Matt Maher: Football has become a game for accountants at Aston Villa

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.

Sawiris and Edens have been doing as much since they bought the club in 2018.

Within days of the deal being done, Sawiris was told selling Jack Grealish to Tottenham was the easiest and immediate solution to Villa avoiding a PSR breach the following summer.

Instead, the club’s new owners utilised the since closed loophole of selling Villa Park to another company controlled by themselves, while booking the profit.

That enabled Villa to keep Grealish, who nine months later would skipper them to promotion through the play-offs.

Even then, things were tight, with the £4m sale of Gary Gardner to Blues at the end of May, 2019, just days before the accounting deadline, the deal which finally got the club under the PSR threshold.

There have been several near misses since, most notably in June, when Monchi and Damian Vidagany, defused what the latter would later describe as a “ticking bomb” by selling Douglas Luiz to Juventus.

The larger point is, in an era when revenue is king, the club’s current owners have always been prepared to push financial rules as far as they will go and to utilise whatever loophole might be available.

Last summer’s sale of the women’s team, another tactic the Premier League has since outlawed, is merely the latest example.

The difficulty is what comes next and it is fair to wonder, nearly eight years in, just how many levers ownership has left to pull?

Much as last season’s profit - the largest the club will have recorded in many a year - is welcome, there’s also no getting away from the fact it was only achieved by women’s team sale, an option not available to Villa next time around.

Without it and the one-off sale of other assets, the club would have reported another loss in a season where revenue was boosted by nearly £100m thanks to their participation in the Champions League.

In many ways, the numbers underline the importance of Emery’s team securing a return to Europe’s elite club competition and its associated riches next season.

But on closer inspection, they also highlight the scale of the challenge facing Villa, whether they are playing in the Champions League or not.

In a season when the club generated more income than ever before, it still ran at a considerable operating loss.

It doesn’t take too long examining the figures to understand why, having missed out on the Champions League for this season, last summer was so fraught.

Neither is it tough to realise why senior officials have stressed Villa must “always” sell players in order to balance the books. Supporters welcome any noise around their most prized current possession, Morgan Rogers, yet increased speculation feels inevitable.

The report also emphasises why the greatest concern for Villa, at least this season, has been complying with Uefa’s stricter financial fair play rules, which don’t allow things like selling your women’s team to be factored in.

Villa were fined £9.5m last summer for a previous breach of the regulations, before entering into a settlement agreement with the governing body which, in simple terms, gives them until 2028 to get their house fully in order. 

The good news is the £80m loss (in Uefa’s terms) will already have been factored into that equation. Yet it does beg the question, with revenues almost certain to have fallen this season due to the lack of Champions League prize money, as to how Villa stay within the parameters moving forward?

Of course, no-one forced them into a situation where last season, they had the Premier League’s sixth-highest wage bill. It is also true the club’s recruitment has not been everything it might have been.

On the grand scheme, however, there seems something terribly unsporting about a club which has enjoyed such success on the pitch being hamstrung to an extent rivals who have struggled (Manchester United, we are looking at you) are not.

That is exacerbated further by the fact Uefa, those bastions of “fair play”, gave more prize money to Liverpool than Villa last season, despite the Reds being knocked out of the Champions League a round earlier.

Never mind finding the right striker. In the age of financial fair play, finding the right accountant feels just as important.