31st August 2026

Summary

• Committed spend is modest and deliberately so. Six permanent additions, Brennan Johnson, Christian Nørgaard, Hayden Hackney, Tyrique George, Merlin Röhl and Arthur Barratt, represent an outlay David Moyes has himself put at approximately £74m. In a window in which Premier League gross spend passed £1bn early and Chelsea alone committed sums approaching half a billion dollars, Everton sit among the division’s more restrained operators, consistent with their status as one of the lowest five-year net spenders in the league.

• Two of the six additions are loan conversions, not new capital commitments. George and Röhl were already in the building, Röhl under a pre-agreed obligation to buy. It is the single cheapest form of recruitment risk management available to a club operating to a ratio.

• Outgoing business was wage-led, not fee-led, and under SCR that is rational. Idrissa Gueye and Séamus Coleman left on contract expiry; Dwight McNeil left in a swap. No cash was raised. Under PSR this would have been a strategic failure, because PSR rewarded the accounting profit on disposal. Under SCR the reward is different: the permanent removal of wage and residual amortisation from the squad cost line. Everton have taken the second prize because it is now the more valuable one.

• The incoming profile is a deliberate reduction in unit cost per squad slot and an increase in resale potential profitability. Hackney (Championship Player of the Season), George and Barratt (Chelsea academy), Johnson and Röhl are young and acquired at or below replacement value for their positions. This simultaneously lowers the wage numerator, supports homegrown registration compliance, and builds a portfolio of appreciating assets that can be sold into future ratio pressure.

• On committed business alone, Everton’s indicative 2026/27 SCR sits above the 85% Green Threshold. The illustrative modelling later in the article places the ratio in the high 80s on a no-material-sale basis. That is not a breach, the multi-year allowance permits operation above 85% at the cost of a levy, but it is an avoidable consumption of a finite resource in the very first year of a regime whose allowance, once spent, rebuilds only at 10% per season.

• A sale of Ndiaye at the reported level transforms the position. On the same assumptions, a disposal at circa £60m against a low residual book value moves the indicative ratio from the high 80s to the high 60s, comfortably inside even the 70% UEFA threshold. No other available transaction comes close to that effect. The club’s public position (“we are certainly not in a hurry to sell our best players”) is a negotiating posture, not a financial one.

• The Harrison Armstrong reversal is the most important governance statement of the window. A £35m sale of a 19-year-old academy player to Nottingham Forest, pure profit under any regime, since homegrown players carry no book value, was reportedly agreed and then stopped by ownership following visible supporter opposition. That decision is defensible on its own terms. It is not free. It establishes that this ownership will subordinate ratio optimisation to supporter sentiment in identifiable cases, and any model of Everton’s future trading must price that constraint in.

• There is no Director of Football, and that is a structural exposure. Following Kevin Thelwell’s departure to Rangers at the end of 2024/25, Everton have not appointed a like-for-like successor, operating instead through a “wider sporting leadership team” in which the manager works directly with the chief executive and ownership. In a regime requiring continuous, in-season ratio management with a compliance test every 1 March, the absence of a single accountable owner of the squad cost line is a governance weakness.
• The strategic direction set by the owners (albeit not articulated)  is stabilisation and asset appreciation, not acquisition. The recapitalisation, the JP Morgan refinancing, the stadium revenue step-change, the wage bill reduction, the collapse in amortisation from £64.6m to £50.9m, the low net spend and the age-profile reset all point the same way. The Friedkin Group is aiming for a club that is cheap to run, compliant by construction, and worth materially more than it cost. Competitive ambition (if any) is being funded out of efficiency, not out of equity.

The most recent audited accounts for Everton Football Club Company Limited cover the year to 30 June 2025 and were published in March 2026. They therefore predate the entirety of the 2025/26 season, the club’s first at the Hill Dickinson Stadium, and both the January and summer 2026 windows. Every statement in this report about 2025/26 revenue, the current wage bill, current amortisation, and the fees attaching to 2026 signings is estimated or reported, not audited. That is a material limitation and it is not resolvable until the 2025/26 accounts are filed, expected in the first quarter of 2027.

