Value For Money

We’re not just spending money for the sake of it. No one is trying to simply buy the title, we’re trying to build a squad capable of competing with the teams that have a massive head start on us. But, and this is vitally important, it’s not just about one season, it’s about being able to sustain it for years to come.

To understand why Aston Villa have needed to invest so heavily over the last several seasons just to get close to competing, one only has to compare the squad that Martin O’Neill inherited and with the squads Rafa Benitez and Alex Ferguson had at their disposal at the time.

Here are the 18 players from each club with the most league appearances:-

So how many of that Villa squad would you like to have today? Gabby and Milner obviously, although Milner was on loan at the time and we had to wait a couple of seasons to bring him in. £12m doesn’t look like a bad fee at the moment either. If you can forget the water that has passed under the bridge, possibly Barry too. Anyone else?

Obviously there was a lot of dead wood to cut out there and that’s exactly where the money has gone in the last 4 seasons. The image below contains a table (click for full sized version) that shows the transfers of all three clubs month by month. Although I haven’t detailed the fees involved, you’ll have a good idea of the major transactions I think.

You probably noticed that there was little going on in Man Utd’s column. Small wonder. After those changes, this is how the same three squads compare this season:-

Alright, I’d still say that Liverpool and Utd look stronger than this Villa squad, but we’re catching up. You can see where the money is going. There’s quite a few players in the right hand column that would easily get a game or two at one of the other clubs.

It’s also worth noting that 79% of the net transfer spend that Martin O’Neill is being judged on occurred during his 3rd and 4th seasons at Villa. The 4th season being the one that we’re currently in. Does this seem like a fair time to decide whether he’s achieved a decent return on that investment?

Revenue

I mentioned sustainability earlier and that’s always been a key component of our progression for me. It’s what gives me the patience that others could do with. It’s no good just throwing ridiculous amounts of money at the task if the people throwing the money are not prepared to keep underwriting that “investment” beyond the foreseeable future. Even if that were the case, I’m not a fan of that approach and neither are UEFA. I’m extremely glad that we’re not doing it the Chelsea or Man City way.

So it’s important that a plan is in place to get to a position where the club is self sufficient as soon as practically possible and with UEFA’s plans fast coming into focus, it’s becoming even more important to have our house in order. Eyebrows have rightly been raised in response to the latest Villa accounts which revealed that the wage bill rose to £70m supported by a turnover of £84m. That doesn’t fit the sustainability mantra, so either the revenue has to go up, or the wage bill has to come down. Eventually.

There has been no shortage of criticism aimed at the gaffer over his transfer activity, but when you consider where we are with wages right now, with Ashley Young reportedly the top earner on £65k a week, it’s difficult to see where we could have been more extravagant in the last couple of years.

Some fans seemed to have genuinely believed that the likes of Wesley Sneijder would be running out in claret and blue by now and feel sold down the river that he, or someone of his calibre, is not. Even if we qualified for Champions League next season I wouldn’t expect that sort of player to be acquired.

Here’s why. The graph below shows the 2008/09 revenue of the same 9 clubs and I’ve separated the portion of revenue that the top 4 derived from the Champions League.

Tottenham are streets ahead of the pack chasing the top four in terms of revenue, turning over £28.8m more than Aston Villa last year. By making the quarter finals, Liverpool earned £29.1m from the Champions League alone in prize and TV money. We might not be able to justify realistic hopes of making it as far and earning as much, we may not even be able to make it out of a Champions League group (although I think we could with a favourable draw), but I’ve shown recently the money that’s on offer if we can just get into the competition and avoid totally humiliating ourselves.

Just to add a little perspective here; the ~£29m differential between our turnover and Tottenham’s or the revenue Liverpool derived from competing in the Champions League is equal to the wages of 9 Ashley Young’s. Of course, that’s revenue, it doesn’t come without cost, but it’s still a large wedge of cash.

Randy Lerner’s investment in cloning technology finally paid dividends.

Growth

Thanks to additional prize and TV money from both the Premier League and the Champions League all clubs with the exception of Newcastle have shown significant growth in revenue over the last 5 years. The long term damage Newcastle sustained by dropping down to the Championship remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t expect them to be much of a threat to the top of the EPL next season should they win promotion back.

It’s amazing to think that as far back as 5 years ago Man Utd turned over close to double the amount Aston Villa turned over last year and with the extra prize money on offer in the Champions League this year, we have little hope of catching them.

