Arsenal might hold more power in their negotiations with Aston Villa than many people realise.
That’s according to Arsenal Insider’s football finance expert, Adam Williams.
Mikel Arteta is driving the pursuits of both Morgan Rogers and Ezri Konsa which, if Villa’s valuations are to be met, could cost up to £190million.
But the Gunners may have enough leverage to drive that number down.
Firstly, it’s important to say that anyone who says they can definitively say how much a club can or cannot spend is either lying or doesn’t understand the rules.
For one, the financial statements we get from clubs like Villa and Arsenal are always on a one-year delay, so there’s a fair bit of deduction involved when you’re making these estimates.
Also, the fact that UEFA makes its SCR assessment on a calendar-year basis rather than a season-to-season one adds another layer of complexity because Villa’s financial year-end, the period which their accounts cover, is 30 June, not 31 December.
Which Morgan do you want at Arsenal and WHY – Gibbs-White or Rogers?
So, you can make a good calculated guess about the extent to which Villa need player sale profits, but we can’t say with cast-iron certainty.
Why Aston Villa may have no choice but to sell this summer
The entry point is to say that it’s UEFA’s rules which are of immediate concern to Villa, not the Premier League’s incoming SCR system, which gives clubs some flexibility to exceed the 85 per cent spending-to-revenue ratio as long as they make up the excess in subsequent seasons.
So it’s UEFA’s SCR rules, under which spending is capped at 70 per cent of turnover plus a three-year average of player sale profits, and the Football Earnings test that we’re looking at when assessing how much leverage they have in negotiations for Rogers and Konsa.
Under the UEFA earnings test, you’re allowed to lose about €60m over three seasons, up to and including the current one, 2026-27.
Villa registered a profit of £17m in 2024-25 but that included the sale of the women’s team and the Warehouse venue at Villa Park to another entity within the ownership group; UEFA doesn’t recognise those sales, so that £17m profit swings back to a loss of about £97m.
In 2025-26, we don’t know their profit-and-loss figures. We do know, however, that they breached SCR at the latest juncture.
With the Football Earnings test, they can make sales at the end of the season, before their financial year-end on 30 June 2027.
So while Football Earnings is an anxiety too, it’s SCR which is the immediate concern because they only have until 31 December 2026 to get within the 70 per cent threshold — so only the summer window, not January next year or the brief period after 2026-27 ends but the financial assessment window hasn’t yet rolled over.
After signing Joao Gomes and Johan Manzambi, I don’t see how they get there without a big sale — and they may well need two.
From Arsenal’s perspective, that does give them significant leverage.
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