Villa Coefficient Kings, Class A Aways and Sponsorship Porky Pies

AVWTF19

Greetings,

I trust you’re well.

First off, it was encouraging this week to see UEFA, AFC, and Concacaf resisting outright Gianni Infantino’s plan to milk the World Cup. The hydration breaks for TV advertising in the last World Cup were an obvious clue to the direction of travel for the game and how commercial interests can interfere with its essence. It’s good to see some line has been drawn in terms of saving whatever is left of the soul of football, which the World Cup should represent globally.

As I touched on in the last edition, Villa are at an interesting crossroads - a transitional rebuild season given the loss of Morgan Rogers, Youri Tielemans, Lucas Digne, plus the injury to Amadou Onana. The timing of the World Cup has been harsh in that respect, cutting down the opportunity for players to bed in with new teammates. Key players like Johan Manzambi, Ollie Watkins, Ezri Konsa and Emi Martinez still haven’t joined Villa’s pre-season yet. There is concern and it may take a few Premier League games for the team to find their feet this season. But then again, even a supposed settled team needed that last season.

The first section below touches on the trajectory that Villa potentially are on, and it’s probably even better than you think. It also underlines the bottom line, that transition season or not, Villa needs to qualify for Europe once again this season, as it has a compounding effect that can only help the big picture.

There’s also a couple of insights off the field - from Villa fan arrests to inflated sponsorship figures.

In the next newsletter, there’ll be a deeper dive into Villa ticket pricing and what’s really been driving it. So make sure you’re subscribed for that dropping.

UTV

David

The European Coefficient Master

Heading into the Champions League draw in the second half of August, Villa will be in pot 2 for the draw. A team’s pot is judged by their coefficient score which is built up over the last five seasons of UEFA competition activity. Despite only participating in the last three seasons of European competition, Villa currently rank 12th in UEFA’s coefficient table.

UEFA ranks every club on a coefficient: points for results in the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League, added up over a rolling window. Two points for a win, one for a draw, then extra points for level of tournament, league-phase position and every knockout round reached. The five-year period decides which pot a team is in, while a longer 10-year period determines revenue value pillars, with more regular participation bumping up a team’s Champions League bounty.

As I wrote on MOMS last month, when it comes to Premier League teams, Villa are now comfortably in the top six of English teams in terms of their coefficient performance just based on three seasons in Europe under Unai Emery.

What gets interesting though is when you look ahead. Villa will add a fourth season to the five-season period with the upcoming Champions League campaign, so their position should improve. If you forget about the two pre-Emery seasons that Villa weren’t in Europe, and look at coefficient scores over the three years since Villa have been back in, never mind disrupting the Sky Six, Villa have been the sixth best team in the whole of Europe.

UEFA Co-efficient Scores of the Last Three Seasons

Looking at the above table, you’ll see that in last two seasons, Villa have even outperformed the likes of Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and Liverpool. If Villa can at least get through the league stage of this season’s Champions League in a top half position, and then qualify for Europe again, they will potentially set themselves up to climb higher than sixth in UEFA’s table and towards pot 1 status.

The coefficient may not be in most supporters’ minds, but it clearly quantifies the progress the club is making and boosting its cachet on the European stage, which obviously has spin-off advantages like attracting players and greater revenue.

Even Our Arrests Go to Chelsea

You’ll know the joke already from what’s happened to Villa in the summer transfer window, that Chelsea seem to be involved in everything that Villa do - from dropping £117m on Morgan Rogers, sending Alejandro Garnacho our way, and even poaching our set piece coach. Well, it doesn’t seem to end there.

So when the Home Office released this year’s football arrest data, it more or less wrote its own punchline: Villa’s single worst ground for fan arrests, by some distance, is Stamford Bridge. 22 since 2019/20, more than any other stadium. It turns out even our worst away days went to Chelsea in the end.

While we’re in the away end of the Home Office football arrest data, there’s a genuinely sharper trend buried in it. Class A drug possession at a stadium only became a football-specific offence in November 2022 — the same month Unai Emery took over at Villa Park. Nothing to do with him, but it means every drug arrest since counts as an “Emery era” number purely by date.

In the time it’s taken Emery to win Villa’s first trophy of his era, Villa have had 31 drug-related arrests. 29 happened to Villa fans in away ends, with just two at Villa Park.

More on where Villa fans stand in the Premier League in terms of the Home Office’s latest fan arrest data

Shirt Deal Maths That Don’t Add Up

When the club announced the Visit Rwanda front-of-shirt sponsorship, they called it “the most important sponsorship deal in the history of the football club.” According to The Athletic, it starts at £17m a year, rising to £20m if bonuses are triggered.

As My Old Man Said reported back in June, the fair market value (FMV) for Villa’s front of shirt sponsorship in 2026 was independently valued at £26.2m. Unfortunately, with several clubs looking for such sponsorships at the same time, having needed to come in line with the ban on betting company front-of-shirt sponsorships, it is very much a buyer’s market, thus in real terms lowering price expectations.

So, £20m, if all conditions are met, would probably have been the ballpark price of expectation. Newcastle, whose own front-of-shirt FMV sits at just £16.9m against Villa’s £26.2m, structured their KNOX deal to amortise at around £26m a year once bonuses land. Whether Villa’s deal stacks up next to that is something I’ll leave you to decide.

The real concern is Villa briefed the deal as a 20 per cent increase on Betano.

Now, on 21 March 2024, The Daily Telegraph ran a story with the headline “Aston Villa agree £40m shirt sponsorship deal with Greek online betting firm.”

The story stated: “Aston Villa have sealed the biggest shirt front sponsorship in the club’s history, with the Greek online sports betting platform Betano paying £20 million annually for two years from next season.”

To anybody paying attention at the time, the Daily Telegraph journalist behind the story was very much paying lip service to the club’s PR at the time on such announcements. He seemingly got an early heads-up and access from the club’s then business president.

If Betano was announced at £20m a year, then if the Visit Rwanda deal was supposedly a 20 per cent increase on that, the new deal should be £24m, not £17m, which is actually a 15 per cent cut.

Behind the scenes, it was known at the time that the number given to the journalist who initially broke the Betano news didn’t quite add up. As I previously stated on the My Old Man Said podcast two seasons ago, having been in a consultation meeting on the BK8 deal before it was announced, we were given a clear insight into the kind of sponsorship values on the table at the time. The numbers touted for the Betano deal seemed a little out of proportion.

The Athletic last month stated they had two sources saying that the Betano deal was actually worth closer to £14m. Which stacks up. Not only that, the club would likely have had to buy their way out of the initial BK8 contract, that they ended prematurely.

Despite not having a betting company front of shirt (it’s now on the sleeve), the Visit Rwanda sponsorship hasn’t exactly trodden an ethical path, when you have Amnesty International UK issuing statements aimed directly at the club because of it.

Parking any virtue signalling, if the club’s position is that commercial reality requires a moral compromise, then commercial reality ought to at least pay for it properly. It could be argued that this doesn’t. Twice now, a £20m figure has gone into circulation — Betano’s, then Visit Rwanda’s — and twice the real number underneath it has landed lower.

It’s worth mentioning that you can still purchase the Villa home shirt without a sponsor, but on Friday 7th August, all shirts will be sold with the sponsor on them. You can buy a sponsor-free one here before 7th August

My Old Man Said Podcast

The My Old Man Said podcast will return in earnest this week. You can subscribe and listen to the podcast on Apple and Spotify, or on any good podcast app.

This newsletter contains a link where at no cost to yourself, any purchases will help with publishing astonvilla.wtf.