These days an English club hiring a manager from overseas is par for the course, but it wasn’t always thus. When Doug Ellis’s Villa made Dr Jozef Venglos the top flight’s first foreign gaffer in 1990, nobody knew quite what to make of him – including his baffled squad
When Arsene Wenger arrived at Arsenal in October 1996, the bespectacled Frenchman was hailed as a revolutionary – a man whose methods would not only shake up the English game but ultimately shape its future, too. Aston Villa’s players and fans, though, were probably wondering what all the fuss was about.