Aston Villa have reconsidered their plans for the summer, pondering whether to sell their top players and making plans to think twice before signing major contracts.
After a season in which Unai Emery led Villa to fourth place, winning 12 of 13 games and ending a 30-year trophy drought with the Europa League title, the first two moves of the summer were to sell Youri Tielemans and now Morgan Rodgers.
Two of the three scorers who helped us win the final European game have gone on to explore new paths, collecting £152m in the process. This alleviates any financial concerns the club may have had and prepares them for Champions League revenue once again.
It appears that Villa are the only team capable of sanctioning the English record transfer, and will then have to consider whether to bring in further promising names. Johan Manzambi has already been signed from Freiburg for a club-record £58 million and Joao Gomez has moved from Wolves for £38 million, but it appears consideration is being given to whether more first-team regulars need to be released rather than making another move.
The Midlands team has become a poster child for the inadequacies of PSR regulations in recent years. But while the club’s supporters lament a system that is not working for them, it is worth considering that they are not without fault and Emery’s reliance on his magic wand is a ticking time bomb.
Villa have probably not been in this position since the early 1990s, when they lifted Manchester United to the Premier League title. Their range of mistakes, and ability to recover from them, is much smaller than established teams that can bounce back from down years with relative ease.
So if a Midlands side acquires a top player, it’s definitely better to keep him, and the case study supports that. Here are some real, and perhaps a little hard to accept, facts.
A £100m player doesn’t go to a specific club. If you’re that good and you’re in the market for that amount of money, there’s only one set of places you’ll end up. So if Villa sell Rodgers for £100m, the chances of them getting a similar replacement for a similar amount are probably slim to none.
Morgan Rodgers is invaluable to Aston Villa (Image: Dan Mullan, Getty Images)
Villa sold Jack Grealish for £100m, with the money distributed among new signings. With him they finished 11th, without him they finished 14th, during which time they sacked their manager. West Ham sold Declan Rice for £105m and split the money, but were relegated three years later. Newcastle sold Alexander Isak for £125m and signed several frontmen to fill the void, resulting in a significant drop. Going back further, Tottenham reinvested Gareth Bale’s then world record fee into the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, but it didn’t yield much.
So, unless Liverpool sell Philippe Couuntinho for more than £100m and sign Virgil van Dijk, a defender coveted by the Premier League’s top teams, releasing an elite player for a huge sum and reinvesting rarely works.
The similarities to Tottenham from around 2015 to 2019 are undeniable. A sleeping giant of sorts has finally cracked the once exclusive club, thanks in large part to the sensationally talented manager in the dugout. Mauricio Pochettino has made Tottenham more than the sum of their parts and mixed it with the elite.
Emery has made a similar move, but there was always talk that, like Pochettino, he might eventually take the plunge and play for a club that always offers him a chance to win titles. When Tottenham lost Pochettino, they feared they would collapse, and that’s exactly what happened. It’s hard to deny that the same thing won’t happen to Villa.
And although much has been said about Emery’s dedication, the fact that he found the perfect environment, the fact that he allowed the club to run. Nothing lasts forever, and there are only so many times a Spaniard can pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Aston Villa sign Johan Manzambi to fill the void left
Like Tottenham, Villa are also investing in their stadiums, albeit to a lesser extent. It is hoped that more financial income will be brought in, but what about the impact on the pitch? Villa’s departure is still up in the air, but while there is some talk of a bit of a rebuild and big money for players, no team in history has allowed first-team players to leave almost every year as a path to success.
From Villa’s perspective, the frustration with Tottenham is that they finished 17th and have since spent £185m on two midfielders, breaking a club record twice in a week to sign Matheus Fernandes and then Sandro Tonali.
That would make them infinitely better, but their financial structure ultimately gave them the room to do so, while Villa, who finished fourth, are far from matching those rewards.
The Deloitte report said Villa had the highest revenue-to-earnings ratio in the league for the 2024/25 season, with 74 per cent of that, or just over £270m, going towards player wages. In stark contrast, Tottenham’s own figure was 45%, the lowest in the top flight.
The Premier League’s governing PSR rules, which stipulate that clubs cannot report losses of more than £105m over a three-year reporting cycle, are now well-documented, including penalties for breaching them. A Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) system will be introduced next season, allowing clubs to use up to 85% of their revenue towards squad costs, which cover player salaries, amortized transfer fees and agent fees. UEFA remains at 70%.
Unai Emery has continued to integrate with the Premier League’s elite, but some may question how long he can continue to do so.
Villa’s appetite to spend much of their player salary income was actually decreasing. Twelve months ago, in the 2023/24 season, it accounted for more than 90% of revenue. These are the decisions the club ultimately took, preparing themselves to operate close to their limits, which is why they were fined £19.4 million by UEFA this month for “serious breaches” of the 2025 Team Cost Regulations.
Whether the current financial regulations are fit for purpose is ultimately worth debating, but for now this set of rules is the status quo. Many top clubs and ambitious clubs operate in an ambitious way.
Villa have appeared to have been held back by Emery since the early days of his managerial tenure, when it became clear that his managerial skills could compensate for other deficiencies.
Already, it looks like this will be a summer in which Villa Park officials, at least privately, will bemoan the current state of the financial situation. Emi Martinez is another name associated with Exit Door.
After the defeat to Everton six months ago, Emery himself insisted: “We are not contenders to be in the top five. We are not yet contenders. There are other teams with more potential than us.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether it was a farewell message to those above them, a genuine reminder of where they are now, or the harsh reality of running a club that strives to perform to the best of its ability.
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