The Premier League could be set to lose over £100m a month without fans in stadiums, according to one chief executive.
Fans have been unable to attend matches since the previous campaign was suspended in mid-March, with the top-flight season finishing behind closed doors.
While it was always clear that the new season would begin in the same fashion, plans were being made for the gradual return of fans to stadiums - with Premier League duo Arsenal and Liverpool among the clubs to outline possible plans for limited attendance to matches in October.
Aston Villa chief executive Christian Purslow believes that every month that goes by without fans in stadiums, the Premier League could lose a staggering amount of money.
Purslow said: "Every month we delay the return of fans costs Premier League over £100m,” Purslow is quoted saying in The Mirror.
"That has profound impact on the football economy. The only thing you will learn from having 1,000 fans in a stadium in a football test event is that football clubs lose huge amounts of money when their stadiums are empty and that has a profound impact on the economy of football.
"The government have been in possession for over two months of a wide-ranging proposal for a set of test events that should have taken place in September, including what we thought of as a pioneering event in central London to try and move away from this social distancing limitation as the basis of which to determine how many fans can come in.
"In our stadium if we applied the one metre plus metric only about 4,000 fans could come in to 42,000-seater Villa Park and anyone can see that's not viable.
"We are advocating a testing largely in line with rugby where a huge amount of accurate pre-testing is done of a known audience of fans before and after matches.
"That not only provides a safe environment but helps the government with a very large sample size. We were proposing 50 per cent in a large London stadium which would have been the biggest sample ever taken."
