I suppose it’s a little like the Milner deal now: it seems certain that Gerard Houllier will be joining Aston Villa, it’s just a question of finalising the details. To that end, the latest word from the street suggests the Frenchman will be joining as the new manager, not a technical director, but I’ll leave worrying about the details until we actually know what they are.

In the meantime, I’ve seen one or two people throwing their weight behind Houllier on the basis of his win percentage as Liverpool boss. I may have seen mention that he has a superior record to any manager we’ve seen at Villa “this century or last” and I wondered whether that may have been based on the table I published recently.

Regardless, it struck me as a little odd to get excited about performance statistics at Liverpool as they’ve been ahead of us for quite some time, let’s be honest. Just looking at the Premiership years, last season was only the third time we’ve finished above them in the league.

It’s a bit like being excited by Jenson Button’s lap times whizzing around Silverstone in his McLaren and exclaiming “wow, his times are better than anything we’ve seen from any driver in a Force India!” Before anyone gets upset, I’m exaggerating the analogy to make a point, I’m not suggesting that we are really Force India to Liverpool’s McLaren, but we do need to see Button in a Force India before we can really draw a fair comparison with their drivers.

Just to establish some context, I thought I’d put our seasons alongside each other, indicating final position, manager and the percentage of available points won. I’ve started using the % of available points metric lately as it allows an apples-to-apples comparison between seasons with differing number of games played and it’s all about winning points in the league after all.

Without wanting to get into Liverpool’s recent history too deeply, Houllier’s introduction as co-manager with Roy Evans, who wasn’t exactly doing badly by himself, seemed extremely weird to me at the time. Houllier is credited with laying some fine foundation stones behind the scenes in terms of structure, but as you can see in the above table, it took a few seasons before Houllier delivered a “better” season’s performance than the man he replaced as far as the league goes. Ironically, it’s a stretch to describe the 2001/02 season as Houllier’s as he missed half the season with his heart problems.

The averages at the foot of the table are significant, Liverpool have averaged 4th place, taking close to 59% of the available points, which in a 38 game season based on three points for a win is around 67 points. Villa have averaged 8th position and taken 48% of the available points, which is about 55 points.

Of course any manager who keeps his job at Liverpool for six years will have a superior record to most Villa managers, it stands to reason, so what is important is how the Liverpool managers rank against each other.

I stuck with the Premiership years for brevity:-

Ironic that Phil Thompson being as mooted assistant manager hasn’t met with a thrilled reaction from fans, myself included, perhaps we really want him as manager, not the assistant.

To put things in their simplest possible terms, winning football games is about scoring more goals than are conceded and this table gives us an interesting perspective:-

Graeme Souness sits rather sadly at the bottom of that table with a ratio of 1.22 goals scored to every goal conceded in the league. By contrast, Martin O’Neill sits atop the same table of Villa managers with a barely superior 1.23 goals for every goal conceded.

As David St Hubbins once said: “yeah, too much f%*king perspective”.

“Rebuilding”

I believe Liverpool fans eventually began to lose patience with Houllier after many years of “rebuilding”, particularly when they missed out on Champions League qualification in 2002/03 and struggled to qualify in 2003/04. It was a poor Premiership competition, even David O’Leary managed a 6th place finish with a record that would barely have achieved 7th in any season since, and Houllier was perhaps fortunate he somehow managed to achieve 4th place despite a worse record than the previous season when they finished 5th.

It was the very Champions League competition that Houllier qualified for in his final season that Rafa won in his first with Liverpool. However, he too would have failed to qualify for the competition in 2005/06, finishing the 2004/05 Premiership in 5th place, had it not been for UEFA inexplicably deciding that reigning champions should be given automatic qualification to the group stage to defend their title at the very time FIFA was dispensing with the principle in the World Cup.

My concern is whether Houllier is coming to Villa to “rebuild” or, as I sincerely hope, to simply build on the strong foundations MON has already laid over the course of four years. I’m encouraged to read reports of a two year contract initially as that suggests he won’t be given inordinate amounts of time to construct his own side.

That said, when it comes to creating a team, it should be noted that Rafa Benetiz won the Champions League with a starting XI containing two players he signed himself, two from Liverpool’s youth system and seven players signed by Gerard Houllier. That was fully six years after Houllier had arrived at Liverpool though, I doubt there’s many Villa fans with the stomachs for another six years of building, even if it leads to the same prize.

One thing that seems clear to me is Houllier doesn’t have anything like the universal support MON enjoyed when he came to Villa and when you consider the honeymoon was over for MON with the ever vocal minority inside three seasons, Houllier’s going to need to translate those Liverpool statistics to Aston Villa and he’s going to need to do it in short order.

From the sounds of things, the official confirmation is expected in the next day or two and Houllier should be on the sidelines for his first game in charge at the Britannia Stadium.  Kicking off with a ‘1’ in the win column would be ideal.