allani

I think there is a divide between ROI for the club and ROI for the owners. FFP doesn't take into account that the club is worth at least 5 times what it was when the owners took over - which more than covers any accounting loss that the business may have made. Obviously there are fewer people who can buy a club for £500m rather than £50m so the risk associated with the owner walking away is higher. But that doesn't seem to worry the authorities when assessing clubs like City / Chelsea / PSG / etc. They might not go bust under their current owners but are they really viable businesses if the owners walk away? I think it is fair to say that Villa is a more viable option for new owners now that it was 5 years ago but that doesn't seem to count for anything under FFP.

I think the world and its dog will be trying to sign Branthwaite this summer. But I agree if we could get him he'd be a superb fit. He seems to be pretty good on the ball (so would fit in with our desire to play the ball out from the back) and is also good in the air. My Evertonian mate says that he needs to move from Everton asap because he could be a Rolls Royce type player but Everton will turn him into a tractor because of the way they play. He'd be great here but we'd face a huge battle to land him. That said Emery and CL football (if we can make it) should be two pretty big ticks on the "why go to Villa" checklist.

Because building a new stand means reducing the capacity for 2 seasons whilst it is being built and so is likely to reduce our match day revenue (even with the other measures) rather than increase it in the short term. Also it has to be remembered that the next 2 seasons are predicted to be the toughest period for clubs with regards to maximising their revenues because of the transition to the new FFP limits. Therefore, it is entirely possible that a decision that is wrong for the mid-long term is the right decision in the short-term. Half the debate on this site at the moment seems to be about the need to sell star players because we are going to miss our FFP targets and then the other half is why have we decided not to reduce our capacity next season and earn less money making it even harder to meet our targets next season? Yes ultimately I am sure we'll need more bums on seats but we need to find a way to do that which won't reduce our revenues for 2 seasons and mean that it's more likely we have to sell players just as we are building a team that is competitive. It is a bit of a Catch-22 situation really and one that highlights that the FFP rules aren't really working correctly. It absolutely should be possible for ambitious (or even less ambitious) owners to upgrade / expand their infrastructure to improve the club's ability to grow or operate more sustainably. Yet the short-term fixation on annual revenue figures seems to prevent that unless you have the luxury of being able to build on a new site, buy a newly-built stadium built for another purpose or have the ability to temporarily move into another big stadium.

I spent a lot of time defending Purslow too (seems to be a bit of a trend!). That said my gut feel at present is that Heck is able to get us in front of potential partners that Purslow just couldn't - or even if NSWE make the contact, Heck is better able to then continue and take things to the next level.

I think this is exactly what I was trying to say (maybe not very well). The CFO/Finance Director is already involved in meetings / decisions that are being made and part of that will be about FFP implications. But we don't need a seperate FFP compliance process because it's already implicit in the way that the business is run. FFP hasn't changed the fact that the financial aspect of any big decision needs to be properly assessed - it just sets some additional criteria to consider within that assessment.

I think that Monchi reports to the owners not to Heck. The response from the club certainly says that the PFO reports to ownership and the PBO reports to ownership. So if we sell Ramsey it will not be Heck's decision. Heck might have recommended it from a business point of view, but Monchi would have given a football perspective to the decision and ultimately responsibility for the decision sits with ownership.

I didn't mean to say they don't have an impact - I meant to say that person doesn't make the final call . We don't have someone sat in an FFP office who can just announce that we are selling Ramsey in June as it is the quickest way to hit our FFP targets. But there will be someone saying "hey guys we need to raise £x in the next 4 weeks or we're going to have a problem".

At the risk of repeating old discussions - how are the Atairos and Adidas deals not things to be impressed by? They both represent a significant shift in the type / level of organisation that we are partnering with and point to an ability to address the revenue imbalance between us and our rivals. I understand your frustrations on the crest and redevelopment but that doesn't mean that there aren't other good things happening off the pitch. There's a lot of stuff that seems very similar to what happened under Purslow (and this comment isn't directed at you) - after the decision to hire Gerrard it was like everything that the club did that was good was down to NSWE and everything we got wrong was pinned on Purslow. We seem to be following the same path again - the Atairos and Adidas deals were down to the owners and everything we don't like gets pinned on Heck.

