In short, no.

Then again, maybe it is… eventually.

Maybe no one really remembers the runner-up, but they’re rightly rewarded with cold hard currency which is needed to help finance next year’s campaigns.  I’ve never made a secret of my opposition to the rich benefactor approach or my pride at the Villa way of doing things right now.  I’m pretty certain that I’m not in the minority there.

I want to see Aston Villa challenging for titles at home and abroad as much as any fan, but I recognise that’s not going to happen overnight and each small step of progress helps.  It’s not just about experience, although that’s a strong component, it’s also about the Benjamins.  Here’s a quick exploration of what’s on offer and why finishing 5th or 6th in the league matters.

League Cup

It seems that only the losers refer to the Carling Cup as a “Mickey Mouse” cup. Utd looked pretty happy to win it and you can be sure there would be plenty of Villa fans still celebrating had we managed to lift the trophy ourselves.

The carrot of a Europa League place is dangled to entice clubs to approach the competition seriously, but Man Utd wouldn’t be thrilled with that and will certainly qualify for the Champions League meaning that prize goes back to league position.

It would be disingenuous of me to call it a Mickey Mouse competition now that we lost, but in monetary terms it certainly is. The winner picks up a paltry £100,000, the runner-up £50,000 and the two losing semi-finalists £25,000 a piece. Of course there’s gate receipts and TV money along the way, but the financial rewards are still small potatoes.

We wouldn’t even be able to cover a week’s wages of two key first team players with our prize money from making it to Wembley, we’re obviously not going to be rushing into the transfer market all flush with our £50k in the back pocket.

The FA Cup

By contrast, as one of the four semi-finalists with at least a couple of live TV games in the competition, so far we’ve earned about £1.6m in prize money from the FA Cup. That would swell by a further £2.7m should we go on to lift the trophy at Wembley. Again, there’s also gate receipts and other media money to add to that.

OK, now we’re talking in millions, now you have my attention. So we’re pretty much certain to be walking away from the FA Cup with somewhere between £1.6 and £4.3m. Even if that’s used to upgrade training facilities or cover the cost of new coaches and scouts at the academy, that all helps as we move forward season on season.

Europa League

Even at this stage of the competition we see empty seats at every stadium, something really does need to be done to make it more attractive. The prize money has been increased, but there’s still a huge disparity with the Champions League.

The money isn’t bad, but with the cost of putting on the games and travelling, there are teams that aren’t even breaking even from competing and there’s a strong argument, especially considering our progress in the domestic cups, that we’re better off out of the Europa League this season.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen us competing if only for the experience. I’m not just talking about the players either, the logistics of organising the matches home and away would have been good for everyone at the club on top of last season’s campaign.

As far as the prize money goes, had we managed to get past Rapid Vienna we would have entered the group stage and been guaranteed 6 matches, 3 at home and 3 away, obviously. If we’d got out of the group and made our way through 5 ties – 9 games – to win the whole competition we would be looking at pocketing around £5.4m. Even with the TV money from the central market pool, it wouldn’t have been much more than £6.5m on offer.

With all the cost, logistics and risk, it’s clearly less lucrative than winning the FA Cup, but who can put a value on the experience?

Champions League

This is it. This is the mother load. All roads lead to the Champions League.

I may have caused a few sniggers recently when I claimed that we could actually do a job in the Champions League right now if we had to, but I’ll say it again, I’m convinced that we could. More recently, I revealed that last season we were the 25th largest club in Europe in terms of income. Obviously that would do absolutely nothing for us on the pitch right now, but it’s indicative of our position among the big hitters.

I’ll reiterate the point that the competition we face to actually qualify for the Champions League is tougher than a lot of teams we would face in the tournament. Our record against top half Premiership teams convinces me that we could do a job, it’s just the performance against lower teams that might cause fans to wonder.

Could we win it? Nah, don’t be daft! But we wouldn’t disgrace ourselves either and the rewards definitely make it worth the risk.

UEFA awards the teams in the group stage just under £500,000 for each of the 6 matches plus close to £3.5m just for making it that far. Add in the wins and draw bonuses and if you make it to the knock out phase you really start earning the prize money.

