3rd September 2026 – Paul Quinn CWTE Limited

Inter-club transfer debt in English football before and after the summer 2026 transfer window

Summary

The summer 2026 transfer window closed on 1 September with Premier League clubs having committed a record £3.48 billion in gross transfer fees, against £2.17 billion recouped from sales, for a net outlay of £1.30 billion. The reporting has been almost exclusively about the gross number as a measure of spending power. That is the wrong frame. The gross number is a measure of obligation creation, and obligations in this market are overwhelmingly settled over three to five years rather than on completion.

This report establishes the inter-club transfer debt position immediately before the window opened, models the position at its close, and identifies the specific exposures and transmission channels that make that debt a systemic rather than a merely commercial concern. It builds directly on my analysis published  in July 2025, which established that Premier League clubs then collectively owed over £3 billion in future installments, and on other private studies this year.

Principal findings

• The pre-window baseline is materially worse than last reported. At the last audited date (30 June 2025), the twenty Premier League clubs carried £3.50 billion of gross transfer payables against £1.25 billion of transfer receivables;  a net transfer debt of £2.20–2.25 billion. Over the decade to 2024/25, aggregate net transfer debt rose by £2.02 billion, from a negligible £165 million to £2,187 million. Rolling forward through the 2025/26 season, gross payables are estimated to have reached approximately £4.7 billion by 14 June 2026, with net transfer debt at approximately £2.85 billion.
• The window added an estimated £2.2 billion of new gross obligations. On a central assumption that 35 per cent of agreed fees are settled on or shortly after completion, the £3.48 billion of incoming commitments creates approximately £2.26 billion of new deferred payables, against approximately £1.41 billion of new deferred receivables arising from the £2.17 billion of sales. Gross payables are estimated to reach approximately £5.5 billion, receivables £2.2 billion, and net transfer debt £3.3 billion by the 2026/27 reporting date.
• Gross and net exposure have decoupled. Net transfer debt is estimated to rise by approximately £450 million across 2026/27;  an increase of similar order to the prior year, because record purchases were matched by record sales. Gross payables, by contrast, are estimated to rise by around £800 million and gross bilateral exposure across both sides of the ledger by materially more. Contagion does not net. A club that is simultaneously owed £200 million and owes £250 million does not face a £50 million problem if its debtor fails; it faces a £250 million obligation it can no longer fund.
• Near-term settlement obligations dwarf operating cash generation. Net transfer installments of £1,137 million fell due across the Premier League in 2025/26 against aggregate operating cash flow of £169–173 million in 2024/25;  a coverage ratio of approximately 0.15 times. Scaling the stock forward, net installments falling due in the twelve months from the close of this window are estimated at £1.6–1.8 billion. Aggregate adjusted EBITDA in 2024/25 was £520–573 million. The division cannot service its transfer book from operations; it services it from new sales, new owner equity and new borrowing.
• Approximately two-fifths of the window’s spending was intra-league. Reported figures indicate that close to 40 per cent of Premier League clubs’ gross transfer spending went on deals between clubs within the division,  approximately £1.4 billion of obligations created inside a closed twenty-member network, settled bilaterally and gross, when a central counterparty could net a substantial proportion of it away. This is the single most direct quantification yet available of the working capital destroyed by the absence of a clearing mechanism.
• The loss-allocation precedent is now live, not theoretical. Sheffield Wednesday entered administration in October 2025, incurred an eighteen-point aggregate deduction, and its unsecured creditors were settled at 25 pence in the pound on the acquisition of the business in May 2026, with football creditors satisfied in full under the EFL Board Insolvency Policy. The football creditor rule performed exactly as designed: it determined who bore the loss. It did nothing to prevent the loss arising.

Recommendations in summary

1. Establish a mandatory Inter-Club Obligations Register covering all licensed clubs, with quarterly gross and net position returns and a published aggregate dashboard.
2. Impose a standardised disclosure requirement on the maturity profile of transfer payables and receivables, distinguishing guaranteed from contingent consideration.
3. Require clubs to register all assignments, factorings and discountings of transfer receivables, with counterparty identity, discount rate and recourse basis.
4. Introduce a deferred-consideration concentration test within the Sustainability and Systemic Resilience framework, calibrated to gross rather than net exposure.
5. Conduct an annual system-wide stress test modelling the simultaneous default of the two largest net debtors and the three most leveraged promoted clubs.

