Aston Villa at Reading, Lerner cash cow and the FA Cup

The FA Cup is a beautiful thing. Anyone can do well in it and all teams get excited about it. Look at Pompey; bottom of the table but they beat Birmingham City 2-0 yesterday; beautiful. The Clowns get a reality check and it makes me smile. Happy Sunday.

But, moving quickly along, because I want to touch on the last filed accounts submitted by Aston Villa and before I say my little bit, I have to tell you that I am not an accountant, which is why we've sent them to one and we'll get you some feedback next week. But I did just want to highlight the management fees of £7.6mn - seems like a lot of money.

But, I'm not an accountant but with all our debt piling up (now higher than it ever has been in our history) I'd not be taking out almost 10% of the revenue for my own company while lending the club money from another and making a very nice return with the interest (management fees and interest now totalling about 15% of all club revenue). Seems, I don't know, not entirely fair almost.

Absolutely nothing wrong with it in terms of the law or doing business, but I just think that the extra £13mn (over £1mn a month) we gave to the Lerner family based on the last filed accounts could have maybe been better used a little closer to home.

It is also worth noting, that these latest accounts are made up to May 31st 2009, which means, anything that happened from June 1st 2009 onwards, isn't included. These accounts run from June 1st 2008 to May 31st 2009. We don't know how much has been taken out, or put in since. In essence, the information is old.

Aston Villa v Reading

Today isn't about how much money the club is making or not making and paying out in management fees, interest and salaries, it is about the FA Cup and like I said above, the FA Cup is a special day as anything can happen.

When you play these games where anything can happen it is wise to not be too confident and while on paper you would think that this has away win written all over it, Reading are to be taken seriously and I am sure they will be, but I still expect us to win, don't you?

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I have brought shame on my family. It is Reading today, not Fulham. Don't ask me why I had Fulham in the title, I can only apologise. This is why I am not an accountant.