By Tony Attwood
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If you have a fair football memory, you might recall the case of Nicolas Pépé who was bought by Arsenal under the regime of Unai Emery for something in the realms of €80.00m in August 2019.
And if you were watching Arsenal at the time you may well remember wondering what on earth made anyone spend that much money on that player. Indeed it really was no surprise when on 25 August 2022, Pépé joined Ligue 1 club Nice on loan for the season. By 2023, four years after costing Arsenal 80 million euros, and having cost another fortune in salary, Pépé left on a free, moving to the Turkish club Trabzonspor. He had played 80 games for Arsenal, which shows us without doing very much by way of maths that each match cost Arsenal 1 million euros in transfer fees plus whatever outrageous salary the player was on.
From this we might assume that there is something not quite right in the cost analyses and scouting ability of the current Aston Villa manager – the very same Unai Emery.
Now we all know that Premier League clubs by and large make losses. Quite why people want to own loss-making clubs I am not sure, but I can only guess it is because there is a market for loss-making Premier League clubs, as well as a number of very rich people who feel like buying one. I’ve no idea if Aston Villa is actually for sale but it is certainly, with the current manager, a loss-making club.
Now to be fair, so is Arsenal, but the difference between the two clubs is that Arsenal have steered a path that keeps them well within the financial FFP rules of the league. But when a club has a manager like Unai Emery, that becomes more of a problem. Indeed we might recall that even with a manager like Arteta, it took one and a half seasons to get back into any sort of European football at all, and two and a half campaigns before the run of second-place finishes began. And Emery is certainly no Arteta.
But what of Aston Villa – the club Emery now manages? Emery signed in October 2022 and has a contract that now runs to 2027. In his three seasons, Villa have come 7th, 4th and 6th. And interestingly their goal-scoring capacity has come below Arsenal’s each season – even though Arsenal have been so strongly criticised this season for not scoring, and according to the media and media-copiers, are in desperate need of a new centre forward.
Across the last three seasons, Villa under Emery have scored 185 league goals compared with Arsenal’s 248. But that is not where the difference ends, because despite not venturing very high up the league table, Villa have been spending, and then spending some more, and ….
Undoubtedly this has been undertaken in order to get into the Champions League where more riches are to be found – but in this regard the tactic failed. Yet they still have to meet the Premier League’s FFP rules, just as Arsenal and every other club has to do.
Now an article in the Athletic reveals that Arsenal made a loss of just under £100m in the last financial year but because much of this came through depreciation, youth development, community spending and the women’s team, they have no FFP problems. Besides which the club made handsome profits on selling Emile Smith Rowe, Aaron Ramsdale and Eddie Nketiah which aren’t yet showing in the accounts. Plus they are in the Champions League each year.
Aston Villa are of course judged by the same financial rules as Arsenal, even though their manager doesn’t quite seem to get that. It seems the club are already in what are called “ongoing discussions” with Uefa over their 2023/24 breach of the financial rules.
The problem is that Unai Emery is not only known for paying far too much for players who aren’t that good but also for what are called in some quarters, ” quirky player-swap deals between clubs.” It seems Pépé taught him no lessons.
Pulling all this together, it is generally agreed that Villa have lost more money on transfers than any other club in recent years and are now trying to meet PSR regulations with a manager who spent £80m on one player who turned out to be some way below the quality needed to play in the Championship.
So he is now selling: Moussa Diaby and Jhon Duran have gone, while they keep bringing in loan players on high salaries. It’s a plan. Maybe not the right plan, but it’s a plan. Of sorts.
And my point here is that this summer it will be the way a club has managed its finances in recent years which will determine how much it can spend. And I suspect that won’t be very much.
Villain short, seem to have gambled everything on getting a Champions League place in 2025/26, and that gamble failed. The consequences for them could be significant.
