narrate it himself in that moment, the honest version would have run closer to: ’these lot have clearly been waiting all season for exactly this excuse.’

Whatever the framing, none of it mattered much in the end. What mattered was the result itself, Villa were promoted, heading back to the Premier League after three years away.

"SAINT! SAINT! SAINT!" At some point, without anyone quite marking the moment it started, the whole stadium had shifted into chanting his name.

Who had actually engineered this turnaround, from one place off relegation to a promotion party, inside a single season? There was only one answer to that question.

Saint Maddox. Thirty-one years old when he took the job, a man whose appointment had made half the country’s football press treat Villa as a national punchline.

Leaving the Championship the very next season? At the time, that appointment had been widely mocked as an act of self-sabotage, a story destined to end in humiliation, not history.

Instead, Saint had let the results do the talking, and by the end of this season, nobody in English football was laughing at that appointment anymore.

From round twenty-four onward, Saint’s Villa had played fifteen matches: twelve wins, one draw, two defeats, thirty-seven points from a possible forty-five.

With the season now officially complete, Villa finished on sixty-three points overall. Put plainly: across those same fifteen matches, Saint had outperformed Ventham’s own return by eleven points.

And even with the season closed out, the press showed no sign of letting Ventham’s own reputation rest easy any time soon.