Former Aston Villa defender James Chester has been sharing his opinion on former Villa owner Dr. Tony Xia.
This comes after Chester recently appeared on the latest episode of The Athletic’s Villa-themed podcast 1874 where the Welshman spoke to Villa journalists Gregg Evans and Dan Bardell about his time at the Birmingham club.
On the topic of his first day at Villa and his first meeting with Xia, who was the owner of the club at the time, Chester shared his thoughts on the businessman.
He said: “I think he was ambitious and wanted the club to be successful. It was perhaps a little erratic in the way he went about it.
“He was obviously speaking about himself, but he spoke about himself in the third person all the way through [the meeting], and when he got to the end, he liked to tell us that if we hadn’t guessed by now, he was obviously talking about himself.
“It was a strange meeting and then a couple [of] weeks after the season started and results perhaps hadn’t gone our way, he sent us all a video from, I think it was from his home computer and the position of the webcam was really low on his desk and we were just looking up at him and it had been edited quite badly as well so that was another strange one.”
Back in 2016, Xia took over the Birmingham club from Randy Lerner for a fee of £76 million. In August 2019 it was revealed that Villa’s current owners Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris paid off Xia’s £30 million debt which saw them take his last shares in the club.
Are you glad Tony Xia isn't in charge of Villa anymore?
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TIF Thoughts…
According to Chester, it appears that Xia had good intentions for the club and wanted to see Villa succeed, even though his behaviour may have come across as a little bit strange in the Welshman’s eyes.
It’s nice to hear Chester looking back on his early days at Villa and his experience meeting Xia in such a light-hearted and friendly manner.