There’s a lot to be said for running a football club. The advice for most prospective Premier League owners is fairly straight-forward – forget about making any kind of profit from it.

Perhaps such a view has been cultured from a narrative that has framed many Premier League team owners as playboys, men with more money than sense, regularly willing to throw good money after bad, all whilst the rest of us lament the death of what we used to call football.

It is hard to argue with the advice when viewed through a lens of two of the league’s most disruptive owners to date – Sheikh Mansour and Roman Abramovich.

Of course, Manchester United fans may well argue that their owners – the Glazer family – have had a massive impact, but nobody spends money quite like Manchester City and Chelsea.

Despite Aston Villa being owned by a billionaire, the club are comparative paupers when viewed against the aforementioned pair. Not only does Randy Lerner have less money than his Premier League counterparts, he has less turnover at the club.

Which, if read against the soundtrack of the Smiths, would be seen as something of a lost cause, a struggle against predicted impossible odds. If all Villa have to rely on is Lerner’s wealth, some would suggest we may as well give up now.

But they’d be wrong.

Whatever your view on Lerner as an individual, gleaned as it will have been via his sporadic statements, few can argue he has started to get it right.

Since the day Villa’s American owner came to the club, he stated that there was a business to be had running a football club. Despite the crazy money being thrown around by some, the long term plan was simple – make Villa a business, a self-sufficient entity that didn’t really need its owner.

At this juncture, I am sure there will be many who will pipe up to say that Lerner’s removal of himself as a crutch to the club would be welcomed, celebrated almost, presumably as a result of the cumulative ire fired at a regularly silent Brooklynite whilst the club has seemed to slip backwards.

However, it is hard to argue against Lerner’s decision to want to make Villa operate as a business. Whilst football can be seen as something of an anomaly, fuelled as it is by crazy wages and crazy money, Lerner’s stance is something of a brave decision.

How Villa achieve this sustainability may not be to everyone’s taste. In the short term at least, there is a high probability that it will mean the sale of the club’s most valuable assets – if a team offers £25m for Christian Benteke, I would expect him to be sold.

I should clarify at this point that I don’t see such a stance to be about Lerner clawing money to stuff in his back pocket, but rather a strategy, an ethos even, that serves the club well in business and football terms.

In Paul Lambert, most would agree that the club have a good manager, capable of finding gems. Infallible? No, but he looks set to turn a profit on his gambles if Benteke leaves.

The profits that can be generated will be used to fund the advancement of the club, if only explained by the logic that the club’s owner has no benefit from starving the club past the point of no-return – devaluing Villa only hurts the person who owns the club.

Sell Benteke for £25m and, in theory at least, £14m of that can be spent to go and buy two players of a similar potential level from the continent.

Should Lambert’s finds – and there only needs to be one a season – increase in value as our current Belgian striker has, it will take around five years to get to a point where Villa will be a transformed entity, nothing like the team we have seen in recent years, scrapping as they have been at the wrong end of the table.

How fans want to frame the club’s operation in the interim is largely down to the individual’s internal narrative. One can see Benteke’s sale as a dangerous gamble or a step in the right direction financially – both people are at least partially right.

Which leads us on to the future. It will be, if nothing else, exciting. Quite how it will pan out is far from certain but, in my opinion, Lerner finally has it right. Don’t expect miracles, but I feel the progress will be there this time around and, for this Villa fan, it will be a welcome relief after a few seasons of turmoil.

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