Aston Villa are having a better season under Unai Emery, who is leading the club back to glory after some questionable form under Steven Gerrard.
The former Arsenal manager has successfully linked the group and adopted his own style of play, with his players continuing to improve their performance for the sake of the club.
While the four-time Europa League winner’s signings at Villa have been spectacular, the Villans haven’t always had a high success rate with new newcomers, as Dean Smith will know from one of his captures.
Smith agreed to terms with Southampton in the summer of 2021 to recruit striker Danny Ings on a three-year contract to boost his front line.
What did Danny Ings cost Villa in total?
Villa paid £25m to the Saints to take the sharp-shooter off their hands, with Smith describing him as an “outstanding” acquisition who has “scored goals wherever he has played”.
It was a fair evaluation by Smith, as Ings sits today on a domestic goal tally of 123 scored in 380 appearances for a variety of clubs, however only 14 of them came at Villa.
Considering that Ings arrived on the back of a glorious stint at St Mary’s where he had netted 46 goals in 100 appearances, his price and wage seemed verifiable with reference to the impact he was anticipated to make on the team.
Things didn’t quite go to plan for the Winchester-born whiz, as he bid farewell to Villa Park after just a year and a half, where in that time he’d cost the club a total of around £34m in both wages and transfer fees.
When you divide the overall expenditure Villa paid to both purchase Ings and maintain his wage demands by the number of goals he scored, it works out that the 31-year-old cost the club around £2.4m per goal.
There was no denying the presence in leading the line that the former Liverpool forward would implement to the XI, however what he actually delivered at Villa Park was far from the standard expected.
The Englishman was handed a salary of £6.24m-per-year by the Midlands club, making him their second-highest earner at the time – falling just short of Philippe Coutinho with a wage of £120k-per-week.
Considering that Ings arrived on the back of a glorious stint at St Mary’s where he had netted 46 goals in 100 appearances, his price and wage seemed verifiable with reference to the impact he was anticipated to make on the team.
Things didn’t quite go to plan for the Winchester-born whiz, as he bid farewell to Villa Park after just a year and a half, where in that time he’d cost the club a total of around £34m in both wages and transfer fees.
When you divide the overall expenditure Villa paid to both purchase Ings and maintain his wage demands by the number of goals he scored, it works out that the 31-year-old cost the club around £2.4m per goal.
There was no denying the presence in leading the line that the former Liverpool forward would implement to the XI, however what he actually delivered at Villa Park was far from the standard expected.
