Manager removed Aston Villa 'risk' to win transfer battle at tribunal

Former Brighton & Hove Albion manager Brian Horton has revealed how he made Aston Villa cough up for Gareth Barry.

Barry joined Villa from the Seagulls in 1997, when he was just 16, and made 441 appearances for the club before leaving for Manchester City in 2009.

The midfielder played 53 times for England and went on to become the Premier League's all-time record appearance holder.

Despite going on to enjoy stints with City - where he won the Premier League title - Everton and West Bromwich Albion, Barry is still most closely associated with Villa.

He arrived for a relatively small sum of money - but Villa didn't want to pay anything at all for Barry.

In Horton's autobiography, Two Thousand Games: A Life in Football, he wrote that Villa argued Brighton were entitled to nothing

He claimed: "Aston Villa, whose manager John Gregory used to play alongside me at the Goldstone Ground, argued that we were entitled to nothing because they had made him into a left-sided defender.

"That was where Gareth [Barry] had played when he first broke into the first team at Villa Park.

"Les Rogers, who had coached Barry at the Brighton centre of excellence, successfully argued that this was one of several positions where Gareth had played in our youth teams.

"Villa were also trying to argue that they were taking a risk by signing him. They claimed they did not know whether Barry would make it as a Premier League footballer."

However, Horton had been to many tribunals before in his managerial career over the cost of players and came back with a retort that turned the tide in Brighton's favour.

In the book, Horton adds: "I pointed out to the tribunal that there could be no risk to them [Aston Villa] because Gareth [Barry] was already a