Matt Maher: Aston Villa owners are splashing cash - but hard work starts now

Publication of accounts for the last financial year once again confirmed the colossal and ongoing investment of owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens.

In their first three years at the helm, the billionaire duo ploughed £329million into Villa via non-repayable share issues, permitting an expenditure on players which, at the end of the most recent transfer window, stood at £430m.

The team’s current position of 13th in the Premier League looks distinctly underwhelming when placed against such eye-watering figures and it seems likely Villa will fall some way short of the top-eight finish targeted prior to the season.

Yet considering the situation when Sawiris and Edens first arrived on the scene in July, 2018, the turnaround in fortunes can still be classed remarkable. With previous owner Tony Xia out of funds, Villa sinking deeper into a cash crisis and on the brink of administration, the smart bet that summer was on the club playing in League One rather than the Premier League in forthcoming years before their 11th hour rescue mission.

Still, the focus is always on the future and the publication of the accounts provides the opportunity to make an assessment of Villa’s progress toward achieving the owners’ long-term goals.

Quite what those goals are can be tough to be pin down because Sawiris and Edens are men who prioritise actions over words. Aside from a carefully choreographed interview with club media following their arrival, a brief chat with Sky Sports on the Wembley pitch after promotion was won in 2019 and the odd official statement, their public utterances on Villa have been few and far between. They have never given an interview to the written press.

While such an approach is preferable to that of their Twitter-addicted predecessor, it does leave an element of ambiguity around the “lofty goals” Edens referenced in the 2018 welcome interview.

Looking back now, at a club which then sat in the Championship, the promise to restore Villa to the “highest level of English football” could quite simply mean the Premier League, rather than anything higher.

Instead, it has been left to others to outline the ambitions. Dean Smith and now Steven Gerrard have spoken about their aim of challenging at the top end of the league, while chief executive Christian Purslow last year confirmed qualifying for Europe was part of the club’s five-year strategic plan. Quite where it sits in the plan isn’t clear and that is understandable. As Wolves have discovered, the difficulty of cracking the Premier League elite is such it pays not to be too explicit with your targets.

The concern for supporters, with progress on the pitch having slowed for the first time under Sawiris and Edens, is whether their reign will follow the same pattern as that of Randy Lerner, who gradually lost interest as the financial realities of the Premier League hit home?

That would be a surprise, considering their investment, which has also been focused on bricks and mortar in addition to the playing squad. The accounts reveal more than £15m of capital investment over the last two seasons, most of which has gone into expanding the Bodymoor Heath training ground. Plans to redevelop Villa Park, which would see its capacity increase to more than 50,000, have also been drawn up.

Yet it doesn’t mean Sawiris and Edens will continue to invest at the rate they have so far. A key aim, first referenced all the way back in their VillaTV interview and present again in the strategic report published with the accounts, is for the club to be sustainable in the long-term. The current model is a long way from that. Losses may have reduced but at £37m were still considerable. Even accounting for the estimated £56m shortfall caused by the pandemic, Villa would still have lost £80m during their first two seasons back in the Premier League. As a business, they remain entirely dependent on owner funding. Even the wealthiest and benevolent of custodians won’t keep throwing such huge volumes of money at a project without progression. The profit and sustainability rules, for one thing, will not allow it.

For Villa to seriously challenge the top flight’s elite it will require other elements of their strategy to bear fruit. A big part of that is the academy, which received more than £10m of investment in the hope it will produce players who can either star in the first-team or be sold on. An increased focus on player trading is also inevitable. Under the current ownership the club has made just £110m from player sales, almost all of that from Jack Grealish, equating to a net loss on transfer fees of £320m. For the long-term plan to work it will need big money buys to be offset, at least in part, by big money sales.

Despite the giant strides made since 2018 the raw numbers provide a reminder of just how much ground remains to be made up. Arsenal, financially the smallest of the so-called Big Six, this week reported commercial revenues for the 2020-21 season of £136m. Villa’s for the same period were £26m, a deficit of £110m. Such figures suggest everything achieved to this point under Sawiris and Edens has been the easy part.