Transfer Embargo?
In today’s Daily Telegraph article on Aston Villa’s interest in Liverpool’s 18-year-old attacker Ben Woodburn, the newspaper revealed that the club had been under a transfer embargo by the EFL.
The newspaper stated:
‘Telegraph Sport can reveal that Villa have been operating under an embargo imposed by the Football League amid their cash crisis under former chairman Dr Tony Xia.’
MOMS knows the journalist in question has previously communicated with the EFL on Villa’s troublesome financial situation under Tony Xia and indeed first brought the stories of the EFL’s meetings with Aston Villa over their concern about the club’s financial predicament.
It would seem an embargo was put in place on the back of those meetings.
If there was such a transfer embargo imposed prior to the new investment by new Villa owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens, the reality is, if the club couldn’t meet its tax bill and pay off instalments to previous transfers, it would be unlikely to go about buying new players anyway.
Villa have recently started to show interest in signing several loan players in the final week of the transfer window, which shows, along with EFL lifting the transfer embargo, that FFP may not be such a Defcon 1 situation as most have thought.
We’ll obviously have a clearer picture come the end of the window in terms of FFP, when we’ll see if any key Villa players have left and who has come in.
UTV
Follow MOMS on Twitter at @oldmansaid
