Explained: Why Aston Villa face another Uefa fine despite expected profit
Villa are on course to be hit with another Uefa fine for breaching financial rules despite recording a profit last season.
The club is expected to announce a pre-tax profit of around £30m for the 2024-25 campaign when they release their accounts in the spring.
But it is believed Villa will once again be in breach of Uefa’s squad cost rules (SCR), which limit clubs to spending 70 per cent of their revenues on wages, transfer fees and agents’ fees.
The club was fined £9.5m last summer for exceeding both the SCR limit and Football Earnings Rule, which restricts how much money can be lost over a three-year period.
Staying within both Uefa and the Premier League’s fair play rules has been an ongoing battle for the club in recent years under the ownership of Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens.
Villa lost more than £200m combined for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons.
Last year’s profit, the highest the club has achieved in more than a decade, was only achieved by more than £100m in “non-recurring” asset sales, including that of the club’s women’s team to their ownership group.
Those sales have ensured Villa avoided a breach of the Premier League’s PSR rules, which limit clubs to combined losses of £105m over a three-year period.
Such sales, however, are not factored into Uefa’s figures.
The governing body’s annual club finance and investment landscape report, released on Thursday, showed Villa posting a loss of more than £80m without the asset sales.
That was despite the club posting record-breaking revenues of £370m, thanks to their run to the quarter-finals of last season’s Champions League.
Missing out on this season’s competition impacted that income and the figures in the Uefa report underline the importance of Unai Emery’s team making a return next year.
Villa entered a settlement agreement with Uefa last summer, with the aim of being fully compliant with the rules by 2028.
Those terms allow the club some wriggle room in terms of losses, yet they risk further fines and even being excluded from European competition if they exceed the agreed limits by too great a margin.
