Chapter 91: The Front Line

Villa’s summer clearout showed no sign of slowing. Six more fringe players left the club in quick succession; Dean Lowry, Ryan Difford, Mark Modesto, Craig Mancini, Tony Aberon, and Luke Vincenti, bringing in a combined eight hundred fifty thousand pounds between them.

Since Saint’s arrival, none of these six had ever looked like genuine first-team options, squad depth at best, and every one of them understood exactly where they stood by the time the season ended, which meant most had already started quietly lining up their next clubs well before the transfer window officially opened.

Saint didn’t fight to keep a single one of them. Sallow handled each negotiation with a free hand, and Saint signed off on every deal without a second glance.

Eight hundred fifty thousand pounds, all told. Measured against the kind of money changing hands at the Premier League’s true elite, that figure barely registered. But for a Championship club mid-rebuild, it was eight hundred fifty thousand pounds worth putting straight back into fixing the areas that actually needed it.

Birmingham’s football landscape had just taken a genuine hit elsewhere in the city that same season; Birmingham City, Villa’s own fierce local rivals, had gone down to League One after a bruising relegation battle, a genuine fall for a club that had spent years scrapping to stay relevant at Championship level.

Saint’s next target had nothing to do with that local drama, though, a twenty-two-year-old left-back named Dean Faraday, currently at a club freshly relegated out of League One entirely.

When Villa’s five hundred thousand pound offer landed, that club accepted without much hesitation, the leverage in that conversation sat entirely on Villa’s side.

With Faraday secured, Saint also moved for a seventeen-year-old prospect named Theo Crist, picked up for a modest one hundred thousand pounds from a lower-league academy side.

With those two additions, Villa’s back line had essentially been rebuilt from the ground up. The clear-out wasn’t finished yet, though; over the following days, Peña, Alves’s old understudy, plus two more fringe defenders, all moved on in quick succession.

Those four departures together brought in four million, seven hundred fifty thousand pounds. Two of them had been genuine regulars the previous season; solid, if unspectacular, under Saint’s system, and the other two had served as reliable rotation options throughout.

Villa landed another genuine coup in the market around the same time, too; a towering, old-fashioned centre-forward named Jake Tomlin, prised away from a mid-table club for six and a half million pounds. That fee eclipsed even Vacek’s transfer, making Tomlin comfortably Villa’s biggest outlay of the entire summer.

Tomlin’s previous two seasons had been genuinely frustrating ones. Playing alongside a more celebrated veteran striker, he’d spent most of his time working as little more than a foil; creating space, doing the unglamorous running, despite regularly outscoring the man he was supposedly supporting.

By the back end of the previous season, injuries had piled on top of that frustration, sixteen league appearances all year, just two goals to show for it.

Which meant Tomlin walked into this summer with a genuine point to prove. But between that injury record and his club’s own reluctance to sell a player they’d invested heavily in developing, getting him out the door wasn’t straightforward.

Villa’s opening offer alone had been enough to turn heads, his club, carrying its own financial strain after years of heavy spending, suddenly found four million pounds for a player on the fringes genuinely hard to refuse.

Word of that opening bid, though, drew in a rival suitor fast. Another Championship club had been quietly tracking Tomlin for a while, holding off purely because their own promotion push had fallen short the previous season and they’d hoped his value might soften as a result.

Good theory, in principle, undone the moment Villa actually moved first.

Once that rival realised they couldn’t simply wait Villa out, they had no choice but to counter-bid, and the fee climbed steadily from that original four million all the way to six million, the absolute ceiling of what that rival club could stretch to for one player.

In the end, Villa’s final offer of six and a half million pounds forced that rival to step away entirely. Tomlin himself was delighted with how it played out, Villa meant Premier League football, while his old club walked away with a fee nearly double what anyone had rated him at coming into the season, given everything that had gone wrong for him there.

Spending six and a half million on a striker who’d managed just two goals in sixteen appearances the previous season, on paper, that looked like a genuinely reckless gamble.

Saint was fully aware of exactly how that read from the outside. He also knew, with total confidence, that Sallow would never have sanctioned a fee like that on his own judgment, and sure enough, the two of them had clashed properly over this deal.

It wasn’t the first disagreement of the window, either. Since negotiations had opened, Saint and Sallow had butted heads repeatedly.

On transfer authority specifically, Saint had been fairly unyielding, every name Sallow had floated independently had been turned down flat. Every single signing Villa had made this summer had gone through Saint’s own personal approval, no exceptions.

The first real flashpoint between them had come over Vacek, a disagreement serious enough that it had actually reached Whitlock’s desk before it settled. Saint had gotten his man in the end, but the whole episode had left Sallow visibly cooler toward him for a stretch afterward.

Things had only just started thawing again when Tomlin’s deal reopened the same wound. The window, though, wasn’t finished, and before Tomlin’s transfer had even fully settled, Saint had already moved on to his next target, this time much further afield. South America, specifically, Argentina.

Diego Salerno (no relation to Villa’s own director) had built a modest reputation in South American football, competent, reliable, but by no stretch of the imagination considered a genuine prospect.

At this stage, he sat entirely in the shadow of his own younger brother, Gabriel Salerno, whose name had actually attracted real transfer speculation that same summer, a flirtation with a major European club that ultimately came to nothing, the move collapsing before it ever got close to completion.

Diego’s own path to Europe, in the version of history Saint remembered, had taken considerably longer to materialise, a winter move to a mid-table English club, still the better part of half a year away at this point.

As it happened, that same season had opened up an unusual window of opportunity for clubs further down the English pyramid too, a wave of restructuring across the lower divisions had briefly made several newly relegated clubs more willing to do business than they otherwise would have been.

That was the version of events that should have happened. With Saint moving early, Diego now had a real shot at reaching Europe well ahead of his own brother.

Europe represents the summit of ambition for practically every South American footballer, and the moment Saint’s call came through, Diego’s reaction bordered on disbelief, no European club had shown any serious interest in him up to that point.

Learning that the interest came from a genuine Premier League club settled it almost instantly. From there, the actual negotiation moved quickly.

Five hundred fifty thousand pounds. Once Diego made his own wishes plain, his current club had little room to resist, his contract had only a single year left to run, and letting him walk for even a modest fee beat the alternative of losing him for nothing twelve months later while still carrying his wages in the meantime.

South American football, like most of the world’s development pipelines, tends to prioritise its youngest, most marketable prospects. A player in his late twenties, however reliable, simply doesn’t carry the same leverage, and that imbalance was exactly what let Villa get this one done so cleanly.