Aston Villa must stop crying foul over PSR and focus on Europa League glory instead

Four wins in a row and suddenly life does not seem so bad for Aston Villa. They are up into mid-table and if a 2-0 victory over Feyenoord in the Europa League will not quite live in the memory in the way last season’s games against Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain do, a return to Rotterdam at least evoked the glory days of 1982.

- Jonathan Wilson

Donyell Malen showed his value with two goals against Burnley

It will be a while yet before the frustration at missing out on the Champions League fades, but there does now seem to be a gathering recognition that Villa have a decent chance of winning the Europa League, potentially adding Istanbul's Besiktas Park to De Kuip as a venue where they have won a European trophy.

The question, then, is where the gloom came from. Why did Villa seem so downbeat about a squad that, at least in terms of those on permanent contracts, had essentially traded Jacob Ramsey and Leon Bailey for the promising Evann Guessand? How did Villa manage to talk themselves into such a funk that they did not win any of their first six games of the season? The answer to which, just as it was for Newcastle, who also began the season in apparent denial about the quality of the squad, is profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).

My Guardian colleague Barney Ronay has a theory that managers were essentially invented as a scapegoat, so that infuriated crowds could abuse the beleaguered figure on the touchline rather than a club’s board. The European Union used to perform a similar function for the UK government. It is useful for those in power to have something to blame, and in football that role is now performed by PSR.

PSR is far from perfect. It has, surely without meaning to, created an environment in which clubs are incentivised to sell homegrown talent and to maintain a constant churn of transaction to generate, thanks to the marvels of amortisation, the book profit that gives them PSR headroom.