You may have already seen that Deloitte has just published the annual Football Money League report and, as I speculated might happen in a post on last year’s report, Villa have just snuck back into the top 20 for the first time in several years.

The report is always an interesting read, but lately I’ve found that it gives us an early glimpse of Aston Villa’s revenue ahead of the official accounts being filed.

Last year, Deloitte said that Villa’s 2008/09 revenue was £84.2m and when we got our hands on the accounts, £84.2m it was.

This year Deloitte have stuck with Euros and declared the 2009/10 Aston Villa turnover at €109.4, which at the stated exchange rate of £1 = €1.2214 equates to £89.6m; an increase of 6.4%.

That’s a figure I would treat with just a little caution, but Deloitte were spot on last year and I wouldn’t expect them to be far away this time. They’re not in the business of getting things wildly wrong.

If you’re interested, I already broke down the £45.9m Villa received just from the 2009/10 Premier League in this post. You can get a feel what we stand to lose by finishing in a lowly position this year.

We’ll have to wait for the official accounts to learn the bottom line for 2009/10, but unless costs have been greatly reduced – and we know that the wage bill that made up the bulk of costs hasn’t really been addressed sufficiently – I would suggest bracing ourselves for a similar loss to last year’s 2008/09 accounts. We shall find out in the next month or so.

With average attendance at VP being down this season and without trips to Wembley (although the FA Cup isn’t out of the question yet), European football or a high placing in the Premier League to bolster the revenue streams this year, it would seem highly unlikely that we’ll make Deloitte’s top 20 in 2012.

More importantly though, it will mean there are some challenging financial conditions ahead as the first tentative steps of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations come into play.

We will have the additional income of the FxPro sponsorship, but we lag some way behind our competitors in terms of exploiting commercial opportunities.

One of the points that leapt out the report for me was how Man City had managed to grow their revenue from €102m in 2008/09 to €153m in 2009/10, leapfrogging Tottenham, mostly because of increased commercial deals such as sponsorship from Etihad Airways and Umbro.

Overall though, while we weren’t languishing too far behind in recent years, it’s nice to get the recognition of being part of the Football Money League’s top 20, but I wouldn’t get too carried away, there are some interesting challenges ahead.

If you missed the link above, you can download the report for yourself here.