The player arrived to huge fanfare but his Villa career failed to take off.
Louie Barry’s six-and-a-half year stay at Villa is over after the forward completed a permanent move to Sheffield Wednesday.
The 23-year-old leaves with an FA Cup tie against Liverpool, in which he scored, as his only first-team appearance for the club.
A sell-on clause and matching rights clause have been included in the deal, with Barry becoming the second Villa player to join Wednesday this month after defender Sil Swinkels.
Barry, a boyhood Villa supporter was one of the most highly-rated prospects in English football when he joined from Barcelona for an initial £880,000 fee in January, 2020.
That followed a controversial switch to the Catalan giants from Albion just six months earlier.
The Baggies never received any compensation, after Fifa ruled they had failed to formally offer him a scholarship.
Had Barry moved directly to Villa from Albion, the latter would have received a fee likely on a par with the £4million paid by Manchester City for Morgan Rogers in 2019.
For all the attention, Barry’s career at Villa never took off though it still proved lucrative for the player, with his most recent contract, signed in January last year, worth around £35,000-a-week.
His sole first-team appearance came in the third round of the FA Cup in 2021 when a Covid outbreak at Bodymoor Heath forced Villa to field their youth team.
Barry stunned the then Premier League champions by scoring in a 4-1 defeat but rather than marking the start of his Villa career, it proved the high point.
The majority of his time at the club was spent away on loan, the most successful of which were with Stockport County, whom he helped win promotion from League Two in 2024.
Barry was close to joining Hull City for £3.5m last summer only for the deal to break down at the 11th hour when the Championship club were hit with an EFL sanction for late payments.
He began last season on loan at Sheffield United before re-joining Stockport in January and just missing out on promotion to the Championship via the play-offs.
Wednesday, relegated from the second tier last season, have now stepped in to provide a permanent Villa exit.
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