Scott Hogan should be sold by Aston Villa this summer

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Aston Villa face a third year in the Championship after play-off heartache at Wembley at the weekend. A 1-0 loss against Fulham condemned the club to another season in the second tier at the end of a long season. Free-spending Wolves proved impossible to keep up with, Fulham played perhaps the best football in the league and Cardiff City shocked everyone – leaving Aston Villa the bridesmaid.

Now, it is believed the club will have to sell several big earners to comply with Financial Fair Play regulations. Since dropping into the second-tier owner Tony Xia has thrown money at the club, but they have operated at a huge loss and that can no longer continue.

The Mirror report this weekend that many will have to go, whilst also highlighting some of the wages the players are on. One of those players has to go, based on the amount he is costing the club a year.

The report claims that striker Scott Hogan is on around £2m-a-year at Villa Park. That is a staggering amount for a player who, quite simply, has not performed since his arrival from Brentford last January.

Aston Villa fought very hard to sign Hogan last winter. With good reason as well. He had scored  21 goals in 34 games for Brentford over the course of 18 months after recovering from a serious injury.

Villa decided he was the man to fire them back to the Premier League. The London Evening Standard reported that Steve Bruce’s side paid the Bees a fee in the region of £12 million, rising to £15 million, for the striker. That fee is yet to be repaid.

Hogan has managed just eight goals for the club in 37 appearances and whilst is hard work can be appreciated his goal return is certainly not worth £2m-a-year to keep at the club.

Finding someone to pay a similar fee for the player might be difficult this summer, but even loaning him out would at least get his massive expenditure off the Villa payroll.

With Villa set for a cull, one of the first men out the door should be Hogan this summer.