Aston Villa’s Record Financial Progress of the Past Two Years
Europa League winners. Fourth in the Premier League. The numbers behind one of the most financially significant seasons in Aston Villa’s history.
The trophy is in the cabinet. The ticker tape has been swept from the Beşiktaş Stadium and off the streets of Birmingham. And quietly, in the weeks since Istanbul, the Aston Villa accounts department have been counting.
Just seven years ago this club was in the Championship, close to going out of business before a play-off final victory over Derby County changed its trajectory. In 2024-25, Villa’s total revenue hit £378m – a new club record, and the fastest-growing revenue in the Premier League over three years. They have risen from 21st to 14th in the Deloitte Money League, the global ranking of clubs by income, overtaking the likes of Milan, Juventus and Benfica. The 2025-26 season, when the accounts are filed, will show another step forward.
Whether it overtakes 2024-25 as the single most lucrative year is a close call. The Champions League quarter-final run in 2024-25 generated £70.2m in UEFA payments, confirmed, now, through the club’s own accounts. The Europa League win and fourth-place finish this season combined for at least £228m in competition revenue. The two years are broadly comparable. What is clear is that taken together, they represent the most sustained period of high-level financial performance in the club’s modern history.
Staying fourth rather than slipping to fifth was worth roughly £7.5m in merit payments alone.
The Premier League: £182.6m
Villa’s fourth-place finish generated an estimated £182.6m in Premier League broadcast distributions — fourth highest in the division, and one of just five clubs to clear the previous single-season record of £176.2m set by Manchester City in 2022-23.
Equal share payments for every club came to roughly £88m. Facility fees, based on 34 televised games, added £18.8m. But the real driver was merit: each league position in 2025-26 was worth £3.76m, a record, up from £2.65m a year ago. Fourth place earned Villa £29.2m in domestic merit and £34.8m in international merit, a combined £64m from finishing where they did.
The position-per-pound value matters because it quantifies exactly what the final day at Manchester City was worth. Staying fourth rather than slipping to fifth was worth roughly £7.5m in merit payments alone.
The Europa League run, for all its glory, came with a hidden cost. Over 40% of Villa’s 34 televised games were “displaced” fixtures – moved to Sundays by EL Thursday scheduling – and displaced fixtures attract less than half the broadcast payment of premium selected games. The Europa League run that delivered the trophy simultaneously reduced broadcast revenue below its theoretical maximum.
One nuance worth understanding, according to last season’s accounts: of every pound Villa earn, 64p came from broadcasting. No other Premier League club is as exposed to the television deal. At most elite clubs, commercial partnerships and a packed house provide ballast, but obviously that comes with bigger stadiums and regular trophies.
At Villa, currently the league table is essentially the business strategy. Finishing fourth is not just sporting ambition. It is the structural foundation of everything else. In essence, Unai Emery has been the business plan since he walked through the door.
The Europa League: £45m and the Earnings Gap That Explains Everything
Villa’s European earnings for 2025-26 sit at approximately £39m for the Europa League alone, with a minimum further £17.5m for Champions League entry next season, a combined floor of around £45m from European competition.
The Europa League breakdown: league phase entry and performance (£6.4m combined), table position bonuses, then the knockout run – £1.5m for the last 16, £2.2m for the quarter-final, £3.6m for the semi-final, and £11.3m for the win in Istanbul. Value pillar and television distributions account for the remainder.
Now compare that with the confirmed Champions League figure from last season. Villa’s accounts show €83.7m from reaching the CL quarter-finals – broken down as €18.6m participation fee, €45.2m prize money, and €19.8m value pillar. Winning the Europa League this season generated roughly €45m in total European payments. A Champions League last-eight exit earned nearly twice as much.
That gap is not arbitrary. It sits almost entirely in one component: the value pillar. The value pillar figures make the disparity concrete. Villa’s allocation: €19.8m. Liverpool’s: €41.2m. City’s: €44.5m. Arsenal’s: €34.6m. Villa earned less from the value pillar than any of those three received as a structural baseline – before a single result was counted. The value pillar rewards historical UEFA coefficient and the commercial weight of a club’s home market. Those figures are the product of decades of compounded Champions League presence, and Villa cannot simply outperform them in a single season. The only route to closing the gap is sustained return, which makes next season’s Champions League campaign not just a sporting aspiration, but a financial obligation.
