Simon Jordan makes £250m Aston Villa transfer claim during Steven Gerrard assessment

Steven Gerrard moved from Scottish Premier League side Rangers to Aston Villa in October 2021 after the latter sacked Dean Smith.

Since then, there have remained inconsistencies but Villa now sit 11th in the league. The former Liverpool captain has won eight of his 20 games in charge but has managed to pull the side away from any fears of relegation this season and will hope to focus on what can be done in the 2022/23 to bring up Villa as a recognisable European qualification threat.

Villa had been sitting within the top half of the Premier League but three losses in a row have meant they have dropped below that halfway point. A 2-1 loss to West Ham was soon followed by a 1-0 defeat to Arsenal and a 2-1 loss to Wolves.

With the 2021/22 season nearing its end, and Villa safe for a 2022/23 Premier League return, Steven Gerrard will turn his attention to the summer transfer season but is likely to face a situation that became familiar to him at Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow.

And former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan has suggested that the ex-Liverpool star will have a similar concern to what Gerrard has already experienced with the Rangers board.

Six months ago, Gerrard had been openly critical of the board at Ibrox and said that a lack of investment led to the defeats in the Europa League as his side lost to Lyon and Sparta Prague.

After their second Group A defeat in October, Gerrard said to the media: “If we want to keep growing and going to the next level we need to spend big money in transfer windows. It’s as simple as that.

“To compete against the teams we’ve got to spend big money. In the last two windows we haven’t spent a penny. So there has to be some realism there as well.

“To compete with these teams and to beat them on their own patch, we have to spend money to compete at this level. There needs to be a little bit of common sense when looking at this from the outside.

“This spark that you’re talking about, it’ll come, trust me, because we’ve got really good players here. It’ll come quicker if we can find this settled team.”

In the January transfer window, Rangers agreed a loan deal with Juventus midfielder Aaron Ramsey and the Scottish side are currently in the quarter final of the Europa League.

In the same transfer window, Gerrard made four signings for Villa, bringing in Lucas Digne and Philippe Coutinho but these two plus Robin Olsen were all loans and the former England captain faces losing them at the end of the season if the Villa board will not back big spending.

Simon Jordan has spoken to talkSPORT saying: “We will say Villa spent £400m (since promotion in 2018) but they didn’t, they spent £370million and took £120m back in so they spent £250m over three years.

“£80m a season is not a huge amount today for a team that is finishing in tenth in the Premier League. I think Gerrard is doing all right and I think he is not beating teams above him in the Premier League is incidental, because he has not got a team that is good enough to beat them.

“Nobody really expected them to be in Europe this season and he picked up a difficult team going in the wrong direction and settled them. He hasn’t set the world alight but there are lots of very good managers in front of him.”

Aston Villa’s next fixture is at home to Tottenham on Saturday 9 April 2022.