Matt Maher: Football has become a game for accountants at Aston Villa
Around a decade ago, a colleague joked the best training course for football journalists would soon be a business degree.
Never mind us media heathens, these days you need to be a chartered accountant to even follow the sport.
A slight exaggeration it might be, yet if you ever feel in need of a headache, half-an-hour examining Uefa’s latest club finance and investment landscape report will do the trick.
It is not that the raw numbers are particularly tough to understand. The difficulty comes in interpreting what they actually mean, with some important pieces of information not included.
Take Villa, for example.
The initial figure reported by Uefa’s is alarming, showing a loss for the 2024-25 season of more than £80million.
But that’s until you check the small print, some 50 pages further back, which reveals more than £100m of “non-recurring asset sales” have been omitted from the equation, as they cannot be included under Uefa rules. The most significant of those was Villa’s sale of their women’s team to their own parent company.
Add those numbers back in and an £80m loss becomes the £30m profit which is expected to be reported in the club’s own accounts when they are released a few weeks from now.
That is undoubtedly good news, when it comes to Villa complying with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules.
After racking up losses of more than £200m in the previous two seasons, Villa needed to tread carefully and the club’s billionaire owners Nassef Sawiris, Wes Edens and Michael Angelakis have once more found a way around the problem.
