Does size really matter?

Gary Jones has a sense of proportion.

Well, we’ve had worse weeks. Despite all that’s seemingly wrong behind the scenes, if you were going to craft the perfect outcome for our first home Champions League game then 1-0 against Bayern Munich is probably it, and Villa Park for all its faults is still the best place in the entire world under the floodlights.

When nights like Wednesday come around it’s inevitable that those of us getting longer in the tooth try to consider where it sits in our pantheon of big matches. On the one hand, it’s our first home game in the top competition in 41 years, and against the team we met on the most famous night in our history. On the other, it’s only a group game, you don’t actually need to be champions to qualify any more, and we get another six bites of the cherry afterwards regardless of the result.

So was Wednesday night our biggest game at Villa Park in 42 years? We all know the answer to that is it probably wasn’t. In just the last 10 years we have had two play-off semi-finals which have fundamentally impacted the entire future of the club, the second of which also just happened to be a local derby. Modern football being what it is, however, for what constitutes the football media now these would have caused barely a flicker on the national and international consciousness.

Villa beating Bayern in the Champions League however? That’s headline news across the football world. There is the old philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” – we could probably add “If Villa play West Brom in a play-off semi-final, does anyone outside of the West Midlands even realise?”.

One thing that is absolutely true about last Wednesday is that it must be by some considerable distance the most lucrative single game ever played at Villa Park. Once broadcast fees and prize money for the victory are added, the total income directly attributable to this one match will be significantly north of £5 million – you wouldn’t have to look back that far in our history for that to be the entire season ticket income for a year.

We all know the problems that the pursuit of that level of income has caused. In the short-term it has caused resentment, led to people missing out on a night they have waited 41 years for, and led to just about the only negative headlines Villa have received since the appointment of Unai Emery.

I think there is a deeper concern about what it all means for the future though. By pricing out a lot of long-term supporters and replacing them with a different cohort, it seems to me you are creating the environment whereby the relationship to the crowd is going to be a lot more transactional. The ‘bigger’ we get and the more we charge, the more the new crowd will expect – just competing will not be enough. Compare the atmosphere at Villa Park on Wednesday with pretty much any you would see at The Etihad. Is that really a route we want to go down? I want my football to be about hope and excitement, not entitlement and expectation.

Which brings us on to our game on Sunday, and the return to the Premier League, the biggest and bestest in the whole world, where we played the mighty Manchester United. We all know what this means, and even after the events of last week there was no doubt we were back to being the support act. The same old ex-Red faces spent hours before and after analysing every minute aspect of what’s going wrong at Old Trafford. We got the odd “That Jhon Duran is a super-sub isn’t he?”, or “Prince William supports Villa y’know” thrown in, before they got back to the really important stuff of whatever Kobbie Mainoo has had for breakfast.

You only had to see the coverage of the matches the previous Sunday to understand where we still register in the eyes of the broadcasters. Despite our opportunity to go joint top of the league, the focus was obviously on the later game between the teams sitting in 10th and 11th, Mighty Manchester United v the Super Spurs. It was billed by Sky TV as a pivotal game for both sides – the sixth game of a 38-game season, between two teams that literally could not be more mid-table. Surely this was more of a case of ‘Substandard Sunday’ rather than ‘Super Sunday’?

But that is where we are and, actually, do we want things to be different? Would it make anyone happier if the Villa were ‘bigger’, had fans who moan about ‘only’ winning the League Cup, and we had our own equivalent of Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher or Micah Richards pontificating and irritating the hell out of everyone? Give me 1982, Unai Emery, the odd night like last Wednesday and a club that still has a soul.