This article covers the twenty clubs comprising the Premier League for the 2026/27 season, with supporting analysis of the EFL Championship and of comparator positions in the other four of Europe’s five major leagues. The audited baseline is the 2024/25 financial year, for which all twenty clubs in that season had published accounts by April 2026. The window under examination ran from 15 June to 1 September 2026 for Premier League and EFL clubs.

Definitions

Sources and their limits

Audited figures are drawn from Companies House filings and from aggregations of those filings published by Matchday Finance (April 2026) and by Greg Cordell (May 2026), both of which reconcile to the underlying accounts. Window aggregates are drawn from Sky Sports’ transfer database as at 2 September 2026 and from Deloitte’s Sports Business Group where the two are reconcilable. Chelsea group figures for July 2026 are my own estimates, published on 23 July 2026.

The estimation problem

There is no register of inter-club obligations. No regulator publishes one; no club is required to disclose one in a standard form; and the only visibility available to any analyst is the annual filing, which arrives between six and eleven months after the balance sheet date and does not distinguish guaranteed from contingent consideration on a consistent basis. Everything in this report describing the position after 30 June 2025 is therefore modelled. The model is transparent, the assumptions are stated, and the sensitivities are given. It is not a substitute for disclosure, and the fact that a report of this kind must be constructed by inference is itself the principal finding.

The position before the window opened

The audited baseline at 30 June 2025

The 2024/25 accounts, complete across all twenty clubs by April 2026, establish the last hard datum. On the aggregate Premier League balance sheet, total assets of £16.0 billion were offset by total liabilities of £11.4 billion. Within those liabilities, transfer-related payables of £3.5 billion exceeded both third-party loans (£3.0 billion) and related-party loans (£1.4 billion). Transfer receivables of £1.25 billion sat on the asset side, alongside player registrations at a net book value of £5.9 billion.

Sources: Matchday Finance aggregation of twenty clubs’ filed accounts (April 2026); Greg Cordell, Premier League Financial Trends (May 2026). Net transfer debt for 2024/25 is £2.20bn on the Matchday Finance basis and £2.187bn on the Cordell basis; the small divergence reflects treatment of intra-group balances. “n/d” indicates not separately disclosed on a comparable basis.

The decade trajectory

Net transfer debt across the division rose by £2,022 million over the ten years to 2024/25, from a starting point of approximately £165 million. Slightly more than half of that increase, £1,021 million, occurred in a single year, between the close of 2021/22 and the close of 2022/23, coinciding with the spike in aggregate net player investment associated with the change of control at Chelsea and the acceleration of extended-tenor contracts across the division.

The more telling metric is coverage. Gross transfer payables at 30 June 2025 stood at approximately 125 per cent of average annual player acquisitions over the preceding three years. Four years earlier the equivalent ratio was approximately 75 per cent. Clubs are not merely spending more; they are deferring a progressively larger proportion of what they spend, for progressively longer. Payment terms have become a financing instrument.

Cash-flow adequacy

The 2024/25 accounts show aggregate operating cash flow across the twenty clubs of £169–173 million,  approximately 2.5 per cent of revenue and the lowest figure of the decade including the pandemic years. Adjusted EBITDA was £520–573 million on revenue of £6,809 million, an 8.4 per cent margin against margins consistently above 20 per cent in the 2016–2019 period. Against that, net transfer installments of £1,137 million fell due for settlement during 2025/26.

The only line that covers the settlement obligation is owner funding. That is the definition of a market dependent on discretionary external capital rather than on its own cash generation.

Net interest costs rose by £39 million to £294 million in 2024/25, attributed principally to higher notional interest on transfer-related liabilities. Deferred consideration is not free credit; it is priced, and the price is now a material and growing line in the division’s profit and loss account.

Roll-forward to June 2026

Between the audited balance sheet date and the opening of the summer 2026 window, clubs transacted through the summer 2025 window (£3.19 billion gross on the Sky basis; £3.0 billion on the Deloitte basis, with net spend of £1.2 billion) and the January 2026 window, which did not exceed the £423.5 million recorded in January 2025 and is modelled here at £350 million. Aggregate acquisitions by cost across the 2025/26 season are estimated at approximately £4.0 billion, against sales of approximately £2.0 billion.

Applying the observed historical relationship,  the increment to net transfer debt has run at 26 to 30 per cent of net player spend by cost in recent years,  produces an increase in net transfer debt of approximately £600 million across 2025/26. Holding the payables-to-acquisitions coverage ratio approximately constant produces the following estimated position at the opening of the window.

