Aston Villa transfers: Selling Jacob Ramsey would be ridiculous but Villa might need to do it anyway | OneFootball

The prospect of a major player sale has overshadowed Aston Villa’s summer transfer window from the moment they lost to Manchester United on the final day of the Premier League season.

Premier League profit and sustainability rules (PSR) artificially supercharge the need for player trading and Villa, as an upwardly mobile club still carrying the financial weight of bad decisions, have had to repeatedly take evasive action.

In its most basic definition PSR holds Premier League clubs to maximum allowable losses of £105 million across any three-season period.

Most of its flaws are obvious – the limit hasn’t changed for years, it doesn’t take debt into account and it’s turning players into transfer chess pieces – but the fact that it achieves neither profit nor sustainability exposes the lie.

I’m in favour of financial controls in elite football. I believe that clubs as social entities should be protected from unscrupulous and incompetent owners, and that the playing field should be as level as realistically possible in every division of every country from the top of the sport to the bottom.

Villa aren’t whiter than white. The club is willing to pull any lever with the best of them. PSR has become the game within the game and Villa are working in every black, white and grey area they can find to progress on the pitch while remaining compliant.

I have no problem with that in principle. PSR doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do so it’s difficult to find fault with clubs for making it work however they must.

And it’s because of PSR that Villa must entertain the quite obviously ludicrous idea of selling Jacob Ramsey to Nottingham Forest.

“Nottingham Forest have made Aston Villa forward Jacob Ramsey a primary summer target to bolster their squad ahead of their long-awaited return to European football next season,” reports The Telegraph.

Ramsey is contracted until the summer of 2027 and the natural response to a Premier League rival’s interest in him consists of a mere seven letters, three of them replaceable with asterisks.

Yet Villa might have to sell him while he has a couple of years left in order to book the profit. He’s been at the club for nearly two decades and he’s from Great Barr. It’s absurd.

The unpalatable Ramsey reality

Villa’s sale (sort of) of Aston Villa Women allowed the club to comply with PSR last month, bringing its allowable losses for 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 in line with the Premier League’s requirements.

That removed the need for unwanted player trading prior to the June 30th deadline but Villa’s ambitions on the pitch and in the transfer market – not to mention the need to meet the squad cost ratio (SCR) requirements imposed by UEFA – mean they will still need to make enough wiggle room to bring in new signings in the next few transfer windows.

They don’t have their backs against the wall. They aren’t under pressure to sell immediately or cheaply but there will need to be sales that are difficult to stomach and there’s every chance we might end up eating one this summer.

The future of Emiliano Martínez remains unresolved. There’s interest in John McGinn and Ollie Watkins and Morgan Rogers because of course there is. They’re not the only ones.

Action Images via Reuters/Paul Childs

But if you’re Unai Emery and Monchi, which of those senior players is at the top of your list to sell?

It’s not cut and dried by any means. Martínez’s age and wages count against him and there’s a greater than zero chance he fancies doing something else for the last few years of his playing career.

McGinn, Watkins and Rogers are unsellable. Boubacar Kamara is unsellable. Ezri Konsa? Unsellable.

Those players each represent something about Villa, or Emery’s football, or both. They’ve all fulfilled their potential in a Villa shirt to become irreplaceable. There is no outcome from any of them being sold that leaves Villa in a better place.

Villa supporters’ love for Ramsey can’t be accounted for but the profit from selling him can. That’s the long and short of it and, perhaps, the best argument of all that PSR isn’t fit for purpose.

The 24-year-old started exactly half of Villa’s Premier League matches in 2024/25 and plays in a position where there are adequate alternatives not only among Villa’s realistic transfer targets but also within the Villa set-up already.

Profit and sustainability: the Premier League’s great financial fallacy

None of this helps Villa to progress sustainably or indeed profitably.

Developing players of Ramsey’s ilk shouldn’t just be incentivised rather than penalised; it’s supposed to be the whole point.

Operating a women’s team with the full weight of the club behind it should be a priority for any Premier League club, never mind one with a women’s team that’s generally been making positive progress of its own.

Putting clubs in a position where home-grown players need to be sold and replaced with new signings, where women’s teams need to be converted into cash, where reciprocal transfer shenanigans between clubs move players around like pawns, is tantamount to governance by neglect.

It’s been widely reported that PSR will be replaced with a model closer to UEFA’s SCR sooner rather than later, and the sooner the better. SCR, in short, is a limit on squad wages benchmarked against turnover. If nothing else, it at least reflects the health of the business in a more meaningful way than the PSR artifice.

Premier League clubs – even those with wealthy owners and in a healthy financial position in terms of debt – shouldn’t just be allowed to spend whatever they want. I truly believe that.

But if it means Villa selling Jacob Ramsey makes sense, this surely isn’t the way.