Aston Villa have hammered the final nail into PSR’s coffin ...Middle East

On Tuesday, it was confirmed that Aston Villa had agreed to sell stakes in its women’s team to avoid financial breaches for the 2024-25 season.

The team will be sold to V Sports, the holding company that owns the club and is jointly owned by Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris. Sawiris is Aston Villa’s chairman.

The deal, which follows Chelsea doing something similar last year, allows Villa to bank the proceeds of the sale against annual losses that would almost certainly have caused them to fall foul of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability (PSR) rules.

Here, we examine six initial reactions to the news…

It is very hard to vehemently disagree. A year ago, Aston Villa sold Douglas Luiz to Juventus before the end of June to alleviate concerns over a PSR breach.

This year, there were no serious considerations over selling a key first-team player. We were told that a potential sale of the women’s team had been planned for some time.

If a club can effectively sell one element of the club to itself (through a parent company), and the proceeds from that sale can be used to offset losses accrued that count towards PSR calculations, how can those regulations themselves be fit for purpose? How can that be fair on other clubs?

Douglas Luiz was sold to Juventus just before last summer’s PSR deadline (Photo: Getty)

There are caveats here. The sale itself is subject to Fair Market Value calculations (so a lower-level Premier League club couldn’t come up with their own vastly inflated figure without scrutiny), but it appears likely that Villa’s £60m sale will be rubber-stamped.

Nothing within the club has intrinsically changed, value-wise. To the layperson, they have simply conjured up extra wiggle room.

That said, can we avoid fanboying for our clubs when they do this? I have already seen Aston Villa supporters and writers heralding this as a genius move.

It is not: it is simply a billionaire working out how they can spend – or justify spending – tens of millions of extra pounds. It is a loophole and it is being exploited.

‘Chelsea started this – we’re just following their lead’

Yes and no. It is certainly true that Chelsea were the first Premier League club to sell their women’s team to a parent company (in their case BlueCo) and a slice of outside investorship. As such, the replies to Tuesday’s news were littered with the same themed reply: “Well, Chelsea did it.”

But this creative loophole accounting is itself not new – which brings us back to Aston Villa.

In 2019, it was confirmed that Villa sold their own stadium for £56.7m to NSWE Stadium Limited, owned by Villa’s joint-owners Sawiris and Edens.

NSWE would later be renamed V Sports, the same group that bought a stake in the women’s team. They are not the only club to have sold their stadium.

That sale was completed on 21 May 2019 and was seen as controversial by Villa’s fellow Championship clubs, who believed that the West Midlanders were simply stretching the EFL’s financial regulations beyond their intended purpose. Just another loophole.

This argument has two strands. The first rails against the concept of PSR itself. While intended to avoid the danger of clubs overspending against their revenue and thus left facing financial apocalypse if their owner pulls the plug, it’s inarguable that PSR does afford advantages to the established elite.

You can only lose so much, so those clubs with higher revenues (built up by historic success) can spend more and thus are likely to reinforce their position of dominance.

In those circumstances, clubs outside that elite (and one within that elite, in Chelsea’s case) seek to find creative ways to bridge the gap after periods of increased spending on transfer fees and wages. That is why this sale will be popular among many Villa supporters.

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But there is also a Pandora’s Box principle here. From the moment one club was permitted to complete one of these interrelated sales, every other club was more likely to do the same.

They saw Chelsea gain a clear advantage, held out their arms and said: “Well, what do you expect us to do?”

That said, there is a choice: clubs don’t have to do this.

There is a process by which they can opt for long-termism: buy low, develop, sell high, reinvest and get better.

Ultimately, you are making a choice between short-term gain that aims to jump into the elite (and elite revenue) and bank on sticking around, or a slower improvement that may well be more financially sustainable. The complication? Supporters are hardwired to demand more, and more quickly.

Finally, Premier League clubs literally did have a choice. The sale of such assets being included in PSR calculations was a topic that clubs were invited to vote on and, given the way the Premier League works, 14 votes would have been enough to close the loophole.

The subject didn’t even get to a vote, indication that there was no support for eradicating the possibility.

‘Women’s teams are being used as pawns’

This is a pertinent and important point. While you can argue about the sporting morality of a club selling buildings to related companies to overcome financial limitations, there is at least very little human cost. Hotels don’t particularly care who owns them.

The same is not true with women’s teams – there are employees to consider. I am uncomfortable with the messaging that a women’s team is in part existing so that it can be a useful tool in the men’s team increasing their own spending.

It sends a message of subservience and also that the women’s team now sits separate from the men’s team. That is not really fair.

That message is pushed forward too. When Premier League clubs now invest in their own women’s teams (costs which sit outside PSR calculations), the inevitable question arises: are they doing this because they really believe in women’s sport, or just to increase the market value to enable a future sale?

Again: yes and no. It is certainly true that Villa now have few concerns over their PSR position for last season.

Whether the same will be true in a year’s time is unclear – obviously they can sell players before then – but they are certainly able to proceed this season without fear of a points deduction.

However, Villa have also qualified for Uefa competition and the rules are different there.

Villa face being fined if they are found to have exceeded Uefa’s squad-cost ratio limits (Photo: Getty)

Uefa’s squad-cost ratio rules require player wages and transfer fees to only account for 80 per cent of revenue for 2023-24 and 70 per cent for 2024-25, when Villa were in European competition.

The club are now in discussions with Uefa about a spending plan to ensure that their own percentage, currently too high, drops.

That said, to date, Uefa’s sanctions have been a) monetary and b) not of a level sufficient to be particularly foreboding. Villa have indeed overcome the hurdle that really mattered.

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Yes, yes and yes, obviously. But that has been the case for a long time and progress has been too slow.

I am confident that an independent regulator will exist in some form at some point.

It will hopefully have powers to enforce mediation and sales by owners proven beyond reasonable doubt to be acting in a way that harms a club’s reputation or financial health.

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But that isn’t what we are discussing here. It is one thing having an independent regulator and another entirely for that regulator to impose limitations that may seem reasonable (i.e. not effectively selling parts of your club to a related party and the proceeds allowable under PSR).

To do so requires buy-in. Premier League clubs may only have one vote in an AGM, but they hold great power as a collective, particularly on a topic where there has been little appetite to close the loophole.

The Premier League is its clubs – you will struggle to enforce anything deeply unpopular without significant blowback.

Which, at its worst, leaves the regulator as merely a conduit to the most powerful clubs, who will lean upon those in positions of governance to get what they want anyway.

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