One of many takeaways from Sunday’s hugely embarrassing defeat to Stevenage was just how disjointed Aston Villa’s recruitment has been over the last few years.

In truth we only lost the game due to a woeful individual error, but that shouldn’t mask how pedestrian we were in the previous 88 minutes. Unai Emery has shown that his first choice 11 can be a genuinely decent team under his guidance, however their mental fragilities and the squad’s lack of quality beyond that will have been laid bare to him at the weekend.

The fact that a struggling Leon Bailey played 90 minutes emphasised the absence of literally any other senior winger. Anwar El Ghazi, Bertrand Traore and Trezeguet are not good enough for the level we want to be at, but to let them leave in the summer without replacements looks increasingly negligent and speaks to a transfer policy that gave Steven Gerrard too much control over recruitment.

In theory the buck for transfers should stop with Johan Lange (it is his job after all), but the collapsed transfer of Ismaïla Sarr from Watford back in August suggested there wasn’t an aligned recruitment strategy between the club and the manager. Someone, presumably Lange, had (rightly) identified a gap in the squad for a winger, negotiated a deal for a highly rated young player that would help fill that gap, only for Gerrard to pull the plug on the deal at the last minute.

We knew that Philippe Coutinho and Lucas Digne were also Gerrard’s signings in the last January transfer window and it’s hard to make a case that either were needed. Perhaps the most notable thing about these signings was that at the ages of 29 and 28 respectively, they represented a clear departure from the strategy Christian Purslow first spoke of in the summer of 2019:

“A really coherent, clear player recruitment plan focusing on younger players who can become more valuable either to us, or if they move on, is number one. Lower age, lower wage. We want players who really want to play for Aston Villa. The glory. Not the money.”

This all muddies the waters of accountability for transfers, and the result is a disjointed squad with players chosen by too many different people for too many different reasons. That’s not to say there haven’t been good signings among them – Boubacar Kamara looks to be a fantastic player and Gerrard deserves credit for the role he played in convincing him to join – but success stories like these have been few and far between.

It also doesn’t help that we’re on our third manager in as many years, though the whole point of a long term recruitment strategy is that you can maintain some level of continuity regardless of who your head coach is. Brighton and Brentford are shining examples of this.

In whichever positions we look to strengthen in the next two transfer windows, the character of the players we sign should be as important as their ability. In the current squad, Tyrone Mings, Emi Martinez, Ashley Young and to a lesser extent John McGinn are the only players with any real leadership qualities on the pitch. This has been evident in spectacular capitulations spanning multiple managers in the 3-2 defeats to Wolves and Man City last season, with Sunday’s horror show to add to that list now too.

In reality, a winners’ mentality has been lacking since we were challenging in the Championship. John Terry, Robert Snodgrass, Mile Jedinak, Glenn Whelan and Conor Hourihane along with Mings and McGinn could all be right bastards when they had to be, and that’s a trait every good side needs.

I fully expect the club to let Unai Emery bring his own players in over the next few transfer windows. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need to keep letting managers overhaul the squad every year but until such a day a long term recruitment strategy actually exists at Villa Park, he’s probably our best chance of success.