Looking at the teams that qualified for the first knock out stage, Inter had the weakest group stage record but even if they lose to Chelsea, their 2 wins, 3 draws and 1 loss mean that they’ll go home more than £11.6m richer and that doesn’t include any of the TV money from the now ONE BILLION EURO market pool.

The whipping boys of the group Liverpool failed to qualify from, Debrecen, lost all 6 games, scoring just 5 goals and conceding 19, but will still take £3m plus TV money back to Romania. To put things into context; their home stadium has a 10,200 capacity, £3m will be a massive amount of money for them.

Hey, if we fail to beat Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final, Debrecen will have earned more prize money from those 6 Champions League games than we will have earned in the Carling and FA Cups combined!

Once the TV money is dished out, there will be a team or two among the semi-finalists this year that will receive £50m, or very close. Some of the factors that determine the share of TV revenue include position in domestic league and the size of the TV market in that country, so it’s impossible to say until the dust settles and the competition is over.

Premier League

I think that I’m right in saying that the Premier League were the first big sporting consortium to be renewing their TV deals following the global economic collapse and the conventional wisdom naturally suggested that they wouldn’t get as much as the last contract. Guess what, they got more.

The TV money is distributed across the 20 teams both equally and on a “merit” basis. 50% is shared evenly among the 20 clubs, although some of that money is used to assist the relegated clubs as they transition to life in the Championship – so called “parachute payments”. 25% is based on TV appearances with every club being guaranteed a minimum of 10 live games. The final 25% is distributed according to finishing position.

It matters where you finish. While it isn’t earth shattering, the gap between 5th and 6th place in Premiership prize money is more than a team earns for winning the Carling Cup. It matters where you finish. 5th is better than 6th.

Chasing The Dream

Winning is the ultimate reason for competing and no one really enters just to make up the numbers, do they? There can be only one winner in each competition though and in the Premiership that means there are 19 losers. The teams at bottom know that they don’t have a realistic chance of winning, should they turn the lights off, lock the doors and leave? It would look a very different league if everyone who knew they couldn’t win dropped out.

Of course that’s just silly. By competing to their highest ability and trying to move forward inch by inch they may well reach the point of competing at the very top. It may just be a an extra point or two per season improvement. It may just be an extra round in a cup further on average over 5 seasons or so, but each little baby step leaves the club in a stronger position than the season before.

Two seasons ago Portsmouth achieved the dream of winning the FA Cup and while they may have got to the final more through a kind draw (Man Utd aside) than an expensive team, they’ve clearly lived beyond their means for too long chasing the big dreams instead of taking baby steps. They are not alone.

How many Pompey fans would swap that day at Wembley now if it meant they had a little financial security?

The point is, what was their plan? Winning the FA Cup sent them into Europe, how did they plan to handle that? How did they plan to go a bit further in the league at the same time? What were they going to do the season after? And the one after that? How were they going to achieve consistent cup runs and/or European qualification?

It doesn’t have to mean that the alternative to going all guns blazing in an attempt to win titles is mid-table mediocrity, but you have to have realistic ambitions. Baby steps. Once you achieve one goal you move on to the next. It’s important to recognise each goal as a stepping stone to the next and not let the crowd that wants it all now re-frame that as a lack of ambition. Don’t let them tell you that aiming to achieve Champions League football next season is tantamount to aiming for fourth place. It isn’t.

Aiming to get in the top four this season gives us a foundation to aim for top 3 next, possibly assembling a team in the process that could have a realistic chance of challenging for the title the season after. Aiming for top four and being satisfied with top four now just creates the opportunity to shoot higher next time.

I’m hugely confident that if we continue developing along the path that we are that we’ll one day have the opportunity to see the Premiership trophy and or the Champions League trophy hoisted high by the Villa captain. That captain won’t be Stiliyan Petrov or Richard Dunne. It may not even be the James Milners or Ashley Youngs of the team. But I tell you, it might just be the Fabian Delphs or Marc Albrightons that we have coming through.

Now that’s a dream worth chasing!!