The Villa Transfer Policy

[Rich_H]

Unfortunately our transfer business will always be dictated by league performance.

 

Until we start performing at a level above the rest of the pack, we will not be able to command fees that result in profit (over purchase price) the reason why the top 6 frequently make profit on their sales is they are able to put players in the shop window to the rest of the league and have them believe that they are worth £x million. The top 6 have sold some right duds to teams in the lower half of the table all because they’ve come from x club so they must be worth the fee!

If Emery is able to get us a top 8 finish this season and repeat it next season you’ll hopefully see our transfer business improve in line with that. 

[Sulberto21]

We have made a ffp profit on Danny Ings . That’s all that matters now not the old buy for £2 sell for £1 and it’s a loss.

Buy for £2 sell for £1 3 years into his 4 year contract is actually a profit for us to buy shiny new player. 50p profit if my limited maths skills are correct. 

[Hank Scorpio]

Just now, Sulberto21 said:

We have made a ffp profit on Danny Ings . That’s all that matters now not the old buy for £2 sell for £1 and it’s a loss.

Buy for £2 sell for £1 3 years into his 4 year contract is actually a profit for us to buy shiny new player. 50p profit if my limited maths skills are correct. 

That may be the part I'm not considering fully here.

So due to amortization we will actually turn a small profit?

[Sulberto21]

5 minutes ago, Pissflaps said:

That may be the part I'm not considering fully here.

So due to amortization we will actually turn a small profit?

On Danny Ings yes. @Czarnikjak did a detailed explanation in the ffp thread. @OutByEaster? @CVByrne and @paul514 have explained it well in that thread as well other threads too. If I’ve missed anyone else who has explained it I apologise.

[VillaParkAvenue]

15 minutes ago, Pissflaps said:

That may be the part I'm not considering fully here.

So due to amortization we will actually turn a small profit?

The principle is correct, but I believe Ings was only here for 1.5 years so amortized about 9m or so. Selling for 15m should mean more or less breaking even for FFP calculations.

Just as important when speaking of FFP is wages. Ings 120K per week is now off the books which leaves some wriggle room.

Edited January 19, 2023 by VillaParkAvenue

[Vive_La_Villa]

Is this the first time we’ve actually willingly sold a decent player as we can get better. I can’t remember the last time we did this.

[Vive_La_Villa]

9 minutes ago, VillaParkAvenue said:

The principle is correct, but I believe Ings was only here for 1.5 years so amortized about 9m or so. Selling for 15m should mean more or less breaking even for FFP calculations.

Just as important when speaking of FFP is wages. Ings 120K per week is now off the books which leaves some wriggle room.

Wasn’t he here for 2.5 years?

edit: ignore me. Forgot Gerrard never had a whole season.

Edited January 19, 2023 by Vive_La_Villa

[Czarnikjak]

17 minutes ago, VillaParkAvenue said:

The principle is correct, but I believe Ings was only here for 1.5 years so amortized about 9m or so. Selling for 15m should mean more or less breaking even for FFP calculations.

Just as important when speaking of FFP is wages. Ings 120K per week is now off the books which leaves some wriggle room.

Yes, frankly speaking I am amazed we managed to break even/turn small profit on him! 
 

He is clearly past his best and doesn't justify keeping at £120k per week.

It was a strange signing to start with and hopefully Purslow learned something (or maybe not, as he followed that with Coutinho )

[Mark Albrighton]

As players come and go so frequently, these days I broadly tend to look at transfers in and out as loans and judge the net difference (typically a loss) as the cost of the loan.

As I tend to think of them as loans, I use Ross Barkley as my go to reference for a bad loan. Ten million for that season. Started well, really tailed off. Really tailed off. 

As such, I look at Ings as essentially a ten million pound loan (bought for 25, sold for 15) in which he chalked up 19 goal contributions in the equivalent of 30 full matches. I would consider that a good loan.

Yes, there will be wages to consider, there’s the question of who we could have bought who’d have done better. But this is just the broad way of looking at a transfer.

Plus sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on what a player can be sold for rather than what they did on the pitch (I wonder how many people would have been content with Ings scoring 20 a season for three years and then leaving for nothing). 

[El-Reacho]

1 hour ago, allani said:

Chelsea have also spent a staggering amount of money on high profile players that they have sold for a massive loss or players they have sold for a fraction of their subsequent value.

Yeah grass is always greener isn't it. I don't think our transfer business is any better or worse than any other side. Brighton and Brentford are the outliers - we're the same as most other PL clubs. Have our successes in Martinez, McGinn, Cash, Watkins, Kamara, Luiz etc., and have our flops. Almost every other club in the league have expensive players that haven't performed as they'd hoped. The money United, Everton etc have wasted is obscene compared to us.  

[MrBlack]

The villa transfer policy... is to become a sustainable club. 

It had a wobble when we had an exceptional season and finished surprisingly high up the table. Then we sold Grealish and thought we could make a big push the following year so took a few short term gambles (insured by some very astute youth team signings that would more than make up for what those few signings cost).

Then it went wrong because actually we couldn't transition to a team without Grealish from a team fully dependent on him. 