Compounding this, the binding regulatory text, the revised Section E of the Premier League Handbook,  had not been published at the time of writing. The SCR and SSR mechanics are drawn from the Premier League’s own statements of 21 November 2025 and from subsequent expert analysis. Definitional detail, particularly around the apportionment of head coach costs and the treatment of contingent consideration, may differ in the final text.

SCR and SSR

At a Premier League shareholders’ meeting on 21 November 2025, clubs voted 14–6 to replace PSR with the Squad Cost Ratio, and unanimously to adopt the Sustainability & Systemic Resilience rules. Both take effect from the start of season 2026/27. Top-to-Bottom Anchoring, the proposed hard ceiling tied to a multiple of the lowest-earning club’s central distribution, failed for want of support and was not adopted.

The 14–6 margin is worth pausing on: SCR cleared the two-thirds threshold by the narrowest possible margin. The six clubs opposed, Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton, Crystal Palace, Fulham and Leeds,  were, without exception, lower-revenue clubs, for whom a percentage-of-revenue test entrenches the existing revenue hierarchy in a way an absolute loss cap did not. The Professional Footballers’ Association also opposed, characterising SCR as a salary cap by another name. Everton, a club with mid-table revenue and a high wage-to-turnover ratio, sit precisely in the zone where that objection has force.

The mechanics

SCR and SSR as adopted, 21 November 2025. Source: Premier League statements and subsequent analysis. The binding Handbook text was unpublished at the time of writing.

Why this changes player trading behaviour

The shift from PSR to SCR is not a tightening or a loosening. It is a change of test, and it inverts several of the incentives that governed Premier League trading between 2013 and 2026. Four consequences matter for Everton.

Profit on disposal

Under PSR, the accounting profit on a player sale, sale price less residual book value, fell straight into the three-year rolling loss calculation. A £40m profit on an academy graduate was, pound for pound, the most efficient compliance instrument available, which is why the academy-sale market inflated so violently between 2021 and 2025. Under SCR, that same £40m enters only the denominator, and its effect is diluted by the size of the denominator itself. A club with £235m of revenue improves its ratio by a smaller proportion for the same nominal gain than a club with £100m of revenue would.

As a result on a comparative basis, clubs with lower turnover will tend to trade more if their squad composition permits them to. This will inevitably lead to player disposals that are difficult for fans to accept, and on occasions, difficult for managers too.

Removing cost from the numerator is worth more

The corollary is that the sale, expiry or loan of a high-wage, high-amortisation player now delivers a benefit that PSR barely recognised: the permanent extraction of that cost from the numerator. A senior player on £120,000 per week with £5m of annual amortisation carries £11m of squad cost. Removing him improves the ratio whether or not a fee is received. This is the single most important behavioural change, and it is precisely the pattern of Everton’s outgoing business this summer.

Loan income and loan structures become more attractive

Loan fees received are operating revenue and support the denominator; the loaned player’s wage cost may, depending on the apportionment adopted in the final Handbook text, leave the squad cost line in whole or in part. Loans out of surplus earners therefore work on both sides of the ratio simultaneously. Loans in with obligations to buy, the Röhl structure, defer the amortisation charge into a year of the club’s choosing while retiring sporting risk first.

Long amortisation is no longer the free lunch it briefly was

Spreading a fee over eight or nine years lowers the annual amortisation charge and therefore the numerator. UEFA capped this at five years in 2023; SCR does not directly cap contract length, but the SSR positive-equity test and the in-season nature of SCR monitoring together erode the balance-sheet appeal of the Chelsea-style structure.

A club that finances a long-amortisation squad accumulates net player registration book value and matching liabilities, which pressures the liabilities-to-adjusted-assets ratio precisely as that ratio tightens from 90% to 80% across three seasons.

