He’s coming back: Former West Brom player has officially submitted a transfer request to return back To West Brom

West Brom defender’s transfer saga degenerated into a ‘pantomine’ before he joined Villa.

It’s the summer of 2007.

West Bromwich Albion have just lost a rather dreary play-off final to Derby County and are facing up to another year in the Championship. One man is feeling particularly sorry for himself. Even more so after an injury prevented him from being able to influence his own destiny by playing in the crunch match at Wembley. He is in a hurry to be back in the Premier League, but consoled by the fact his stock is high and, as far as he understands, a gentleman’s agreement is in place.

That man is Curtis Davies and after taking several days to process the raw emotion, he is ready to meet with Albion chairman Jeremy Peace. It isn’t part of the small print in his contract, but Davies insists he made a verbal pact with Peace and former boss Bryan Robson two years earlier. If Albion were still outside the top flight and a suitable bid came in, the former Luton Town central defender would be allowed to leave with the Baggies’ blessing, he claims.

“We’d lost the play off final and I was a bit numb,” Davies tells the Undr the Cosh podcast. “I’m not going back to the Premier League, but in my head I knew there were going to be offers. It was still raw so I didn’t go straight after the game and say chairman I want to leave. I gave it about a week or so and then I contacted him and said can I come in and see you?

“I went to see him and to ask what kind of price are we looking for and he said I don’t want to sell you. Mr Chairman – always very polite – Mr Chairman, you looked me in the eyes, you shook my hand with Robbo. I know Robbo’s not here to back it up now but you shook my hand and you said I could go. Yeah but we’re going to build the team around you, we’ve got a new sporting director coming in, have a sit down with him and see all the plans blah blah blah.”

Davies was not interested. By now Baggies boss Tony Mowbray and his West Brom squad were on their summer breaks, jetting off to the sun to temporarily take their minds off football. Davies just couldn’t switch off, frustrated by broken promises and more determined than ever to get back in the big league.

Regular bulletins from his agent informed him that transfer interest was continuing to swirl. Several clubs tested the water with tentative bids of around £4 million, but it would take more than that to grab Peace’s attention. Before long, the players were reporting back to Albion’s Great Barr training ground for pre-season.

Cue a slapstick situation in which the only real beneficiaries were stationary suppliers in the wider Birmingham and Black Country area. Davies describes it as ‘pantomime’ as a daily tit-for-tat trading of sheets of A4 paper broke out between the wantaway defender and the ‘you-must-stay’ chairman.

“Every day in pre-season I was going in and slapping a transfer request on his desk,” reveals Davies. “Every day. I went and bought a printer to connect to my laptop just so I could print off the transfer requests. I didn’t need it for anything else.

“I bought envelopes, paper and a printer and it was stacked up in my flat in Birmingham. Because he knew I was coming in every day it became pantomime where I’d give him that and he’d say ‘I’ll see your transfer request and I’ll give you a rejection letter’. It became a thing. He was going into his pile and I was going into mine. That’s what it became.”

During his time at Albion, Peace developed a reputation as one of the fiercest negotiators in the game when it came to getting what he wanted from transfers. Davies, at that time a headstrong 22-year-old old, might have met his match, but he was not to be deterred, even when the chairman went into hiding.

“We went away to Slovenia for pre-season and when we came back he’d restructured the training ground,” laughs Davies. “So now you couldn’t just go knock on his door, barge in and give him the transfer request. He’s now behind a coded door. You couldn’t get direct access to him. You had to go through there via the secretary.

“I’d call the secretary every morning, ‘Hi Sarah, I need to see the chairman’.

‘Oh the chairman’s not available until 3 o’clock’.

‘No problem, I’ll wait’.

Finish training, do gym, have a coffee, eat late, whatever, hang around. I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go. Transfer request, rejection letter. This was a theme throughout the whole of pre-season.”

With his agent in his ear and a longing to get back to the Premier League after his first top flight season with Albion ended in relegation, Davies resorted to some dirty tricks. Years on, as a mature, articulate, almost ambassadorial figure, he is not proud of the lengths he went to in order to force his way out, especially his behaviour towards Mowbray, one of football’s genuine good guys. When a £7 million offer from Tottenham Hotspur, more than twice what Albion paid for him two years prior, was rejected, Davies decided to crank things up a notch.

