Manager #29 for Aston Villa. Rémi Garde had the unenviable job of picking up the worst ever Villa squad constructed by CEO Tom Fox, sporting director Hendrik Almstadt and head of scouting and recruitment Paddy Riley, and to a lesser extent his predecessor Tim Sherwood with Villa already well on course for relegation.

Predictably Garde couldn’t turn around Villa’s fortunes and the inevitable relegation, five seasons in the making, was already all but guaranteed by the time Garde left his post after 23 games.

Garde delivered a win rate of 13% to become statistically Villa’s worst ever manager.

There is in truth little else to say about Garde’s horrific spell in charge of the club however some felt for him as having been placed into an impossible position not of his own making by the incompetence of the Villa hierarchy.

It is fair to say however that the players did not see him as such an innocent victim in Villa’s abject relegation season as Gabby Agbonlahor recalled:

“Some of the French players were asking ‘what’s this guy [Garde] like?”

“They were like ‘wow, you’re not going to like this guy, Gabby’. I remember asking the chief executive, after he’d sacked Sherwood, can you give it Kevin McDonald, who was the reserve team manager at the time. He was well liked by the players and was well respected having done a good job when he had come in, in previous years.”

“It was like ‘no, we’ve got a great guy, the chairman has spoken to him’.”

“Aston Villa thought bringing in a French manager would get the best out of the French players but even they didn’t really warm to him and, from the first day he came in to the day we left, there was a negative atmosphere around the training ground.”

Villa’s first relegation in 29 years - which followed a roll call of abject managerial failures from Gérard Houllier, through Alex McLeish, Paul Lambert and Tim Sherwood, ended with Rémi Garde - was as inevitable as it was damaging.

Owner Randolph Lerner’s legacy was one of incompetence, mismanagement and disaster and only a root and branch overhaul of every aspect of the club would prevent it plummeting down the divisions such were the problems infecting the famous Aston Villa. Bright Future, Proud History looked a cruel joke.