Everton’s financial position entering the window

The accounts of Everton Football Club Company Limited for the year to 30 June 2025, published in March 2026, record the first full year of Friedkin ownership and are the foundation of any credible assessment of the club’s current capacity.

Everton Football Club Company Limited, year to 30 June 2025. Source: statutory accounts; underlying loss derived by the author and consistent with independent analysis.

Capital structure and the Friedkin recapitalisation

The Friedkin Group completed its acquisition through Roundhouse Capital Holdings on 18 December 2024 for a reported consideration of approximately £400m, taking a stake of 98.8% and rising. The subsequent balance sheet reconstruction was substantial and is the reason the club enters this window with genuine, if constrained, capacity:

• Farhad Moshiri’s £450.75m Bluesky Capital shareholder loan was converted to equity, with a capital reduction cleansing accumulated losses.

• Roundhouse injected £233.4m of new equity, lifting shareholders’ funds from £168.5m to £393.3m.

• The Rights and Media Funding facility, approximately £200m at a rate above 10%, carrying negative-pledge and veto provisions that had materially constrained the previous ownership,  was settled.

• The 777 Partners / A-CAP liability of approximately £200m was addressed.

• A £350m JP Morgan-led stadium refinancing completed in March 2025, reported as oversubscribed several times over, alongside a reported £130m loan to TFG for the club.

• The Premier League concluded or dropped its outstanding complaint regarding Friedkin-era loan draws, ending all live PSR proceedings against the club for the 2022 and 2023 financial years.

The substantive change is one of cost of capital. Everton moved from distressed, high-coupon, covenant-heavy shareholder and specialist lending to institutional debt at close to institutional pricing. That change does not, by itself, create SCR headroom, interest is not in the numerator,  but it removes the cash constraint that previously forced trading decisions the club would not otherwise have made.

Stadium economics

The Hill Dickinson Stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, capacity 52,888 and built at a cumulative cost of approximately £750–800m, opened for competitive football in August 2025. Average league attendance in the first season was approximately 52,132, against roughly 39,000 at Goodison Park. Naming rights to Hill Dickinson are reported at approximately £10m per annum on a long-term arrangement; the aggregate revenue uplift attributable to the move has been widely estimated at approximately £40m per season.

For SCR purposes, the stadium is the club’s principal structural advantage. It raises the denominator permanently and, uniquely among the levers available, does so without any offsetting increase in the numerator. It also brings non-football stadium events and concerts, explicitly within the adjusted revenue definition. The commercial base is being rebuilt in parallel: Castore replaced Hummel as kit supplier at a reported £20m per annum against roughly £8m, and for 2026/27 the club moved to a dual arrangement with CMC Markets front-of-shirt and Stake on the sleeve, reported at approximately £25m per season in aggregate.

Contingent liabilities and the compensation cases

Two PSR-derived compensation claims from the points deductions of 2023/24 remain relevant. Everton were deducted ten points in November 2023, reduced to six on appeal in February 2024, for a 2021/22 breach assessed at a loss of £124.5m against the £105m limit, and a further two points in April 2024 for a 2022/23 breach of £16.6m.

• Leeds United: settled out of court, reported by The Athletic on 23 September 2025. The sum is genuinely undisclosed and no reliable estimate is available.

• Burnley: an independent commission ruled on 10 June 2026 that Everton pay £26m in damages plus £9.1m in interest, a package of just over £35m, against an original claim of approximately £51.7m. Everton described the ruling as “fundamentally flawed in both law and fact” and have appealed, with an outcome expected late in 2026. The liability is therefore not final.

• Leicester City, Nottingham Forest and Southampton did not proceed. There are no further outstanding claims.

