richp999

Daggy_333 fair enough didn't know that.. However i can't see why we aren't allowed to get sponsorship to the same level as the bigger clubs.. I guess that would be a court battle Trouble with selling Jack and Chester to balance ffp is we obviously lose 2 best players, and still can't spend to get anyone else in because we are just back to a 'balanced' level with regards to FFP. Thankfully I hope we now have owners with the real funds to do things, so if there is a way around it they will find it. Hopefully they are streetwise and can pull a few strings.. I would image they wouldn't have brought the villa if they didn't have a plan, and weren't confident they could work some magic with regards ffp.. Let's all hope!

Getting round ffp is going to be our no. 1 issue now.. Itd be great to try Henry as manger, but if he can't buy any new players to work with the way he wants, then I'd rather stick with brucie.. There's Lot of things I don't like about Bruce, but in the end we missed promotion by 1 place, and automatic by a few points. That means he did a better job than every other manager in the league apart from the 3 that went up. Swap that for a total unknown quantity? Especially if the ffp problems can't be got around.. If we can't find a way around it, we'd be mad to change Bruce. However if we can get around it, and bring new players in, a change might be worth a go. Well more than that - if we could spend whatever we liked, and a new manager could craft their team.. Then go for it. Its all about the ffp for me, that dictates the manager decision. On another ffp point, I think we can bring in much larger sums for stadium sponsorship etc.. Man city did 400m over, 4 or 5 years, so I think we can manage more than 2m a year. There is no reason we couldn't reasonably pull in the same as man city did.. Remember they weren't in the position they are now when they signed these deals.. There are always many ways around it, what we lacked with xia was that he didn't really have the cash to bankroll it. Let's see if the new guys are going to throw the cash at us..

It impacts us massively. Whilst all of your points are correct, the ffp rules basically screw us in terms of what we can now do going forward. Of course its all correct that it's all down to financial mismanagement.. Well really the massive gamble the club took last year going for promotion. Personally I think xia was a chancer looking to make money by either : Getting the club promoted, then selling for a fat profit when the Premier league cash came in Or by running the club in the Premier league, extracting huge amounts of money in yearly 'management fees' The issue with ffp is the amount we could 'lose' each year dropped down this year from about 100m to 13m. How can you just 'ignore' that? Also the parachute payments stopped, making the problem worse from the other side. It runs over 3 years too, so whatever sanctions you get this year you might face next, and the one after. Man city were fined around 49M, QPR 40m, not really money we have, is it? Leicester got away with 3.1m by a shady deal to sell marketing rights. That's all fine if you get promoted after breaching the rules, but if you don't you can't perpetually afford those sorts of fines in the championship. The top and bottom of it is that we spend far more than we get in, we simply don't have the revenue streams, especially now. Even with a new owner, ffp would stop anyone coming in and throwing £100m in the bank balance.

Not really, no. This is just one of the problems. If I remember rightly the club can lose £5m a year, and the owner can cover another £8m, so a total of £13m loss per year. Its worked out over 3 years ;but basically you can only show a loss of £13m per year. As far as I understand to get money 'into' the club, you have to show it as a 'sale', so Tony would have to sponsor something.. But whatever you do, it can be looked at by the league and if its not commercially 'viable' they won't let you include it in your ffp calculations. So if you sponsor the gents for £200m per year, they will just say nobody else would reasonably pay this to sponsor the toilets, and you couldn't show it as income. Its can be quite difficult - but he hasn't got the money so it's not much use trying to think about how he could get it into villa. If you really have the cash, there are ways..

Think you can squeeze McCormack in there?

The key thing that stops smaller clubs catching the top 6 is the fact you can't just inject money. Limiting the losses is sensible, but If an owner wants to put hard cash in, (and not by the way of a loan) then they should be able to. At the moment you can't.

But you still can't do it like this. The signing on fee and transfer fee would be accounted for as a 'spend' "by the club and hence a loss.. And the club is only asked to make a £13m loss per year total. (wages, transfer fees, signing on fees.. Everything) If you have a rich owner that is willing to pay these costs, the problem is getting the money INTO the club. You cant just pop online and transfer a few million across. The club has to be seen to 'earn' it, as an income. I.e. Sponsorship, shirt sales etc.. There would be some creative ways to do it, like an earlier poster suggesting selling the seat next to Tony for £100m...sounds daft but that type of thing is the only way around it. The money needs to come into the club then get transferred elsewhere in an unattached transaction. On top of this if the league think your blagging it they can still fail your ffp. I think the rule is the any sale of anything has to be at the going rate, or close to what you could reasonably get on the open market. So they would say 'nobody else would ever pay £100m for a seat at a football ground, show me someone else who would pay that' and so you wouldn't get that transaction included in your ffp calculation. Its pretty difficult to get around, even if the money is there to try. Having said that if the will and money really was there, I'm sure you could dream up ways to do it. Put a sponsorship spot on every seat in villa park, £1000 each per year.. That's raise £40m a year. No ones ever done it so who could say how expensive it should be?

