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‘Ready to kick the door down’ – Villa chief on promising commercial progress

Sumeet Paul
Aston Villa’s President of Business Operations, Chris Heck, has delivered a promising update on the club’s commercial growth and progression.

Under Unai Emery’s guidance since his appointment in October 2022, Villa have gone from strength to strength on the pitch as we look to secure Champions League qualification for next season as well as win a trophy in the Europa Conference League.

READ MORE: Positive selection conundrum for Emery as Villa set for boost vs Chelsea

However, in order to sustain our success and continue to build, it’s imperative that we continue to see growth and improvement commercially in order to become financially stronger, to then be able to compete with the top clubs in England and around Europe.

Heck was appointed as V Sports’ President of Business Operations in May 2023, and although he hasn’t been particularly vocal since his arrival at Villa, it’s evident that he has been busy working on deals behind the scenes.

While he has received criticism for that lack of communication at times as well as for specific decisions including changing the club crest again and the scrapping of the Villa Park expansion plans, there is evidently a lot of good work being done too, as he outlined this week.

“We have doubled our front-of-shirt deal, we have doubled our sleeve deal, we have doubled our kit deal,” he told SportsPro, as per the video below. “I haven’t been talking much because honestly we’ve been working to get this accomplished. Now, it’s time to share that, the big six is who we’re chasing, and quite frankly, we’re ready to kick the door down.

“What we’ve done in 11 months, we’ve cleared up a lot of…let’s say not great contracts. We have reinvented ourselves, we will be launching the next generation of our brand coming up in a few weeks.”

Villa confirmed Trade Nation as our sleeve sponsor last year, while it was announced this week that Betano will become our front-of-shirt partner from next season onwards, as per the club’s official statement,

According to The Telegraph, Adidas will replace Castore as our kit manufacturer as of next season, and so Heck has certainly been busy moving on from contracts done by the previous administration that he didn’t feel were beneficial or fully maximised the potential of the club, and we’ll hopefully see the rewards of the new agreements in the coming years.

It’s a big statement from the Villa chief but as Emery noted on Tuesday after his own contract extension was announced, ambition has been, and will always be, the motto of this Villa project, and that goes for both the sporting and commercial sides of the club.

It will be interesting to see the launch of the fresh brand look and all that comes with it, while we’ll hopefully hear more about the alternative plans for the stadium moving forward too. Nevertheless, from a commercial perspective, it all sounds very promising indeed.

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