What has been an open secret at Villa Park has finally been let out by Randy this week.

Lerner said: “The capacity issue, the focus on Villa Park, is very real.
“I do believe that as part of our plan, taking the North End of the ground and improving it and modernising it, should be part of our reasonably near term strategy.
“I am conscious of the fact this is an attendance-driven business and, if you don’t have (high) attendances, then at some point your success will decline.
“There are a variety of balancing acts that go into generating additional capacity and at what cost are you going to do it.”
Lerner added: “When will work start on the North Stand? We will start this year although not with a grand designer project to begin with. You will see small signs.
“The time frame? One to three years, two to four years, it depends. There are a couple of things that need to click in, in terms of our commercial model to put us in a position to really do something special with the North Stand.
“It is on our mind. We have got plans and drawings. It is the centre piece of our next big plan but I couldn’t say definitively when we are going to get it done.
“If we do it, the capacity will increase to 50,000 at Villa Park.”

For some reason there are a great many Villa fans out there that seem to think we can wait for the North Stand. That is simply a totally false position, even if you do not massively extend the average and the North Stand has as many people as now the revenues will go massively up. This is done due to higher revenues per seat through increased seat prices and the most important massively improved corporate facilities.

The key to all this is just to see how far our revenues are behind Spurs never mind the Sky 4 and Man City. Arsenal per game for example pull in around £2.5m and we pull around £800,000, how can we hope to compete with this for wages for the top players, it is impossible !

The North Stand is a carbuncle on the face of Villa Park and whilst there are no plans yet into the council I do expect some this summer and as Randy say by this time next summer we should start to see the welcome changes.