Estimated figures for 14 June 2026 are modelled by the author from the audited 2024/25 base plus 2025/26 window activity. They are not audited and should be treated as indicative within a ±10 per cent band.

The summer 2026 window

Headline aggregates

Premier League clubs committed £3.48 billion in gross transfer fees, exceeding the previous record of £3.19 billion set in summer 2025 and representing almost three times the £1.19 billion spent a decade earlier in 2016/17. Clubs recouped £2.17 billion from sales, producing a net outlay of £1.30 billion. Twenty players moved to Premier League clubs for fees of £50 million or more.

Source: Sky Sports transfer data, updated 2 September 2026. Figures include potential add-ons and exclude undisclosed fees (except Aston Villa). Summer 2025 sales receipts derived. Championship clubs have generated a transfer surplus in every summer window since 2016/17.

Concentration at club level

Four clubs accounted for approximately 40 per cent of the division’s gross outlay. Manchester City spent £440.3 million, Chelsea £342.4 million, Tottenham Hotspur £334.0 million and Newcastle United £275.2 million. On a net basis the ranking inverts substantially: Liverpool led at £219.4 million, followed by Ipswich Town at £190.7 million, Tottenham at £176.0 million and Arsenal at £136.6 million, while Chelsea closed the window £67.3 million in surplus having generated £409.7 million from sales.

* Manchester City net spend derived from reported gross spend less reported sales including Savinho and other departures; treat as indicative. Estimated new payables apply the central 65 per cent deferral assumption to reported gross spend. “n/d” indicates not disclosed in the reconciled sources used.

The intra-league concentration

Reported analysis of the window indicates that close to 40 per cent of Premier League clubs’ gross transfer spending was on deals between clubs within the division. On the £3.48 billion headline, that implies approximately £1.4 billion of obligations created inside a single closed network of twenty counterparties, each of which is simultaneously a debtor and a creditor of several of the others.

The largest single deals of the window illustrate the point. Manchester City signed Enzo Fernández from Chelsea for £125 million, matching the British record, and Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116 million. Chelsea signed Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa for £117 million. Tottenham signed Sandro Tonali for £100 million. Manchester United rebuilt its midfield with Carlos Baleba (£70 million), Andrey Santos (£50 million) and Youri Tielemans (£35 million),  all three from Premier League clubs. Of the five largest incoming transfers, only Bradley Barcola’s £123 million move from Paris Saint-Germain to Liverpool crossed a border.

The Championship and the transmission belt

Championship clubs set their own record, spending £289.3 million against a previous high of £204.2 million, but recouped £461.4 million from sales for a divisional surplus of £172.1 million. The Championship has generated a transfer surplus in every summer window since 2016/17. It is structurally a net creditor of the Premier League.

That structural position is precisely what makes the second tier the primary transmission channel for any Premier League payment failure. In 2024/25 the Championship recorded a net inflow of £270 million from Premier League transfer activity,  the largest single destination of the top division’s net outflow. Clubs whose operating models depend on collecting installments from Premier League debtors are, by construction, running unsecured, unrated, uncollateralised credit exposure to counterparties they cannot monitor and could not enforce against without recourse to a tribunal.

European comparators

The Premier League outspent Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 combined by a factor of approximately 1.4. Serie A clubs spent £843.6 million, La Liga £603.5 million, the Bundesliga £507.6 million and Ligue 1 £490.6 million. On a net basis the divergence is starker still: Serie A recorded the highest net spend outside England at £266.4 million, while Ligue 1 clubs generated a collective transfer surplus of £467 million after recouping £957.6 million from sales.

The corollary is that continental clubs are increasingly net creditors of English ones. Ligue 1’s £467 million surplus, La Liga’s selling posture under Spain’s stricter control regime, and the Portuguese and Brazilian selling economies all hold sterling-denominated or euro-denominated receivables against Premier League balance sheets. English payment failure is not an English problem. It is a European one with a currency mismatch attached.

The position at the close of the window

Model architecture

The model rolls the estimated 14 June 2026 position forward by the window’s activity and by expected settlements. It rests on four assumptions, each of which is stated, tested and varied in the sensitivity analysis below.

Central case

Applying the central assumptions, the £3.48 billion of incoming commitments generates approximately £2.26 billion of new deferred payables. The £2.17 billion of sales generates approximately £1.41 billion of new deferred receivables. Netting settlements made during the window period and projecting to the next reporting date produces the following.

All figures other than the 30 June 2025 column are the author’s estimates. The 30 June 2027 column assumes a January 2027 window of £400 million gross and no exceptional deleveraging event. It does not model contingent consideration, which is excluded from all lines.

