My old mate Damo has been banging an interesting drum recently which is summed up pretty nicely in a comment he made on his blog today:-

I think the most interesting thing is if you look at actual spend as a percentage of turnover … it’s almost the same. Nothing has really changed.

He’s made similar statements several times recently, although he normally inserts some kind of  disclaimer that this is just what someone has told him, so don’t hold him to it, but it “makes sense” to him.  What he’s referring to here is comparing the net spend on buying new players as a proportion of the club’s turnover between Doug Ellis and Randy Lerner.  The conclusion is the two owners’ ratio is comparable and helps flesh out his assertion that Randy is really no different from Deadly Doug.

The first thing that strikes me about this claim is that we don’t know the revenue for the 2008/09 season yet.  That’s convenient for a case against Randy as it doesn’t allow us to include the corresponding ~£46m net spend.  That leaves us with the 2006/07 and 2007/08 seasons – two years is a fair comparison with all of the years Ellis was in charge, right??  Of course, this also takes into account that Lerner’s initial acquisition (60% of AVFC shares) was completed August 14th 2006 leaving him barely more than 2 weeks of the summer transfer window to operate with.  (Yes, that’s exactly why Petrov was the only purchase during the summer 2006 window and the bulk of the money was spent in January 2007).

Let’s park the 2008/09 season for a moment, we’ll come back to it at the end and make some assumptions about revenue and see where the numbers come out.  Stick around, you might like it.

I’m sourcing my revenue numbers from here, I’ve checked the numbers for the last five seasons in that table against the revenue quoted in Forbes annual Soccer Rich List and they seem perfectly reasonable.  On that basis, I’m assuming that the data is reliable enough to work with.  I’m using my own transfer spend table, the data sources are cited in the post.

Wow, Doug’s 12.49% vs Randy’s 15.87%, maybe Damo has a point. That’s if you think it’s fair to compare all of the years that Ellis was in charge with the less than 2 full seasons of transfer windows that Randy had to show his mettle.

Ah, but remember that £45.9m net transfer spend from the 2008/09 season, it’s a pity we can’t include that in some way, isn’t it? Tell you what, let’s make an assumption of what the revenue could have been for that year and see what it does to the numbers.

Grab you calculators, let’s pull a number out of thin air. Let’s assume that the 2008/09 revenue will be an increase on the 2007/08 revenue by roughly a third. That’s a whopping 33% increase on the previous year’s ~£75m, giving us £100m to work with:-

29.03%!!  Boom!!  How’d you like them apples??

But wait, there’s more.  Since we’re in the mood for making up numbers, I’m wondering what sort of revenue from 2008/09 would cancel out Randy’s apparently generous net transfer spend of  £45.9m??

Ready for this??

Yup, if Aston Villa turned over £289m during the 2008/09 season then Randy’s overall net transfer spend as a percentage of revenue will be 15.88% for the 3 seasons (almost identical to the previous two season alone) and it could be argued that “Nothing has really changed.”

The bottom line is that it will take a substantial increase in revenue during 2008/09 for Randy’s revenue/net transfer spend ratio to fall below 30% for the last three seasons.  There have been a handful of seasons where Doug appeared to go crazy in the past, but he certainly reigned himself in in the seasons that followed.  Overall, I would say his 12.49% ratio over the course of 13 seasons is a fair reflection on his stewardship.

I’m not suggesting that we need to wait 13 years before we can compare Doug and Randy in this area, but as Damo himself invited you to “look at actual spend as a percentage of turnover” I did and I find little to back up his claim. Perhaps it’s time that Damo showed what he’s basing this claim on or kindly shut the fuck up.