If Preston are the underdogs for the FA cup tie, we will certainly be the underdogs in the Champions’ League against Paris St Germain when we play the first leg in Paris. Unless the first leg is a disaster (Heaven forbid!), the return at Villa Park ought to be one of those never-to-be forgotten evenings.

In between the Preston match and the PSG first leg cup tie, we have a couple of tricky looking Premier League fixtures, away at Brighton and at home to Forest. We need to keep picking up points in the league if we want to make sure of qualifying for a European competition next season. In between the two PSG matches, we have a trip to Southampton, who may be down and out but probably won’t give us an easy game.

Football success tends to correlate with the size of a club’s turnover in comparison with its competitors. The latest Deloitte Football Money League provides figures for European clubs for the 2023/24 season and it shows that, of the teams remaining in the competition, Real Madrid had the largest turnover with €1,045.5 million and Villa had the smallest, with €310.2 million. So the Spanish club is, as a business, well over three times the size of Villa.

The other quarter finalists recorded turnovers ranging from PSG at €805 million to Inter’s €319 million. All the remaining quarter-finalists, apart from Dortmund and Inter, are well over double the size of Villa. These figures show clearly what a great job Unai is doing, getting the club to punch so far above its weight.

The commercial team are doing a great job too, of course. Villa are now the eighteenth biggest club in Europe, up from twentieth the previous year and well out of the top twenty before that. If success on the pitch tends to correlate with the club’s size, it is vital that the commercial boys are on top of their game too. Whether that justifies charging extortionate seat prices is not a discussion I want to get into here, though….

However much revenue we generate, we will never be able to catch a club which is a Champions’ League regular. Real Madrid and Barcelona, for example, will have earned at least as much from this campaign as Villa have. It’s only when a previously successful club goes through a bad time that there may be an opportunity to catch up, if only slightly.

Manchester United and Chelsea have both struggled over the last few seasons to regain the consistently high levels of performance which they attained, while Sir Alex Ferguson was manager in the first instance and while Roman Abramovich owned the club, in the second.

Even so, the Deloitte Money League shows Manchester United at fourth, with a turnover of €770.6 million and Chelsea at tenth, with €545.5 million turnover. Two years ago, Manchester United were again fourth and Chelsea were eighth, so possibly it is slightly easier to retain a high turnover, at least for a few seasons, if the club has a downturn, than it is to generate revenue in the first place.

When it comes to the FA Cup, Villa are of course one of the bigger boys and, by my logic, ought to be a finalist. However, Manchester City had a turnover last year of €837.8 million, well over twice that of Villa. Surprisingly, all the other Premier League clubs that are bigger than Villa have been knocked out. Several of the other quarter finalists were not too far behind Villa in the Money League. Brighton were 21st, with a turnover of €256.8 million, Crystal Palace were 26th, with €218.9 million and Fulham were 28th, with €212.2 million.

Bournemouth and Forest haven’t been featuring in the top half of the Premier League long enough yet to build such large turnover figures, but they are both punching well above their weight and will be a threat to any team they meet. We must be in with a decent chance of a Wembley appearance though.

It seems sad to me that football success should depend so much on money, but when you hand your national game over to billionaires and tycoons, that is what happens. Money is what interests them, not fairness, and if they think they will make more money out of a handful of clubs growing to an extent where they dominate the game, that is what will happen.

It still saddens me that Villa were so slow in getting to grips with the Premier League and that from 1992 until Sawiris and Edens arrived in 2018 we mostly sat and watched other clubs move into positions from which it has become difficult to dislodge them.

A lot of people saw it coming, of course, but Doug Ellis had his own agenda which had little to do with the requirement to grow the club rapidly and outgun the competition. I still weep at the thought of defeat after defeat, year in, year out, at the hands of Fergie’s Manchester United. We had other bogey teams too, but after Ellis handed over to Randy Lerner, who appointed Martin O’Neill, it really looked for a while as though we might manage to break through.

We didn’t, of course, but here we are at long last, not only in the Champions’ League for the first time, but in the quarter finals. Villa’s diminutive size as a business, in comparison with the other quarter finalists, is of course mainly down to Ellis, Lerner and Tony Xia.

Let us hope that Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens, with their company V Sports, will hang around long enough to undo a quarter of a century of failure and continue to grow the business and bring success to Aston Villa. Apart from the appointment of a certain Scouse manager, which was probably in any case down to bad advice, they seem to me hardly to have put a foot wrong in six and a half years.