Sensitivities

The deferral rate is the dominant variable. A ten-point movement in the proportion of fees settled on completion moves estimated gross payables at the 2026/27 reporting date by approximately £350 million.

Note the asymmetry: net transfer debt moves within a £240 million band across the full sensitivity range, while gross bilateral exposure moves within a £1.2 billion band. The measure clubs and commentators report is the one least sensitive to the behaviour that creates the risk.

The principal finding: gross and net have decoupled

The distinction is not academic. In a default, netting is available only where it has been contracted for, and inter-club transfer agreements do not generally contain multilateral netting provisions. A club that owes £250 million and is owed £200 million has a net position of £50 million and a gross exposure of £450 million. If its own debtor fails, the £200 million receivable becomes an unsecured claim in an insolvency process while the £250 million payable remains due in full and on schedule. The net figure describes the club’s solvency in a world where everybody pays. The gross figure describes what happens when somebody does not.

Settlement pressure in the coming twelve months

The most immediate operational consequence is the settlement schedule. Net installments falling due across the division in the twelve months from the close of this window are estimated at £1.6 to £1.8 billion. Set against aggregate operating cash flow of £173 million and adjusted EBITDA of £520–573 million at the last audited date, the division must find between three and three and a half times its entire recurring cash profit simply to service obligations already incurred, before wages, before infrastructure, before any new signing.

Three funding sources exist. Further player sales, which create further receivables and shift the problem forward. Owner equity, which ran at a record £1.66 billion in 2024/25 and is discretionary. And external borrowing, which stood at £3.07 billion of third-party loans at the last audited date and is increasingly sourced from private credit rather than clearing banks. None of the three is a recurring operating cash flow. All three are subject to withdrawal.

Specific exposures and worked examples

The aggregate figures describe the scale of the problem. The following worked examples describe its structure,  how a single player registration generates a chain of linked, deferred, cross-collateralised obligations across four or more balance sheets, none of which is visible to any single participant in the chain.

Morgan Rogers: a four-node payment chain

Chelsea signed Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa for £117 million, a British record for an English player. The chain behind that single transaction runs as follows.

Sources: Sky Sports, Teesside Live and contemporaneous reporting, July 2026. Middlesbrough’s total receipts from Rogers are reported at approximately £35.8 million against an acquisition cost of £1.1 million.

Enzo Fernández: circularity in the same asset

Manchester City signed Enzo Fernández from Chelsea for £125 million on the final day of the window, matching the British record. Chelsea acquired the same player from Benfica in January 2023 for a then-record £106.8 million, in a transaction structured on deferred terms, and subsequently amortised the fee over an eight-year contract at approximately £13 million per year, the practice that prompted the five-year amortisation cap introduced from 2025/26.

The transaction therefore does two things simultaneously. It creates a new £125 million payable from Manchester City to Chelsea, deferred. And it monetises, at a modest premium to cost, an asset whose own acquisition obligations were themselves structured across multiple years. The £125 million receivable Chelsea now holds is a claim on Manchester City; the residual obligations attaching to the original acquisition are claims on Chelsea. The same registration sits behind obligations running in both directions across three balance sheets.

Elliot Anderson: regulatory forcing and value transfer

Manchester City signed Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116 million. Forest acquired him from Newcastle United in summer 2024 for approximately £35 million, in a sale Newcastle undertook under Profitability and Sustainability Rules pressure. The £81 million uplift accrued entirely to Forest,  a club identified in the 2024/25 accounts as one of only four in the division reporting a net liability position, driven specifically by high transfer-related and third-party debt.

Chelsea and the BlueCo group

Chelsea remains the division’s largest single concentration of transfer-related obligation. My analysis of the group’s filings, published in July 2026, estimated gross outstanding transfer payables at group level in the £450–550 million range against receivables of £150–250 million, a net payable position of approximately £250–350 million. What is not estimated is the cash flow: installment settlement ran at £306.6 million in the year to 30 June 2025, making it the group’s largest single cash demand after wages.

The club spent £305.5 million on new registrations in that year, funded by a £382.2 million increase in the interest-free intercompany creditor balance owed to BlueCo 22 Limited, which reached £2.02 billion. Chelsea FC Holdings carries no debt at football entity level; the ultimate parent, 22 Holdco, carries approximately £1.4 billion. Interest payable on external group loans reached £136.4 million in 2024/25, equal to 25.4 per cent of consolidated group turnover of £536.5 million. The club reported the largest pre-tax loss in English football history at £262 million and an operating loss of £308 million.

