Aston Villa must adhere to Premier League and UEFA financial regulations while making development on and off the pitch.
V Sports is committed to keeping Aston Villa at the top of the game, having completed a five-year plan to return the club to Europe before Unai Emery’s Champions League qualification last season.
Villa finished ahead of half of the ‘big six’ last season and above Tottenham and Chelsea the year before; now they want to be a part of a ‘great eight’, but know it won’t happen quickly, even if Villa’s improvement since 2018 has been impressive. Their climb has not been without challenges, of course, but Emery is the elite coach V Sports requires to put their dream into action.
Villa’s football department, led by Monchi, Damian Vidagany, and Emery, as well as their support personnel, have helped fans achieve their ambitions since Steven Gerrard’s sacking, even when the club was struggling in the Championship.
After securing Champions League football and reaching a European semi-final last season, Nassef Sawiris was quick to offer Emery a contract extension, valid until 2029, when the season finished in May. He wants the Spaniard to oversee a tenure similar to Sir Alex Ferguson’s at Villa and build on the improvements made over the last 20 months.
V Sports’ goal is for Villa to become a regular participant in European competitions and, of course, to win silverware. Clearly, Villa has a great football department, and now it’s up to the business department to ‘catch up’ to Emery’s rapid success.
Simply put, Villa must continue to raise revenue in order for the football department to have greater success on the pitch. This is nothing new, but while Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) have made headlines like never before in the last month, a football club’s commercial success is more important than ever. Especially for a club like Villa, which has demonstrated its ability to break up the ‘big six’, doing so season after season presents an even larger challenge.
A harder struggle because, just as Villa finished fourth in the country, they lost a vital player as a result of the PSR strain.
“We know what we are up against and we almost feel that we have to do this on our own because these rules are not set up to reward an ambitious club or a challenger,” president of business operations Chris Heck told the Telegraph last month after Villa’s proposal to increase the allowed losses from £105m to £135m over three years was rejected at the Premier League AGM.
Heck expects that Villa will need another three years to establish revenue sources equal to the ‘big six’. He wants to increase their revenue to £400 million by 2027.
“We think it will take us another three years to build that sustainable business,” he told me. “In the meanwhile, we have some very good folks on the sporting side who work in a similar manner to how I work on the business side.
“The first year, we were successful. We generated £50 million more, and we intend to generate £50 million more each year. This has never been done before, and we are doing it. We’re already well on our way. We were on £219 million [year turnover], so what is the magic number to reach? We believe that entering the sustainability game will cost £400 million. We have a way to get there.
Premier League clubs have agreed to try Squad Cost Rules (SCR) and Top to Bottom Anchoring Rules (TBA) in addition to the existing PSR on a “non-binding basis” beginning with the 2025/26 season. This will allow the league and clubs to properly examine the system, including the implementation of UEFA’s new financial laws.
Under the new arrangement, teams can spend no more than 85% of their entire revenue on squads. The TBA is an anchoring mechanism based on the earnings of the worst team, which the Premier League stated is “designed to be a pre-emptive measure to protect the competitive balance of the Premier League”.
If Villa want to continue qualifying for European football season after season, they would face increasingly harsher budget constraints from UEFA, which currently uses SCR.
Last season, SCR limited expenditure on player and coach wages, transfers, and agent fees to 90% of club revenue, as part of a progressive threshold. The barrier will be reduced to 80% next season, followed by a permanent 70% ceiling beginning in 2025/26.
Villa are now under no compulsion to generate more monies to meet UEFA’s squad cost criteria, having already complied with PSR last week.
Read more at: https://sportupdates.co.uk
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