The Friedkin Group have injected approximately £38m of fresh share capital (Companies House records 221,954 shares at £175) to fund the Burnley award. The club’s stated position is that the payment is not a football cost, will not affect transfer or wage spending, and does not enter the SCR calculation. On the definitions adopted in November 2025 that position appears correct: the payment is neither a player wage, nor amortisation, nor an agent’s fee. It is, however, an SSR consideration, since it bears directly on liquidity and on the liabilities-to-adjusted-assets test.

Sporting and revenue position entering 2026/27

Everton finished 13th in the Premier League in 2025/26. Broadcasting revenue in the last audited year was flat at £129.2m, with UK merit payments of £12.9m for a 13th-place finish. Critically for this analysis, the club did not qualify for UEFA competition in 2026/27. The applicable Green Threshold is therefore 85%, not 70%, and the applicable Red Threshold is 115%.

Incoming; confirmed permanent

Confirmed permanent arrivals. Aggregate committed outlay approximately £74m per David Moyes. Individual wages, agents’ fees, instalment structures and contract lengths were not disclosed and remain unavailable until the 2026/27 accounts and the next Premier League intermediary fees disclosure.

Outgoing; confirmed

Confirmed departures. No cash consideration was received for any senior departure.

Unresolved at the time of writing

Unresolved transactions as at 30 August 2026.

Pursued and not completed

The list of unconsummated approaches is analytically useful, because it discloses the club’s valuation discipline. Everton bid a reported £30m for Jonathan Rowe and were rejected by Bologna; two bids for Guela Doué were rejected by Strasbourg; a proposal for Daniel Muñoz was overtaken by the Tete route; Aaron Wan-Bissaka joined Aston Villa and Djed Spence moved toward Inter Milan; interest in Zian Flemming cooled; a link to Kyle Walker was disputed. In each case the club declined to move materially beyond its own valuation, including for a right-back position it has publicly identified as its most pressing need for more than a year. That is not indecision. It is a club refusing to pay a premium into a cost line it must divide by revenue every March.

Comparative context

Everton’s three most recent windows.

Against the market, the restraint is stark. Premier League gross spend passed £1bn early in the summer 2026 window and continued to climb. Chelsea were the largest spenders at approximately $476m, including a club-record fee reported at approximately $159.6m for Aston Villa’s Morgan Rogers; Tottenham committed approximately £230m; Manchester City spent £116m on Elliot Anderson alone; Brighton exceeded £100m. Arsenal led on net spend. 

Everton’s approximately £74m gross, with no cash sales concluded, places them firmly in the division’s lower half of spenders and is consistent with their standing as one of the lowest five-year net spenders in the league.

Reading the strategy

Four observable design principles

Stripped of transfer-window noise, Everton’s activity discloses four consistent principles, each of which maps directly onto a term in the SCR equation.

• Convert tested risk rather than acquire untested risk. George and Röhl were bought after a season of observation. The club paid a price premium for certainty and avoided the amortisation charge on a failed signing, the most expensive item on any cost-ratio numerator, because an impaired registration must still be amortised or written down while contributing nothing to the denominator.

• Lower the unit cost per squad slot. Hackney at £16.5m from the Championship, George from a Chelsea squad in which he could not be guaranteed minutes, Barratt from an academy: each occupies a first-team-capable slot at a fraction of the wage and amortisation of an established Premier League incumbent. Six additions for approximately £74m is an average of roughly £12m per slot in a market where a single established international routinely costs three times that.

• Strip senior wage cost without needing a buyer. Gueye and Coleman came off the wage bill through contract expiry, requiring no counterparty and no negotiation. Under PSR that generates nothing; under SCR it is a direct reduction of the numerator. McNeil’s exit by swap achieved the same while acquiring a younger, higher-ceiling asset without cash.

• Build resale optionality. The English-qualified, sub-24 profile of Johnson, Hackney, George and Barratt creates a portfolio of assets whose value appreciates with minutes played, which can be liquidated into a future year of ratio pressure at high margin. This is asset warehousing, and it is the standard response of a mid-revenue club to a percentage-of-revenue test.

