Hello and welcome to Libero. Libero 56, I'm informed by James Horncastle, the podcast about the most important of the least important things, as the pornographer Paul Raymond once said.

I'm Rory Smith of the Observer and Men in Blazers, and today I'm joined by the primarily guardian face in John Bruin and the aforementioned James Horncastle who works for the athletic, but you recognise him from TNT Sports.

We're talking about existential futility today,

and if that doesn't keep you listening,

I don't know what will.

But we're going to start with you, James.

Our newsy hook, kind of our equivalent of a cold open.

Monchi has left Aston Villa.

Monchi.

What's the best way of characterising his kind of 18 months at Villa limited success?

Similar, a little bit longer than his spell at Roma, similar kind of outcome.

And this is a subject I know you have thrown thoughts on, is Monchi like

a Seville-specific thing? Does Monchi only work if he's like near the Plaza Italia?

I think he is, you know. I mean, we've spoken about him before if people go through our archive

and find the sporting director episode. I think we said that, you know, there are clubs which are identified with a manager or a player, and he seems to be the only one who has a club, which is like, ah, Monchi Severe.

And whenever he's stepped outside of Plaza Italia, he's really struggled.

Like you say limited success would feel like I would say associated with success, which is Unaimri's success.

Because if you look at the players that Monchi has brought in over the last couple of years,

how many of them have genuinely made an impact? Because the 11 most used

players last year by Emery, I think maybe only two were signed by Monchi. The rest came before,

which was Johann Langer, who's now at Spurs, whose time sort of briefly overlapped with Monchi,

Rob McKenzie. And then, you know,

...