Tribal Football

Heck: Emery and Emi are great for Aston Villa brand!

Heck: Emery and Emi are great for Aston Villa brand!
Heck: Emery and Emi are great for Aston Villa brand!Action Plus
Aston Villa business chief Chris Heck has hailed the impact of manager Unai Emery and goalkeeper Emi Martinez on the club's growth.

Heck expects things to change quickly at Villa thanks to their looming Champions League campaign.

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He told Cross Broad Sports: "I’ll give you a specific, and how you can flip the business if you have a lot of things that work in your favour. And it’s just all happened well for us this year.

"We have an incredible manager (Unai Emery). He’s a top five, top three manager in the world. We locked him in. He made that big a difference. We generated almost £54m of incremental revenue this past year. That’s off of a £200m pound business. The plan is to be £400m to £450m in three more years.

"Now all of a sudden you’re competing against Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, but also Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich. You’re in that space. We overachieved, but we also capitalised on it, and you have to do it for several years to catch up.

"We’re one of the good clubs in the sense that we have the ability to catch up because we’re in a big market with a big fan base. There’s statistics out there saying we have 300 million fans. It’s crazy. How do you actually capitalise on that?"

Heck added: "We plan on bringing in another £50m plus in incremental revenue (next year). We will bring in a lot of money for the Champions League and we are celebrating our 150th year anniversary. We have doubled the size of our staff, we are doing massive improvements at Villa Park, but trying to keep the nostalgia and the character of the facility.

"There is just so much work to do but it’s a really fun time to do it. We have some stars on the path, our goalkeeper is the most famous and the best in the world. What you see is what you get - he is wonderful for the brand!"