Indicative SCR modelling for 2026/27

The following model is illustrative. It is built from the last audited cost base, adjusted for reported window activity, and its assumptions are disclosed in full so that the reader may substitute their own.

Assumption set for the indicative model. Every figure is derived, not audited.

Sensitivity analysis

Indicative sensitivity of Everton’s 2026/27 squad cost ratio to the principal unresolved decisions. Derived by the author under the assumptions in Table 8. Not a forecast of audited outturn.

Armstrong reversal

Everton reportedly accepted a £35m offer from Nottingham Forest for the 19-year-old academy midfielder Harrison Armstrong and granted permission to travel, before The Friedkin Group intervened and stopped the transfer. Reporting attributes the reversal in significant part to supporter opposition, including 1,200 travelling supporters singing against the sale during the draw at Bournemouth.

The financial characteristics of that transaction deserve to be stated plainly. An academy graduate carries no book value. A £35m sale is therefore £35m of pure accounting profit, an unqualified addition to the SCR denominator, accompanied by the removal of a modest wage from the numerator. In pure ratio terms it is close to the most efficient transaction a club of Everton’s revenue profile can execute. Ownership reversed an earlier decision and  declined it.

Three inferences follow, and they should be held together rather than separately. First, the ownership is sensitive to fan sentiment; there is a supporter-relations constraint that binds, and it binds at levels of consideration high enough to matter. Second, the ownership judged that it had sufficient alternative capacity, which is itself an implicit statement that a larger disposal, most obviously Ndiaye, was available. Third, and most significantly for anyone modelling Everton’s future behaviour, the reversal establishes a precedent that will be tested again. Homegrown players are the natural currency of a cost-ratio regime. A club that has publicly declined to spend that currency once has raised the political cost of spending it later.

Governance gap

Kevin Thelwell departed for Rangers at the end of 2024/25. Across three years and six windows he generated £226m in transfer income against £145m of spending,  a net contribution of £81m, achieved under acute PSR duress. Everton did not appoint a like-for-like successor, operating instead through what has been described as a wider sporting leadership team, with the manager working directly with the chief executive and ownership.

This is a defensible structure in a stable regulatory environment. It is (in my opinion, a weak one in the environment that now exists. 

SCR requires continuous management of a single arithmetic quantity, tested in-season on 1 March, with SSR liquidity and equity tests assessed each 7 July. Those obligations require an executive who owns the squad cost line as a permanent responsibility, who can trade against it in real time, and who is accountable for it independently of first-team results. 

A chief executive has a wider remit; a manager has a shorter horizon and a structural interest in a larger squad. Angus Kinnear’s own framing,  that he was “hoping for the maximum spend of what we are allowed to spend”,  is candid and accurate, but it describes a budget-consumption posture rather than a ratio-management posture. The distinction will matter.

The public record

What has actually been said, by whom, and when. Statements are reproduced in brief and attributed; the analytical reading follows each.

David Moyes, manager

• On squad completeness, during the window: “We’re still needing quite a few players to add to the squad. I’d like to do more if possible” (Sky Sports News). He had earlier indicated a requirement for nine or ten signings, and described this as the busiest window of his career.

• On sales: “We are certainly not in a hurry to sell our best players.”

• On authority: he has described his say over signings as “mostly” decisive, working alongside a large scouting and recruitment operation.

• On the committed outlay: he himself put the spend at approximately £74m.

Reading: Moyes has been unusually transparent that the squad is unfinished, and he has been careful to attach the number to the spend rather than to the shortfall. A manager who quantifies what has been spent while stating that more is required is managing expectations upward and protecting himself against a window that closes short. The “not in a hurry to sell” formulation is standard vendor positioning and should not be read as a statement of intent.

Angus Kinnear, chief executive (in post from 1 June 2025)

• In his May 2026 matchday programme notes, he described the season as “happily dissatisfied”, and set the objective as having “banish[ed] the triple threats of financial instability, relegation risk and regulatory sanction”.