We sacked Dean, appointed a charlatan as manager who we gave the keys to the Kingdom. He signed another couple of ageing and on the way down footballers on high wages, thinking that it was the experience and winning mentality that they'd bring with them would be enough to get us over the threshold into Europe. They didn't, and the manager turned out to not really be a manager at all. Motivational dinner speaker at best, also good at going to people's houses and looking them in the eye.

So from there,  we have to start again. We appoint the best manager we can, with a better record than any other manager we've appointed in our history. We're a bit more confident that he knows what he is doing,  and we're going to let him do what he needs. We're hoping the end result will be better, but we'll probably not let him sign any 29 year olds on wages like Digne and Coutinho. If he sees a 29 Yr old that's better than one of those we have, and they're on reasonable wages, it's probably not a major issue.

And we'll try and get him to fix the errors of the past. One of which was thinking Ings could replace Grealish. Tick so far. The money we got for Ings more than covers his book value for us, and so we get an FFP profit for it.

Now we hope that possibly the best manager we've ever had can work his way around it. And hopefully also make us money back on the other players we've got wasting away. By bringing Sanson back it the fold we might get 5m for him, instead of the nothing we'd have got with Gerrard still in charge.

[CVByrne]

1 hour ago, Pissflaps said:

That may be the part I'm not considering fully here.

So due to amortization we will actually turn a small profit?

Yes about 3m profit is booked on player registration (we sold ours to West Ham for Ings) we then have the savings in expenditure on player wages

[Stevo985]

It would be nice to get the club to a place where we don't have to overhaul the squad every time we get a new manager. But that's more about club policy than transfer policy

[DaveAV1]

1 hour ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

Wasn’t he here for 2.5 years?

edit: ignore me. Forgot Gerrard never had a whole season.

You can’t be blamed for at least trying to forget that time. 

[The Fun Factory]

3 hours ago, VillaJ100 said:

You could say El Ghazi made us about £200 million with his play off performance 

That is why he should be always welcomed back to Villa Park with open arms.

The second greatest miss-queued goal in Villa's history. 

[Delphinho123]

I think our transfer policy over the last couple of years has been poor tbh. That isn't a reaction to selling Ings. I believe that deal represented value given his age and wages. 

But why did we sign Ings? That is the question. Why did we let three wingers go and not replace them? Who scouted Olsen? Who thought Buendia, Bailey and Ings could replace Grealish' output? So many questions.

We bounce around from policy to policy dependent on the manager. It's slapdash and we always have to press the reset button whenever a manager eventually leaves. 

We're not the worst in the league, but our net spend and wage spend in relation to our league position isn't pretty. We could be a LOT better at the transfer thing. 

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, Mark Albrighton said:

As players come and go so frequently, these days I broadly tend to look at transfers in and out as loans and judge the net difference (typically a loss) as the cost of the loan.

As I tend to think of them as loans, I use Ross Barkley as my go to reference for a bad loan. Ten million for that season. Started well, really tailed off. Really tailed off. 

As such, I look at Ings as essentially a ten million pound loan (bought for 25, sold for 15) in which he chalked up 19 goal contributions in the equivalent of 30 full matches. I would consider that a good loan.

Yes, there will be wages to consider, there’s the question of who we could have bought who’d have done better. But this is just the broad way of looking at a transfer.

Plus sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on what a player can be sold for rather than what they did on the pitch (I wonder how many people would have been content with Ings scoring 20 a season for three years and then leaving for nothing). 

The key thing really is that people go astray when they focus entirely or primarily on either the finances or the performances on the pitch. Basically to 'get transfers right' you have to achieve both. Ings is probably to a closer to a good transfer than a bad one, all things considered. 

[Mark Albrighton]

48 minutes ago, Delphinho123 said:

I think our transfer policy over the last couple of years has been poor tbh. That isn't a reaction to selling Ings. I believe that deal represented value given his age and wages. 

But why did we sign Ings? That is the question. Why did we let three wingers go and not replace them? Who scouted Olsen? Who thought Buendia, Bailey and Ings could replace Grealish' output? So many questions.

We bounce around from policy to policy dependent on the manager. It's slapdash and we always have to press the reset button whenever a manager eventually leaves. 

We're not the worst in the league, but our net spend and wage spend in relation to our league position isn't pretty. We could be a LOT better at the transfer thing. 

Depends what you mean by “output”.

The three of them managed a combined 26 goal contributions last season. 

Grealish managed 18 in his final season. And yes, he was injured for a dozen games, so he could (would) have racked up more. But then Bailey was injured for more matches than that last season.

If you’re talking about team cohesion and the like, fair enough. But I don’t think “output” is the correct term.

[Hank Scorpio]

1 hour ago, Stevo985 said:

It would be nice to get the club to a place where we don't have to overhaul the squad every time we get a new manager. But that's more about club policy than transfer policy

This is a big issue for sure!

[allani]

3 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The key thing really is that people go astray when they focus entirely or primarily on either the finances or the performances on the pitch. Basically to 'get transfers right' you have to achieve both. Ings is probably to a closer to a good transfer than a bad one, all things considered. 

Fair to middling I would say.  Didn't work out as well as we hoped but was far from being a bad signing.  There were players I'd rather we had targeted at the time and there are players I would rather have now.  But he's done a decent job for us in the meantime - as much as some on here will try, you really can't knock his goal contributions with us.