Up the Villa...

Now ... where do we put the bloody star?

There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about football success.

A club wins a major honour, the city celebrates, the pubs run dry, taxi drivers become philosophers, and somewhere in a back office a poor soul is staring at a crest thinking, “Right… where do we put the bloody star?” Because that is where Aston Villa now find themselves. One star was easy. 1982. European Cup. Job done. It sat there with quiet authority, like a medal you don’t need to explain. Now another one comes along and suddenly it’s not history, it’s interior design. Do you go symmetrical, two neat stars like cufflinks, do you stack them, do you float them artistically and pretend it was always meant to look like that, or do you go full continental and start building a small constellation above the badge? Football, as ever, has no rules on this, only opinions, and most of them delivered with complete certainty.

At the opposite end of this celestial debate sits my own beloved Walsall FC, a club blessed with a clarity Villa fans can only dream of. Zero stars. Not one, not a half, not even a speculative outline pencilled in for future use. A clean badge and, I can confirm as a man holding not one but two season tickets, a blissful absence of any need to convene a design committee. There is a certain purity in that existence. While Villa supporters wrestle with legacy and symmetry, we at Walsall can focus on the essentials, the rhythm of a Saturday afternoon, the condition of the pitch, and whether flirting with the top half of the league might constitute reckless ambition. And yes, for those who enjoy a quiet historical footnote, Walsall did once turn out in claret and blue, a small, almost forgotten thread that gently ties the two clubs together without making a fuss about it.

Now, before the dreary accountants, auditors, compliance officers and their equally earnest cousins in similarly meaningful professions begin reaching for their spreadsheets, it is only fair to concede the point they would insist upon. Clubs like Aston Villa matter beyond the pitch in ways that are hard to ignore. A successful Villa pulls money into Birmingham and the West Midlands. Matchdays fill pubs, hotels, taxis and trains, and European nights turn the city into a destination rather than a stop along the way. The wider sports economy in the West Midlands runs into hundreds of millions, and events such as the Commonwealth Games 2022 delivered around £870 million to the UK economy, much of it rooted locally. That is the language of the ledger, the sort of thing that keeps the serious people nodding, even if it never quite captures what football actually feels like when it matters.

If you step back and look at the wider game, the star system itself becomes gloriously inconsistent. Nottingham Forest, have two European Cups and wear two stars, simple, direct, almost stubbornly honest. Al Ahly SC, based in Cairo, Egypt, have over ten African Champions League titles and display multiple stars grouped together because there is simply no other way to fit them in, their badge edging toward a night sky. Boca Juniors, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, incorporate dozens of stars within the badge itself, turning it into something closer to a catalogue of achievement than a crest. Juventus, of Turin, Italy, take a more measured approach, awarding one star for every ten league titles and currently wearing three, as if even glory must be counted and filed correctly. Meanwhile back in England, Liverpool FC and Manchester United continue to show a certain restraint, achieving greatness and then behaving as if making too much of it might be slightly embarrassing.

Even from the Saddlers end of the M6, this latest Villa success felt different. Watching Aston Villa do it properly, there was a quiet sense of pride that stretched beyond club lines, Birmingham, our part of the world, standing tall again. You don’t have to wear claret and blue to feel that. “Up the Villa,” and not through gritted teeth either, which is perhaps the highest compliment one club can pay another.

So yes, let them have their dilemma, because it is the right kind of problem to have. Two stars, neatly placed, will do just fine, no need to overthink it, no need to commission a branding exercise to decide whether they should sit a fraction higher or lower. The real trick is not where you put the stars, it is earning them in the first place. And if ever Walsall FC find themselves facing the same question, I can assure you we will handle it with the dignity it deserves, after a brief period of complete disbelief, followed by celebrations that may well require their own economic impact assessment just to keep those same accountants happy.