Yes but that would come into the 'running of the club'. We surely can't be spending £60Million on administration? Are the secretaries on £20,000 a week contracts ? ?

Yes lots of it doesn't add up , so most likely the figures banded around are wrong. The big issue this year is losing the parachute payments , and being squeezed at the other end by FFP. It means we have an income tens of millions less, and can lose tens of millions less also. But you are right, even if we had a squad of 25 players all on 50,000 a week (which we don't, on average) then the wage bill would be around £65 million a year. With an income of £70 million that should leave us with around £5m to run the club. The last time I looked a the club accounts we did seem to spend an astronomical amount on just the running of the club, but even that shouldn't warrant another £60m black hole.

That's great news.. So if we can find a way of getting around FFP, we can expect at least another $290m a year.. Sorted !!! Now how much did that Gareth Bale want ?

Could be a problem then.. But I don't think we are looking at administration anyway... hopefully.. But there are ways around this also.. What if 'old' AVFC had already sold their ground, training ground and other assets to another company before they entered administration....and the 'pot' left couldn't afford to pay out the contracts ? Its more about using the threat to try and wiggle out of these long expensive contracts that provide us no benefit, and are dragging us down. Of course we will most likely end up stuck paying them.

I think he was talking from the perspective of the club going into administration. In that case, the club/company the player has contract with is essentially bankrupt and no longer exists - thus your contract no longer exists. Admittedly this would mean the 'old' AVFC would have to sell all of its assets to pay as many bills as possible before being sold to the 'new' AVFC for a £1. Players like Richards would then be at the bottom of a list of creditors and likely get nothing. Jordan has had a cub relegated and has dealt with all of these problems. A savvy businessman should be going to players like Richards and saying 'The club is likely to go into administration , in which case you get nothing for the last 12 months of your contract. If you accept £500,000 now instead of the £1.5M you would have been paid then we can avoid administration ; and £500,000 is better then £0 right?'

True, but I'm sure I read a post somewhere that last year we had reached 4/5 position before Grealish had even come back from injury - and Kodjia pretty much didn't play all year. Whilst I'd hate to loose Grealish, if/when we have to it might not be the catastrophic disaster people are predicting. We shouldn't give up before the season has started !

I still can't decide if Xia's not got any cash to throw at it, or if he's been stopped exporting the cash by the Chinese government. It sounds like he's been funding the wage bill to the tune of £60m a year for the last two years, and had to suddenly stop. That's an awful lot of money. I don't think he can be criticised for supporting the club in that way for the last two years. It may well be that he had some kind of deal with the Chinese government that allowed him to export the £5m a month until early this year, based on the fact it would stop when we achieved promotion Now we haven't , he can't get the £5m a month out. Either way, those kind of losses aren't sustainable with any owner. We can't pay that wage bill until we are *in* the premier league.

My thoughts too.. Didn't want to loose grealish at all, but sounds like we are being 'prepped' for his departure. O'Hare would step up into his place, not a bad thing, I always thought he looked pretty decent ; shame about his injury though - has come at just the wrong time for us. And we already have too many strikers So probably not quite the doomsday scenario ; Jordan was even suggesting we could still mount some kind of promotion push. I don't know but it sounded to me like he'd had quite a long chat about it with someone definitely ITK!!

Interesting interview on talksport just now with Simon Jordan.. Always liked him, talks a lot of sense. Talking about Villa's situation, he clearly knows someone high up at villa but wouldn't reveal sources... Probably wyness or someone similar. He said Villa won't be going into administration, but will need to sort out the wage bill, as we all know. Said HMRC can be dealt with, and a threat of a winding up order was quite common and usually the first shot they use to concentrate your mind on paying ; he said they can usually be paid over a longer period once you have done a deal with them. However he suggested we will *have* to sell at least Grealish and Kodjia - said he knew for a fact from friends within the game that people were already prepared to put in bids for them. So looks like we will unfortunately lose those two at least, and have to rebuild from there. Also talked about doing deals with players on large salaries to get them off the wage bill (Richards?) , as if the club did go into administration, their contracts would be voided. Also HMRC wouldn't get any cash. I would think this is the only 'genuine' information about our current situation, as I suspect he has talked to someone at the club - maybe a way to get out some information to the fans without making a formal statement ?