“I was the captain and I didn’t want to leave like that,” he admits. “I wanted it to be that the gentleman’s agreement was upheld with his best wishes and the team’s best wishes, but I had to become a nasty b*****d. They reject it (the Spurs offer) so I go into Mogga, having to have a go at the gaffer when I love Mogga.

“It’s f*****g out of order, you’re not going to get f**k all out of me. I’m being horrible to Mogga. I hated myself. I had to look at myself in the mirror after that because he’s a lovely guy. He said it’s not me, you’ve got to go and speak to the board. I said I f*****g will.”

Davies marched in to see Peace, only to be told the chairman was not in. Fuming, he took his tantrum on to the practice pitches. Again, as he looks back on the situation almost two decades on he is older, wiser and, in truth, more than a little embarrassed at his disruptive behaviour.

Leon Barnett, his former central defensive partner at Luton Town, had just signed for Albion and was left stunned by what he witnessed from Davies in one of his very first training sessions at his new club. Davies, a player and person Barnett knew to be a consummate professional had reached the stage of booting balls ‘Peter Kay John Smiths advert ‘ave it’ style to make his point to Peace and the Baggies board.

“Barney’s known me since we were kids coming through at Luton together,” says Davies. “The ball comes across and ‘boom’ (Davies mimes whacking the ball off into the distance). Barney’s thinking ‘He doesn’t mean to do that’ when the first one goes, ‘He’s a good pro, that’s not Curt’. Next one ‘boom’ left foot, that way, third one ‘bang’ past Barney. ‘Curt, Curt what are you doing?’.”

Fitness coach Richard Hawkins, a sports science guru Davies respected, asked him to move away from the group, saying ‘Curt I totally understand your frustrations but please don’t f*** up my sessions’. To avoid getting fined, he went 50 yards up the pitch to do some stretching exercises on his own ‘so if the chairman’s looking out of the window from his cubbyhole he can see me’.

Despite Davies’ destructive demeanour, Mowbray still intended to include him in the starting line up for Albion’s Championship opener away at Burnley that August. Stopping short of refusing to play, Davies told the manager he really didn’t want to be involved. Message received. It was the last time he was asked, Mowbray gave up trying and before long Aston Villa finally offered Davies an escape route.

“Technically it was £8 million plus a £1 million loan fee,” he explains. “So basically, I was on loan for the first year but it was an obligation to buy so I was always going. When I did my achilles at Villa everybody was thinking ‘Oh they might not take him now’, but I’d already signed a four year deal.”

So off to Villa he went. Back in the Premier League, but in and out of Martin O’Neill’s first team in a move that never really lived up to its billing for the club or for Davies himself. On his claret and blue debut – a 1-0 League Cup defeat to Leicester City at Villa Park in September 2007 – he was brutally self-critical, likening his own performance to that of a ‘pub player’. When he finally forced his way into the starting line up and enjoyed a run of games midway through the 2007-08 campaign, the aforementioned achilles injury would arrive to knock him out of his stride.

All in all Davies made 60 starts and seven substitute appearances for Villa in the Premier League, Europe and the domestic cups. He scored three goals for Villa, in an away win at Wigan Athletic in his first season, in a home win over – who else?! – West Brom in his second and, perhaps most memorably, one in an away win at Liverpool in his third and final season.

Villa finished sixth, sixth and sixth again in his three years. He was back in the big time, so there were no regrets about leaving The Hawthorns for rivals 3.7 miles down the road at Villa Park. Years on, after spells with Leicester City, Birmingham City, Hull City, Derby County and Cheltenham Town before his retirement from playing in August 2024, the way he engineered his Albion exit, however, will forever be tinged with rueful pangs of conscience.

“It was a s*** sandwich,” he adds. “I accept it because that’s the way I had to do it, but I shouldn’t have had to do it that way. That’s always been my big thing, I was captain there, I was proud to be captain, the second youngest captain in the club’s history.

“It didn’t fall on deaf ears to me that I had a leadership role but I’m a very moral-based person. More fool me for it not being in the contract, of course, but you take someone at their word and then they go against it. Fair enough the fans can have a go, but he (Jeremy Peace) can’t say anything about it.”