It turns out that he has been infected by my enthusiasm for the Villa, though I don’t think I am much different from any other fan. I love the Villa and hate all the other clubs, I am overjoyed when we win and am depressed when we lose. That’s normal, isn’t it? I have told my friend many times, though, that you never know what to expect with the Villa and he has come to realise that I am right, this season being an excellent example. What other club would be the last in the top four divisions to score a goal after the season started but would be challenging the leaders by Christmas?

Meanwhile, however the season pans out, you can rest assured that I won’t suddenly decide to give up the Villa and take my affections elsewhere. According to the Sustain Health website, there are nine types of football fan: the Diehard, the Instant Expert, the Fair-Weather Fan, the Pub Fiend, the Gambling Man, the Club Loyalist, the Nostalgia Tripper, the News Junkie and the Pressured Peer. You might think my friend is a Fair-Weather Fan, but this category seems to be reserved for glory hunters, so he is perhaps just a glorious eccentric.

As for me, I think that perhaps I am a Club Loyalist with a touch of the Nostalgia Tripper.

The annual Deloitte Football Money League is due out this month. It defines what top flight European football is now all about. A year ago, Villa were in 18th position, with a turnover of €310.2 million. Arsenal were 7th, at €716.5 million, a fact which I don’t think got much of a mention during our recent meetings with them. Arsenal as a business was, and probably still is, more than twice the size of Villa, and league position tends to correlate with turnover, which demonstrates just how far Unai is getting us to punch above our weight.

Quite possibly Villa will be a few places higher in the next Money League, to reflect our more successful recent form over the last two or three seasons. Many of the clubs above us will have likewise increased their turnover though. It seems to be easier to hold on to a high level of turnover than to achieve it in the first place. Manchester United were fourth in the Money League, with a turnover of €770.6 million, despite having had a big dip in form since Fergie’s departure more than twelve years ago. As Villa have discovered, the UEFA Squad Cost Rule and the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability rules do little to enable equality.

New Premier League rules are coming into force next season though: Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) and Sustainability and Systematic Resilience (SSR). Nice acronyms, but what do they mean?

SCR will regulate clubs’ on-pitch spending to 85 per cent of their football revenue and net profit/loss on player sales. Clubs will have a multi-year allowance of 30 per cent that they can use to spend in excess of the 85 per cent. Utilising this allowance will incur a levy and once the allowance is exhausted, they will need to comply with 85 per cent or face a sporting sanction.

According to the Premier League, the new SCR rules are “intended to promote opportunity for all clubs to aspire to greater success and brings the League’s financial system close to UEFA’s existing SCR rules which operate at a threshold of 70 per cent.” The other key features of the League’s new system include “transparent in-season monitoring and sanctions, protection against sporting underperformance, an ability to spend ahead of revenues, strengthened ability to invest off the pitch, and a reduction in complexity by focusing on football costs.”

The SSR rules, on the other hand, assess a club’s short, medium and long-term financial health through three tests – Working Capital Test, Liquidity Test and Positive Equity Test.

Yeah, well, we will have to see just how much this new bureaucracy helps mid ranking clubs like Villa compete financially with clubs that got off to a flying start in the early days of the Premier League. As an old cynic, I expect this is just window dressing designed to maintain the status quo.

What do the boards of Newcastle United and Birmingham City have in common? Both are shouting about their ambitions. Newcastle CEO David Hopkinson stated last month that he expects Newcastle to be among the world’s top clubs by 2030, while Blues owner Tom Wagner wants the club to return to the Premier League and he plans to build a new 62,000 seater stadium ready for the 2030-31 season.

Newcastle is only a slightly larger club than Villa. They were 15th in the last Deloitte Money League with a turnover of €371.8 million and it will be interesting to see where they appear in the next one. The club’s Saudi owners are no doubt envious of the success of the Abu Dhabi brigade with Manchester City, so it will be instructive to see, in view of the spending regulations, to what lengths they will be prepared to go to emulate them.

As for our dear neighbours, they have spent a long time languishing in the Championship and have little immediate prospect of escaping, so Mr. Wagner will need to show that deeds speak louder than words. As for the new stadium, at least the Bordesley Green Bernabeu won’t be an identikit one plonked near an out of town shopping centre. We are all very keen, I am sure, to see his grand plans fulfilled for the sake of the city which bears his club’s name.

Villa are due to play Fenerbahce of Turkey away on January 22nd. The same fixture took place on September 28th 1977 and Villa won 2-0. On that occasion we had already beaten them 4-0 at Villa Park. I saw the home game and remember thinking how exotic the opposition looked. Our first ever game in a European competition had only been a couple of years earlier and we were all still getting used to the experience.

We went on to beat the Polish side Gornik Zabrze over two legs then did the same to Athletic Bilbao before losing 4-3 on aggregate to Barcelona at the quarter final stage. It was all good European experience, but Villa only finished eighth in the first division and Ron Saunders had more team building to do over the next three years.

Let us hope that we can repeat the 1977 result on January 22nd. It won’t be easy as Fenerbahce are 12th in the Europa League, having lost only one of their six matches. They won’t seem quite so exotic as their predecessors of 48 years ago, though. According to ESPN’s website, their squad includes a certain Marco Asensio and another name we know well: Jhon Duran. They also seem to have a young player in their squad called Mustafa Kok, would you believe.