OK - I read / interpretted the response in a completely different way. The way I have read the response is that there are no decisions that are made purely down to FFP and therefore there is no need to have someone akin to a President of FFP. FFP is just one of many considerations that are taken into account when making any decision. I'm sure that there is someone who is monitoring and re-forecasting our finances to review our ability to meet the FFP rules but that person does not make decisions that impact on the business or sporting side of things. I didn't think that it sounded like a flippant response at all.

No it doesn't. The logic points to us selling players whose value to the team is less than the cash value they would bring in by selling them offset by t he cost of bringing in a replacement. Bringing in a "home grown" player who will start the majority of our matches and perform at CL level will not be cheap.

Given how far behind we seem to be behind our rivals in terms of revenue (match day income, shirt sales, sponsorship, etc) there's an awful lot pointing to more action and less words being absolutely the right way to go. I'd 100% prefer us to double our revenue and halve our communications rather than double our friendly comms and keep our revenue the same. That doesn't mean that we can't be good on both sides of the equation. But if we have to be poor at one....

Plus I suspect that trying to shorten a long discussion into a sentence or two "minute" almost always cuts out the dialogue and "fluffy" side of things.

I suspect that just the involvement of Adidas's marketing team / presence will make the launch quite "sexy", exciting and positive. A bit like when the F1 team unveil their new liveries. It gathers media attention and interest.

I was tempted to send you a PM on this rather than reply here but I am genuinely interested in your thoughts on this. I think that it's probably down to someone trying to make the notes look business like rather than more casual and so the tone of the notes is out of kilter. Which ties in with your comment above. But when I read the notes I was looking at some of the questions and wondering why the FAB were being so aggressive and that that approach is always going to end up with curt, blunt responses (which seem to have been given). Engagement is a two way street after all. So both the "tone" of the questions and the answers sound like they are both out of alignment with the generally positive and open discussion that you say the attendees (or at least those you have spoken to) felt had taken place. Is that fair? Oh and one important comment I noted about FFP and the change of the accounting date being about bringing it in line with the dates of other contracts - which makes complete sense - hopefully that clears up all the noise about it being done to try and hide a possible problem. There might be an FFP related bonus but I suspect it just makes reporting 1000 times early because you don't have to mess around with pro-rata calculations, etc. It does kind of make you think why on earth was it ever done in May?

I might be ploughing a lone farrow here but what I read between the lines is not that it less about frantic attempts to make the badge better and / or to get it approved by the FA (because that has already happened insofar as the FA have said that the correct process is being followed) but potentially more about lining it up to coincide with the Adidas deal and possibly even a new kit? Ideally there would also be a new shirt sponsor to go with that - although I'd have hoped that there might have been a tiny hint towards that in the response to the question on gambling sponsorship. I think one "launch" of all makes a lot of sense in terms of raising the profile of the event and triggering media / partner engagement and interest. However, I can also see that if that happens then it could be claimed that it is all about burying the new badge in other news.

OK. When he stays I'll take the plaudits.

Most of the media know that Ramsey is "one of our own" and so any rumours about him are going to have Villa fans reading their story and responding to it. There's also a fair few who would be delighted to cause some friction in the Villa camp and for our season to fizzle out so that Man Utd qualify for the CL. There is no way that anyone in the mainstream media has knowledge of which players we might sell (for FFP purposes or not). The BBC publish 15 transfer rumours every single day of the year - most of which don't lead to transfers. It's just noise that makes people like us read what they have to say.

It's €138m rather than €138,000 - but yes it has been widely reported from the accounts the club submitted and the report UEFA published a couple of weeks ago. Most of the independent analysis I have read seems to suggest that it sounds a lot worse than it is and that we should meet the PL FFP requirements without too much problem. Meeting the UEFA requirements is possibly a bit harder but mainly because the assessment period has been reduced whilst the limits change - but again I don't think too many people (apart from Villa fans) believe that it is a significant issue - other than limiting what we might be able to spend in the summer. So what I've read is basically that we're very unlikely to breach FFP but that we might have less to spend on transfers than we would like. On the flip side I don't think any projections have factored in the new deal with Adidas (which is rumoured to be significant), qualification for either the Europa League or CL, etc. I am also confident that we will announce a number of new sponsorship deals over the coming months - this is something that Heck did in Philadelphia and is an area that Atairos / Comcast have considerable experience of (it is unlikely to be just headline grabbing shirt or stadium sponsors - I think there will be other deals happening as well - American sports teams get sponsors / partners for almost everything).

