Let me just preface this post by pointing out that I don’t generally spend much time taking potshots at other Aston Villa blogs, but yesterday was one of those days and, in a fashion, so is today. It’s a coincidence, nothing more.

Last summer I spotted a claim being repeated here and there that Aston Villa’s spend on transfer fees under Randy Lerner was really no better than under Doug Ellis if you expressed it as a percentage of the revenue. This seemed quite ludicrous, but I checked into anyway.

You can go check out the full post if you wish, but here’s the nutshell version:-

The first thing that struck me was that we only knew the revenue up until the 2007/08, meaning it was only possible to compare the spend under RL for two seasons; 06/07 & 07/08. Not only did it seem grossly unfair to put such a short record up against all the years that Deadly Doug had to establish his legacy, but extremely convenient as it also meant we had to ignore the ~£46m net spend for the 2008/09 season.

However, I worked the numbers I had anyway, which for Doug was 93/94 – 05/06 and Randy 06/07 -07/08 and came up with a Transfer Spend to Revenue Ratio for Doug of 12.49% and Randy of 15.87%. In the same ballpark perhaps, but when you’re dealing with tens of millions, 3 percentage points is no small change.

I went on in the post to demonstrate that a hypothetical 2008/09 revenue of £100m (which would have been an increase over the previous year of 33%) would give a Transfer Spend to Revenue Ratio for Randy Lerner of 29.03%. In fact, it would take revenue of £289m for the ’08/09 season to keep the ratio for 3 years at the same ~15% rate. It was never going to happen.

Well, I now have the actual* 2008/09 revenue figure according to Deloitte which is….

…*drumroll*…

£84.2 million.

If you’re interested, that’s a 11.47% increase over 2007/08 and means that the real Transfer Spend to Revenue Ratio for 2006-2009 is 31.19%.

Doug Ellis @ 12.49% and Randy Lerner @ 31.19%. Yeah, nothing’s really changed, has it? Hopefully I can get back to writing about the Villa now instead of correcting the claims made by others.

* 2008/09 Revenue obtained from Deloitte Football Money League 2010 report which carries various disclaimers about how they arrive at their calculations and until official numbers are known this should be regarded a very good estimate.