Tony hasn't got the cash. Its that simple, I think we are looking at a new owner. If he had the money there are plenty of ways around it all.. Buy a tiny football club in China, which buys the current squad contracts from avfc. Loan them back to avfc whilst subsidising the wages. FFP sorted with big income from player 'sales', no need to extract money from China. Done. But it won't be, because tonys run out of cash. Come to think of it didn't man city do something like this? They own a couple of other clubs.. Didn't they loan players from them?

The key problem with ffp and why it protects the man u's of this world is because it prevents an owner bankrolling a club. This they don't like because it allows others with a rich owner to catch up. If it were just to stop clubs going bust, then the rules should just be that you are not allowed to lose more than X amount of money a year. Stopping an owner throwing millions in to balance the books is where it becomes protectionist. If tony wanted to waste millions each year on bad transfers etc, then why is that a problem if he also was to put in the cash to balance the books at the end of the year. Now man city have got around it with £400m sponsorships, there is a now a change to ffp to be voted on (the uefa ffp). They want to change the rules to be based on a transfer loss limit. So next, even the clubs who have a decent income can't spend it on expensive new players, without already having expensive players to sell, to bring thier net transfer spend below a certain level. Who does this benefit? Ah yes, the clubs that already have large expensively assembled squads.. Surprise suprise the man u's, Chelseas,arsenal's etc.. Itll be almost impossible to compete even if we do ever get back to the prem.

On the plus side, if the tax man winds the club up, can the official fan club buy it for a pound? ?

It's all a bit dodgy.. First we need to sell futures in two players for cash flow.. Basically to pay the wages for the month.. Then we cant pay a tax bill.. Someone hasn't got the money have they? In my job ; the first time you know a company is in trouble is when the they can't pay the fuel bill. That's the first sign and there's only 1 way it's going after that. I don't think the club could tell the tax man they can't pay because of ffp!

In my opinion this is exactly what FFP is *supposed* to do. (for the benefit of the big clubs) It really came about because the richest clubs got freaked out when mansour brought city, and suddenly they weren't the biggest clubs around any more. Now they have soldified themselves at the top with all the income they don't want anyone else competing with them. So create ffp, and stop any billionaires coming in and taking the income off them. Its just there to stop all of us 'little' clubs having the opportunity to one day challenge for anything significant. All you need to do is watch how they are *still * after man city under ffp. Incidently villa voted against ffp when it was looking at being introduced. I wonder why?

Under ffp we can only lose max 13m a season over three seasons (your last 2 seasons and a projection for the next). The max loss is actually 5m, but can go up to 13m if the owner directly funds the difference. For any years you have been in the prem, you can loose 105m. So last year, we had 1 prem year and 1 championship year, and a projection for the championship season just gone ; which would have meant over the 3 years we could have lost 131m. This coming season all 3 years are championship years, the last 2 and the coming season. So the max loss over the three must be no more than 39m. This is quite a jump from the 131m last year. We really are losing a lot of money each year! There are ways around it though sponsorship etc.. This could be done, so the question is why hasn't it? I'm starting to think either Tony hasn't got the money, or doesnt want to spend it. Maybe he just had enough to fund a push into the Premier league, along with the parachute payments, and hoped once promoted he wouldn't have to put anything more in. It could all be fixed easily-but would take a stack of money - and its not being fixed, so that must mean tony doesn't have or won't put up the money.

OK.. I don't know enough about the ffp rules, but this must be open to 'who is a club of our stature?' Id argue its man city. ? We've won more, probably got more fans etc... But more seriously there *must *be ways around this.

Going a bit of topic now, but it seems we always seem to be the club who have to play by the rules... We just need to look and see how man city get around it - or did.. They have endless cash to invest and there's no chance they generate that money from shirt and ticket sales. Look at what wolves have just done.. If we need to find a way around it I'm sure we can. The real underlying issue is whether the money is really there or not.

Well it's a bit of a joke but also not really... How do man city do it? Its all through sponsorship.