I think given the way Everton have conducted their transfer business I wouldn't be too sure that they'd have got much more. There's a big difference between saying they could have got £20m more and any club meeting that higher price. But as I say I agree with your point and I have plenty of concerns with the way that FFP has been implemented (I have always said it's to protect the status quo more than it is to prevent clubs from going under). That said as much as FFP is our enemy it could become our friend. The "Sky 6" (I refuse to call them the big 6) all budget on finishing in the top 6 and progressing a long way in Europe. The more that clubs like us, Newcastle, Brighton and West Ham can disrupt that and make them miss these targets - the harder it will be for them to keep hitting their FFP numbers. Chelsea are almost certainly going to have to offload players this summer and if Man Utd were to miss the Europa League as well the CL then they will struggle too. The challenge is that we need to be able to be good enough to keep qualifying without becoming reliant on qualifying to keep us compliant. Qualification has to be treated as a bonus rather than an expectation. But the more often we qualify the more that becomes true for the "Sky 6" too. Of course their other revenue streams are much higher than ours so they should be better able to handle missing out on CL money - but their expenses / outgoings are also likely to be considerably higher too.

I'm hoping not. I'm hoping for a new kit manufacturer, new kit, new main shirt sponsor and new badge quadruple-whammy update. And given that two are impacted by existing commercial agreements they won't be able to be officially confirmed for a while.

Everton spent a lot of time buying players from "lower" clubs - they just spent over the odds and on questionable players. At the end of the day the reason they've had to sell their best players rather than their worst players is because they paid way over the odds for their worst players and put them on big salaries. Everton are in the position they are in because of their mismanagement not because FFP has failed. They are a bad example to use. I agree with your main point - I just take issue with using Everton as a victim of it.

I think the coefficient shown in the tables is after that calculation has taken place. But I think you are right for each team that progresses our coefficient would increase by slightly less than France (because we had 2 more teams earning points). However, the teams above us had 7 teams in Europe - compared to our 8 - and so it's not particularly relevant. I think it would be more significant for the Czech Republic (who had 4 teams qualify).

I'm not convinced that we have sold any Academy players who would feature in our strongest first team (11 + 5). Chuk maybe - but that wasn't down to FFP. Indeed you could easily argue that we have benefitted more from this than other clubs as we have been very active buying players from other academies to strengthen ours. I don't know why we are "most likely" to sell Ramsey by the end of June. This seems to have come from one rumour that we have a massive FFP hole to fill (when there are plenty of other sources that project we are fine - or at least won't need to sell a significant player) and the view that selling a player who has come through the system yields a greated FFP return. It completely fails to take into consideration the fact that Ramsey is likely to have more value to us next season as he is probably our biggest "home grown" player and so is important for the UEFA squad registration.

Indeed - plus the points you earn are the same for all UEFA competitions. So if we progress in the Conference League, England's coefficient improves by the same amount as if Man City progress in the CL. These are the relevant matches in the next rounds: Italy Germany England France Spain CL Bayern v Lazio (0-1) Bayern v Lazio (0-1) Man City v Copenhagen (3-1) Sociedad v PSG (0-2) Sociedad v PSG (0-2) Barcelona v Napoli (1-1) Real Madrid v Leipzig (1-0) Arsenal v Porto (0-1) Real Madrid v Leipzig (1-0) Atletico v Inter (0-1) Dortmund v PSV (1-1) Barcelona v Napoli (1-1) Atletico v Inter (0-1) Europa Sporting v Atalanta Qarabag v Leverkusen Roma v Brighton Marseilles v Villareal Marseilles v Villareal Roma v Brighton Freiburg v West Ham Sparta v Liverpool AC Milan v Slavia Prague Freiburg v West Ham Conf Maccabi v Fiorentina Ajax v Aston Villa Sturm Graz v Lille So there are already a few matches (particularly the CL) where a team from one of the other leagues vying for an extra CL spot is playing against a club from another. Meanwhile Brighton and West Ham's Europa matches are important because they both play teams from clubs currently higher in the UEFA coefficients. So wins for either will make it a bit more likely that England gains one of the extra spots. It also means that it is important that we progress further than Fiorentina in the Conference as again that would represent a swing in our favour. With so many of the current rounds seeing matches between teams from the 5 leagues leading the coefficients race - the coefficient table is likely to change significantly and as a result the odds will also change.

The women's team is called Canberra United. So I imagine that they would adopt that.