The money Aston Villa paid to sign John McGinn was a joke that Scottish fans ought to be used to by now, and the midfielder has shone since.
Who’s this then?
John McGinn is a 27-year-old, 5ft 10ins midfielder who plays for Aston Villa. Raised in Clydebank, to the west of Glasgow, with a sister and two brothers, both of whom are also professional footballers with Falkirk and Motherwell.
With his grandfather Jack McGinn being a former Celtic chairman and Scottish Football Association president, football is certainly in his DNA. He got his career started in 2012 at St Mirren after joining the club’s youth system aged just seven. His first silverware was winning the League Cup in his first season, beating Hearts 3-2 in a remarkable result for the Buddies.
He was coming to the end of his three-year contract when a training ground joke went wrong and he was speared in the thigh by a training pole thrown by teammate and club captain Steven Thompson. It inserted itself into his thigh seven centimetres deep, an absolutely gaping wound which was one millimetre away from his femoral artery which, if it had cut, would’ve basically killed him.
Yeah. That’s big on the ouch-o-meter.
Given it put him out for the last two months of the season, John rightly chose to make a claim via the club’s insurance for loss of earnings and damage like any employee who is injured at work. It was reported he was suing the club, which he wasn’t.
Has ‘whinging’ John McGinn really got any better options than Aston Villa?
Relations were strained with the club anyway as he wasn’t getting offered a suitable new contract at the time. All of this meant he fell out with St Mirren fans – though not with Thompson, who remains a good friend.
Fortunately at this point Hibernian snaffled him on a four-year contract for a development fee, but with a 30% future sell-on for St Mirren.
Although in the second tier with the Hibbees, he won their first Scottish Cup for 114 long years and helped get them promotion the next season too.
In 2017/18 he was nominated for PFA Scotland Players’ Player of the Year. Celtic came sniffing – of course they did – making three offers for him, all of which Hibs rejected. That summer it was an on-off thing: one of those tabloid psychodramas that the papers think we care more about than we really do.
In the end, Aston Villa, who were in the Championship at the time, turned up with £2.7million of loose change they’d found in some old jeans,…
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