This could be a chunky number for Villa. The fines for breaching the squad cost rule are automatic, but fall within ranges.
Basically, you get fined a proportion of the amount by which you breach the limit.
So if your limit is £200m, and you hit £220m, you've breached by £20m or 10%.
For first-time offences, the ranges are:
Up to 10% breach - 10-25% of the value of the breach (using my example, £20m x 10% or 25% = £2-5m)
10-20% breach - 25-50% fine (£5-10m)
20-30% breach - 50-75% fine (£10-15m)
Over 30% breach - 75-100% fine (£15-20m).
They were fined €6m last time out. It's difficult to know where they sat on the fine scale or the level of breach, but if you took my example, the breach was £20m and the fine would need to be around the 25% level to hit €6m.
The problem they have is that for a second successive breach, the fines kick up. So 10% breach is 25-50% fine, 10-20% breach is 50-75% etc. It's implied, but not stated, that anything about 30% will be 100%.
So with the target ratio going down from 80% to 70%, unless they've reduced their costs and / or increase their revenues, the amount of the breach will go up, and the fine will then be a higher percentage of a higher number (i.e. the increase is exponential).
So if all the numbers were the same as in my example, the target is now £175m and the breach would be £45m (25.7%). That means the level of fine would be 75-100% (2nd year offence is a higher range) of the breach amount = £33.75m - £45m, an increase in the range of £31.75m - £40m.
Obviously those aren't real-world numbers, but they illustrate the potential impact. If you applied a pro-rata sliding scale to the fines, that theoretical club would pay £5m in year one (top end of the range) and then £40.2m (just over mid-range) in year two. An increase of £35.2m for not getting their shit together. In Villa's case, a fine of that size would probably be more than they earned by being in the competition in the first place.
And if we bear in mind that Villa's media income will have gone down massively (Champions League revenue last time out, Europa League this time) then they will need to have made big savings on wages and amortisation if they're not going to get hammered.
