Usually when a team goes far in the Europa League, League form suffers.
#AVFC win the thing and finish 4th, after the lowest net spend in the league back in the summer.
Unai Emery- pound for pound the best manager in the League and the manager of the season.
😤 "Every time Villa get closer to [the elite clubs], the goalposts shift!"
🤦♂️ "There's an unfair ceiling... the trapdoor's been pulled up behind the top six or seven clubs!"
Simon Jordan explains why #AVFC will never be able to become one of the world's biggest clubs! ❌
Brilliant scenes of Aston Villa players celebrating with their friends and families, and with the fans who turned up in their thousands, as always. Means everything. Such a long wait for a European trophy, 44 years. Such a proud club, a great historic club, been building so promisingly under Euro-specialist Unai Emery. Few coaches prepare a team as well as Emery.
Villa deserved this trophy: so many good performances, Buendia, Lindelof, Rogers, Tielemans, McGinn, Watkins, all of them. Freiburg were modest opposition undoubtedly and couldn’t live with a vastly superior Villa. Nor with Austin MacPhee’s set-piece wizardry. Focus this summer for Villa is deepen the squad and attack the Champions League. Keep the momentum. Emery is building something very special at Villa. #FREAVL #AVFC
PSR doesn’t level the playing field, it protects the existing hierarchy, @Arsenal being the text-book example, they evidence how #PSR is not fair and equal at all #LOB
FT: Burnley 2-2 #AVFC
Having not scored a home goal since Feb, Burnley score twice to draw. Means Villa have 20 points from 17 league games in 2026, eight points in the last nine and winless in six on the road. Villa crawling/clinging to CL qualification through the league
Whilst Everton/Forest/Leicester get points docked & Villa despite UCL qualification forced to sell prize assets like Luiz, Diaby & Ramsey every year just to satisfy PSR. The rules aren't there to stop "bankruptcy"; they are there to stop anyone else joining the elite. @PGMOL_FA
I think any progressive and ambitious Premier League club should now spend whatever they like and push the boundaries way past compliance.
Because if you only receive a paltry fine for adding players who materially helped you win trophies then it's worth it.
Was massively pro spending rules but clubs illegal spending prior to PSR isn't being punished at all and I bet those clubs are pissing themselves, all while clubs with the money to compete with them today are having to audit every fucking toilet roll, with promising home grown players being horsetraded like meat in order to comply with PSR.
Clubs and supporters should always support rules which protect our clubs from themselves at times, but dishing out fines that some clubs can find from the back of the boardroom sofa while directly profiting from the players "illegally" purchased makes a mockery of the system.