So, I hope that by showing the bigger picture, by placing our recent transfer expenditure in the context of the Premiership as a whole and against the teams regularly playing Champions League, you can understand why it irritates me to see people elevate expectations based on cherry picked information. It should also serve to illustrate the true nature of not only the task ahead, but the rewards on offer.

Aston Villa failed to grasp the opportunity the Premiership presented when it was first formed. We’ve lagged behind ever since. We weren’t anywhere close to catching the boat when the money in the Champions League began heading into stratospheric territory and it’s only getting bigger, taking those that are on board further from the chasing pack.

Yes, Martin O’Neill, at this stage, has only turned Aston Villa around and taken us to the point of being among the second pelaton and that may be about what is expected given the time and investment, no more, no less. But whoever heard of a manager taking so much criticism for meeting reasonable expectations, but not beating them?

The lack of vision is also mind boggling. We may have spent a lot of money at this point, but we’re still a couple of players away from being a really good side. Once they’re in place, hopefully for next season, then you’ll see the investment in new players starting to pay off. One of the potential problems I foresee will be hanging onto the key players we’ve already acquired in the interim. If we can’t do that, we’ll never get any traction in the chase for top four.

Everton

It would be dishonest of me to finish without mentioning Everton, a club I have a lot of time for and also for David Moyes, he’s doing a great job there, with meagre resources. However, he’s been there for 8 years now, so he has a significant head start with a club that’s pretty much on par with Aston Villa, although we are nudging ahead in all the key areas now.

Moyes certainly deserves plenty of credit, but there’s also a lesson to be learned from Everton’s recent history that we can’t afford to miss. They were the last side outside of the now established big four to finish in the top 4 places and qualify for the Champions League, back in 2004/05 with 61 points. Incidentally, we finished last season with 62 points, but it was only good enough for 6th place.

Everton had held on to most of the money they had received for Wayne Rooney, but went on a bit of a spending spree ahead of the 2005/06 season, bringing in players such as Per Kroldrup, Phil Neville, Nuno Valente, Andy Van der Meyde, Andrew Johnson, Joleon Lescott and taking the on loan Mikel Arteta permanently. (If Kroldrup rings a bell, that’s because he played one game and it was against us in a 4-0 loss. He didn’t settle and was blighted by injury, not the best use of £5m).

Unfortunately for Everton, they didn’t make it past the qualifying round, losing 4-2 on aggregate to Villarreal, and dropped into the UEFA Cup. The whole saga was clearly a massive distraction, damaging their league performance to the point of finishing 11th.

Clearly they weren’t ready. They made the impressive leap from 17th position in 2003/04 to 4th in 2004/05, but then had too much to deal with and dropped back again in 2005/06. Too much, too soon, but they’ve done well to claw their way back and remain one of the top clubs in the league today and my dark horse tip in the race for fourth.

By contrast, should we somehow manage to finish in the top 4, I think we’re in a much stronger position to mount a Champions League campaign next season. And if we don’t make it this season, we’re looking strong for another crack at it next season. We’re moving forward bit by bit and as long as that continues, eventually that net spend will blend into the background.

Patience

And that is really the bottom line. Martin O’Neill has steadily re-built the Aston Villa squad to be a genuine contender in the next season or so. He’s invested heavily in young, talented players who ought to be with us for a while. We’ll be augmenting that with promising youngsters coming through the ranks over the next few seasons too.

We may well need to add a player or two, it’s a largely held view that we’re probably a good striker and strong midfielder away from being the finished article, but once that is in place our spending on acquiring new players will probably be largely offset by larger fees for the players leaving who are better quality than in the past.

The net effect – no pun intended – is that our net transfer spend will be in line with the bigger clubs, while still dealing in quality players, just as they do. As I said at the beginning, it really isn’t a difficult concept to grasp, it’s just that without adopting the Chelsea or Man City approach (something I’m extremely proud of by the way), it takes a little time.

Patience.

Sources

Most of the Aston Villa data I’ve used here came straight from my own records, collected over time from places such as soccerbase.com and transferleague.co.uk. I’ve appended that data with information about the other teams here from those same sources and also gathered turnover information from the excellent Deloitte Football Money League reports. There are enormous problems trying to attain accurate information on transfer fees and it’s not getting any easier. I understand that there is some criticism and skepticism about these sources, but I took the view that it’s the same for all teams in this post and we’re looking at a large period of time which goes some way to negating errors.