The Hidden Cost of Squad Building – Aston Villa’s Increasing Agent Fee Spend
Transfer net spend of the season is often quoted for shaping narratives and opinion. Yet agent fees are rarely mentioned, despite being excluded from net spend calculations altogether. For Aston Villa in 2025/26, agent fees were actually higher than the club’s reported net spend.
Villa’s reported net spend in the 2025/26 season was £28.7m. As one of the lowest in the Premier League, it is constantly offered as evidence that the club is financially shackled and held back by financial regulations. While there is truth in the sentiment, the figure misses out a key component on Villa’s balance sheet.
‘EVERY PENNY GENERATED THROUGH THE TURNSTILES IN VILLA’S CHAMPIONS LEAGUE SEASON WAS EFFECTIVELY MATCHED BY THE CLUB’S AGENT FEES TWELVE MONTHS LATER. It Doesn’t even touch transfer fees’.
Net spend is a transfer fee calculation – money in, money out, expressed as a single figure. Clean and simple. What it excludes entirely is agent fees: a direct cost of both incoming and outgoing transfers, disclosed independently by the FA, absent from the net spend figure despite being inseparable from the business of buying and selling players.
In 2025/26, Villa’s agent fees for the same period were a startling £38.4m, the second highest in the Premier League.
When it comes to squad building, events like contract renewals or savvy loan deals all come at a cost in the world of agent fees.
On the recent episode of Sky Sports The Overlap, a Villa fan claimed that Burnley had outspent Villa – using net spend as the evidence. Burnley’s net spend last season was £57.8m, suggesting they had spent £29m more than a financially constrained Villa. Burnley’s agent fees though were just £7.4m.
Add agent fees to each club’s transfer activity and the picture changes entirely: Villa’s combined outlay was £67.1m, while Burnley’s was £65.2m.
2025/26 Premier League Agent Spend
| Rank | Club | 2025/26 agent spend |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chelsea | £65.1m |
| 2 | Aston Villa | £38.4m |
| 3 | Manchester City | £37.4m |
| 4 | Liverpool | £33.9m |
| 5 | Arsenal | £32.1m |
| 6 | Manchester United | £31.8m |
| 7 | Wolves | £26.0m |
| 8 | Tottenham Hotspur | £21.4m |
| 9 | Bournemouth | £20.9m |
| 10 | Newcastle United | £20.3m |
| 11 | Brighton | £19.5m |
| 12 | West Ham United | £18.3m |
| 13 | Crystal Palace | £16.8m |
| 14 | Brentford | £12.7m |
| 15 | Nottingham Forest | £12.2m |
| 16 | Fulham | £11.4m |
| 17 | Everton | £10.0m |
| 18 | Burnley | £7.4m |
What £38.4m Bought Villa
So what on earth did Villa spend a cool £38.4m on? The FA disclosure data breaks the 2025/26 spend across five categories.
First-team signings
Evann Guessand, Yasin Ozcan, Victor Lindelöf, Harvey Elliott (loan), Jadon Sancho (loan), Marco Bizot, Alysson Santos, Douglas Luiz (loan return)
Contract renewals
Boubacar Kamara, Morgan Rogers, John McGinn, Matty Cash, Lucas Digne, Tyrone Mings
It is worth pausing on what contract renewals actually mean in this context. Villa are paying agent fees to secure new contracts, often involving improved wages and longer commitments. While such renewals can protect asset value and retain key players, they still represent a significant cost that ultimately feeds into the club’s ever growing wage bill. The wage bill in 2024-25 was £273m, almost double the £143m it was three years earlier. Agent fees and wages are not separate costs. They are sequential ones.
Outgoing transfers and loans
Leander Dendoncker, Jacob Ramsey, Kaine Kesler-Hayden (permanent exits); Leon Bailey, Donyell Malen, Enzo Barrenechea, Samuel Iling-Junior, Kosta Nedeljković, Yasin Ozcan (loans out)
Academy — 29 transactions: 4 scholarship applications, 11 new registrations, 14 youth contract renewals
Women’s team — Rachel Daly, Ellie Roebuck, Lucy Staniforth, Jill Baijings, Maya Hijikata, Oriane Jean-François, plus contract renewals
Agent fees are a club-wide operational cost — not purely a transfer window line item, and not purely about bringing players in. The renewals list alone — Rogers, Kamara, McGinn, Digne, Cash — illustrates how much of that £38.4m was spent securing players Villa already had.
The Escalating Cost of Doing Business
This is not a one-year anomaly. Villa’s agent fee trajectory makes it structural.
| Season | Agent spend | Year-on-year |
|---|---|---|
| 2023/24 | £21.2m | — |
| 2024/25 | £25.1m | +18.5% |
| 2025/26 | £38.4m | +53.3% |
| Three-year total | £84.7m | +81.7% |
Villa’s agent bill has grown by 81.7% in three seasons. The 2025/26 figure of £38.4m was the highest in the club’s recorded history, and it arrived in the same season that gross transfer spend of £71m was the second lowest in the Premier League. Zooming out to the three-year totals confirms it is not a one-season outlier:
| Rank | Club | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chelsea | £200.6m |
| 2 | Manchester City | £150.1m |
| 3 | Manchester United | £98.9m |
| 4 | Liverpool | £86.2m |
| 5 | Aston Villa | £84.7m |
| 6 | Arsenal | £79.7m |
| 7 | Newcastle United | £63.5m |
| 8 | Tottenham Hotspur | £59.5m |
Over three seasons, Villa have paid more in agent fees than Arsenal, Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur. They are fifth overall, behind only clubs with substantially larger revenue bases.
As Swiss Ramble noted when analysing Villa’s 2024/25 accounts: “Despite the slowdown in player purchases, Villa’s agent fees significantly increased from £25m to £38m in the last 12 months, which was the second highest in the Premier League, only below Chelsea’s £65m. This was driven by payments to agents for facilitating the loan signings and contract extensions.”
Read MOMS recent article on the real money coming into Villa
Why This Matters to Supporters
Every summer, supporters who raise concerns about ticket prices are met with the same rebuttal from fellow online fans: you want better players, you accept higher prices. Every pound funds ambition. Stop complaining.
It does not hold up.
Consider the gate receipts. In 2024-25, it was a Champions League season, with European nights at Villa Park, premium matchday crowds, and a record £378m total revenue – Villa’s gate receipts were £38.5m. That was a 37% increase on the previous year, and the highest matchday income in the club’s modern history. The best possible matchday season Villa could produce.
Villa’s agent fees the following season were £38.4m.
So, in effect, every penny generated by supporters through the turnstiles in a Champions League season was matched by agent fees twelve months later. It doesn’t even touch transfer fees.
Villa’s agent fee figures should encourage supporters to be more sceptical of the simplistic narratives that dominate football finance discussions.
The idea that supporters simply pay higher ticket prices so clubs can buy better players increasingly belongs to a different era. Likewise, net spend has become the statistic of choice because it is easy to understand and easy to compare.
The reality is considerably more complicated.
Agent fees may not generate headlines, but they have become one of the defining costs of modern squad building. Ignore them, and you are only seeing part of the story.
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Every club has loan signings and contract renewals just as we do. I don’t understand how our agent’s fees are so high? And don’t the players pay their agent’s fees out of their wages etc??