As Francesco Calvo, Villa’s President of Business Operations, put it: “The Champions League is important for the visibility it gives to the club, the players, and the money it generates. If you’re not there, you suffer.”
Istanbul and the Commercial Bounce
Prize money tells only part of the story.
Trophy wins generate commercial returns that balance sheets capture slowly and incompletely. Kit sales spike sharply in the weeks leading up to and following winning a major trophy. Istanbul was a once-in-a-generation occasion for a fanbase that had not seen European silverware since 1982. The commercial and merchandise upside from the Europa League win will run through the 2026-27 season, not just the weeks after the final whistle.
The timing of the new 2026-27 adidas kit launch, arriving while a supporter base is still celebrating a trophy and anticipating Champions League nights is not accidental. Villa’s commercial revenue has grown from £13m under the previous owners to £91m today, driven by deals including a new Betano shirt sponsorship (£20m per year), and a long-term adidas partnership reportedly worth £17m annually.
The Istanbul bounce adds to a commercial base that has been building for seven years. Villa may not currently have a front of shirt sponsor at the time of writing, but despite being in a buyers market (due to the withdraw of betting sponsors this season), due to their progress and increasing prestige, they are in a good position not to be lowballed.
The Bigger Picture – What Made This Season Genuinely Critical
Combined competition revenue for 2025-26, both Premier League and European, is at least £228m. That does not include match day income, commercial partnerships, kit revenues, or the Istanbul merchandise uplift. It is the floor.
Understanding why this season’s revenue mattered requires context of what’s been happening off the pitch. Villa’s accounts for 2024-25 showed a headline profit of £17m, but that figure was almost entirely the result of a £114m one-off gain from selling the women’s team and the Warehouse operating rights to a group company. Strip out those asset sales and the underlying loss was £97m, very much in line with the £86m loss in 2023-24 and £120m loss in 2022-23. Villa have lost approximately £500m in seven years of current ownership.
Central to such dents on the balance sheet has been a wage bill that has almost doubled in just three years – from £143m in 2021-22 to £273m in 2024-25.
More significantly, the club’s 2024-25 UEFA breach resulted in a settlement agreement that placed explicit financial conditions on the club. One of those conditions was straightforward: Villa had to pretty much reach break-even in 2025-26. With a penalty clause: if they exceeded the target by more than €20m, they would face a one-year ban from UEFA club competitions – the same sanction applied to Juventus in 2023-24.
Seen through that lens, the £228m in competition revenue was not simply a welcome windfall, it was essentially a regulatory requirement. The season’s financial outcome – Europa League winner, fourth in the Premier League, record broadcast income – was the difference between meeting a UEFA obligation and facing an existential sporting sanction. The restricted transfer window this past summer (£71m gross spend, second lowest in the Premier League), the Jacob Ramsey sale to Newcastle, the careful management of squad costs – all of it makes sense against that background.
Likewise, Villans have recently experienced the impact of such high stakes souring due to missing targets on the pitch, with the deathknell to the previous Villa owner Tony Xia’s gamble proving to be the play-off loss to Fulham at Wembley in 2018.
Revenue that has more than doubled in three years means the UEFA settlement is likely met, with a Champions League year ahead to further reinforce their position. The financial picture entering 2026-27 is materially better than it has been, and the summer transfer window will be the first real test of whether it translates into the squad Unai Emery needs to compete at the next level.
Despite the progress in the club’s revenue streams, unfortunately for match-going supporters, they have suffered their fifth consecutive ticket price rise. The cost of 2026-27 season tickets and match tickets have risen 5%, against UK CPIH annual inflation of 3%. This is a conversation for elsewhere, but it sits in the background of a record revenue picture, and it will not go unnoticed.
For now, the 2025-26 season will be seen as a pivotal season on and off the pitch, allowing the club to continue on its journey of Big Six disruption.
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