English soccer club Aston Villa have agreed to sell their women's team to their own parent company, V Sports, to avoid breaching profitability and sustainability regulations (PSR) laid down by the men's top-tier Premier League.
V Sports, controlled by the Villa owners, billionaires Wes Edens and Nassef Sawaris, also holds stakes in other clubs in Spain and Portugal, while having partnerships in place with Egyptian and Japanese sides.
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Under PSR rules, if a sale of an asset – in this case, the women's team – has been agreed in principle, it can be included in the accounts for the 2024-25 UK soccer season despite the deadline for those figures having passed yesterday.
Villa, through this sale, are now reportedly confident of not breaching PSR for 2024-25 through this loophole, which was previously used by fellow Premier League side Chelsea.
It was first reported late last month by The Athletic that Villa were considering selling their women's team to meet PSR obligations.
Over the last two years, Villa have lost (excluding this sale) £195 million ($267 million), which would have put them in danger of breaching PSR rules, which allow Premier League clubs to lose £105 million as an aggregate over a rolling three-year period.
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By GlobalDataIn 2023-24, in which Villa finished fourth in the Premier League, the Birmingham club lost £85.4 million (post-tax), despite a substantial uptick in year-on-year revenue as the men's team qualified in a pan-European UEFA club competition for the first time since 1983.
The Midlands club are now following in the footsteps of Chelsea, who sold their own (highly successful) women's side to BlueCo, the London club's parent company, in June 2024, with that deal – filed just days before the 2023-24 accounting deadline – generating close to £200 million in profit. Chelsea have also previously sold two hotels, adjoining their Stamford Bridge stadium in West London, to companies related to BlueCo, for similar PSR-based reasons.
The inclusion of funds from the sale of fixed assets to companies related to a club's ownership model is permitted by the Premier League as a workaround to PSR, with the issue having not been voted on at the league's most recent owners' meeting last month.
Villa's women's team finished sixth in the 12-team, top-tier, Women's Super League (WSL) in 2024-25, with the men's team finishing in the same position in the Premier League (thus, failing to qualify for the lucrative UEFA Champions League, and potentially necessitating the sale of the women's team).
As a contrast, assessing how much Villa's women's team could be valued at – Chelsea Women have won the last six editions of the WSL.
Villa's men's team, meanwhile, will still take part in UEFA competition next season, through the second-tier Europa League.
The club are also expected to be fined by UEFA, after being found to have breached the European soccer body's squad cost ratio (SCR) rules, which determine how much each team's squad can cost, dependent on that club's revenues.
Following the end of the 2024-25 English soccer season, Villa's president of business operations Chris Heck left the club. Heck, who had joined Villa in May 2023, has now taken up the same role at the controversial and lucrative US-based LIV Golf series.
At that point, the club said they expected a replacement for Heck to be in place before the start of the 2025-26 season.
Villa's 2025-26 Premier League campaign gets underway on August 16, while the new WSL season's fixture list has not yet been released.
Regarding PSR in the Premier League, meanwhile, the rules will still be present next season, as was confirmed after discussions between clubs at a shareholders meeting in February.