• On the transfer budget: he was “hoping for the maximum spend of what we are allowed to spend”.

• On structure, a year into Friedkin ownership: he credited “recruitment structures… marrying world-class analytics with industry-leading talent identification and player trading capability”.

Reading: the “triple threats” formulation is the clearest available statement of the ownership’s actual objective function, and it is defensive on all three axes, stability, survival, compliance. 

None of the three is a competitive objective. 

The “maximum spend of what we are allowed” phrasing does not confirm that the constraint is regulatory rather than shareholder appetite, It is open to interpretation as to whether Everton’s ceiling is set by the ratio, not by the owners’ willingness to fund.

The ownership

• Marc Watts, executive chairman, framed the Moyes appointment and the Kinnear hire as establishing “the foundation of a new era”.

• Dan Friedkin launched Pursuit Sports on 16 July 2025 to oversee AS Roma, Everton and Cannes. Chief executive Dave Beeston stated that the objective is “operational excellence” and explicitly not a hierarchy in which smaller clubs feed players to larger ones. Ryan Friedkin provides the operational link across the clubs.

The Pursuit Sports framing is a centralised back-office and data model with distinct front offices, not a player-pipeline model. Nothing in the summer 2026 window contradicts it, there is no evidence of intragroup player movement between Roma, Everton and Cannes. That restraint is also regulatorily convenient: UEFA multi-club ownership rules constrain dealings between clubs in the same competition, and any related-party transfer must be executed at fair market value and would attract scrutiny under the associated party transaction regime.

What the owners are actually doing

The model is stabilisation and appreciation, not acquisition

Every material decision taken by The Friedkin Group since December 2024 has reduced the cost of running Everton Football Club or increased the value of its assets, and almost none has increased its competitive capacity in the short term. 

The Moshiri loan converted to equity; the Rights and Media Funding facility settled; the 777 exposure resolved; £350m refinanced at institutional pricing; the wage bill down 3%; amortisation down 21%; the stadium delivered and monetised; the naming rights, kit and shirt arrangements repriced upward; the squad age profile reset; net spend held at the bottom of the division. 

This is the profile of an owner building an asset, not an owner chasing a trophy.

Given where the club was in December 2024, servicing double-digit-coupon specialist debt, carrying two points deductions, mid-construction on an £800m stadium, and dependent on player sales for liquidity, it is (from a shareholder perspective) the only responsible sequence. 

But it does set expectations. A club who defines success as the absence of instability, relegation and sanction is not, in 2026/27, a club that has been resourced to challenge.

The window is an SCR window, executed competently

Judged against the regime it was executed under, the incoming business is reasonably constructed. The loan conversions retire risk. The Championship and academy sourcing lowers unit cost. The age profile builds a saleable portfolio. The refusal to pay above valuation for Rowe, Doué, Muñoz or Spence, even at a position of acknowledged need,  demonstrates that the numerator is being defended, not merely observed.

Judged as a football window, it is much thinner. 

A defensive midfielder arrives injured; a midfielder is being played at right-back; the right-back the manager has sought publicly for over a year had not arrived at the time of writing; and the manager himself has said the squad needs more. The gap between the financial quality of the window and the sporting quality of the window is the price of the regime, and Everton are paying it openly.

The unresolved question is whether the owners will sell

The strategic direction will be settled not by what Everton bought but by what they were prepared to sell. 

Two disposals were available this summer: Armstrong at £35m, and Ndiaye at approximately £60m. Ownership reversed the first on grounds that were not financial. If it also refuses the second, the club enters 2026/27 above the Green Threshold, consuming multi-year allowance in the regime’s first year, having declined roughly £95m of available consideration in a single window, which would be a statement that supporter relations and sporting continuity now outrank ratio optimisation. 

If it accepts the second, the club enters the season with a ratio in the high 60s, full allowance intact, and the capacity to trade aggressively in January.