In this window Chelsea purchased £342.4 million and sold £409.7 million. The net surplus of £67.3 million will be presented as evidence of discipline. On the analysis above it represents a simultaneous increase in payables and receivables of approximately £488 million combined, and a further extension of a settlement obligation that already consumes more cash than any item on the group’s statement other than payroll.

Manchester United

At 30 June 2025 Manchester United carried the highest gross transfer payables in the division at £447 million and the highest net position at £244 million. By 31 December 2025 the club was reported to owe more than £500 million on transfers, against total debt of £1.29 billion, comprising long-term ownership-era borrowing of £488 million and short-term borrowing of £295.7 million. The trajectory is instructive: transfer payables stood at £34 million in 2013 and £136 million in 2021.

The club spent a further £155 million in this window on Baleba, Santos and Tielemans, all acquired from Premier League counterparties. Revenue for the six months to December 2025 fell from £341.8 million to £330.7 million in the absence of European football. A club servicing a £500 million transfer book from a declining revenue base, without European qualification, and with a stadium project requiring finance, is the clearest single-name illustration of the structural problem.

Manchester City

Manchester City’s position deserves attention precisely because the club has historically been the division’s most disciplined trader. Gross transfer debt rose 84 per cent in 2024/25 to £423.0 million, with the portion due within one year up 70 per cent to £169.7 million. Receivables fell 20.5 per cent to £95.5 million. Net transfer debt tripled from £109.8 million to £327.6 million, taking the club to within a short distance of Manchester United’s divisional record.

The club then spent a division-leading £440.3 million in this window. On the central deferral assumption that adds approximately £286 million of new payables to a book that had already tripled. The significance is not that Manchester City cannot pay, its ownership capacity is not in question, but that even the most conservatively managed balance sheet in the division has moved decisively toward deferred settlement. When the disciplined participant adopts the practice, it has ceased to be a distress signal and become the market convention.

Ipswich Town and the promoted cohort

Ipswich Town recorded the second-highest net spend in the division at £190.7 million and completed sixteen permanent signings. Coventry City broke its transfer record four times and Hull City twice; the three promoted clubs spent more than £400 million between them. Ipswich, Coventry and Hull will each face a Premier League central distribution cliff of approximately £100 million on relegation, against instalment obligations contracted on the assumption of top-flight revenue.

Sheffield Wednesday: the loss-allocation precedent

The theoretical argument about contagion became an English case study in the 2025/26 season. Sheffield Wednesday entered administration on 24 October 2025 following repeated late payment of wages, arrears with HMRC and multiple EFL registration embargoes. The club received an automatic twelve-point deduction, followed by a further six points for multiple breaches of EFL regulations relating to payment obligations. Administrators reported creditors owed in excess of £80 million, including a claim in excess of £60 million from the former owner.

On 1 May 2026 the business and certain assets were acquired by Wednesday 1867 Limited, and the purchaser agreed to settle certain unsecured creditor claims at 25 pence in the pound in full and final settlement, in accordance with the EFL Board Insolvency Policy. Football creditors,  including clubs owed transfer installments,  were satisfied in full under that policy. Non-football creditors took a 75 per cent haircut.

Transmission mechanics

Bilateral gross settlement

Every inter-club obligation in English football is settled bilaterally and gross. There is no mechanism to net, batch or offset multiple obligations,  not across counterparties, and not even between two clubs simultaneously holding payables and receivables against each other. Club A pays Club B in full on the due date and Club B pays Club A in full on its own due date, with both flows crossing the same banking system on the same terms, for no purpose beyond the absence of an infrastructure that every comparable market has possessed for decades.

The cascade

The transmission sequence is straightforward and has been rehearsed in every credit market that has failed.

1. A trigger event;  relegation, loss of European qualification, owner withdrawal, broadcaster default, or a regulatory sanction,  impairs a club’s liquidity.
2. The club fails to meet a transfer instalment. Under FIFA regulations, a payment thirty days late constitutes an overdue payable; the creditor must formally place the debtor in default and allow a further period before sanction proceedings can begin.
3. The creditor club, which had budgeted that receipt, faces its own shortfall. If it is a Championship or mid-table club operating on thin liquidity margins, that shortfall is not absorbable.
4. The creditor either fails to meet its own installments, propagating the shortfall, or accelerates receivables through factoring at punitive discount, transferring value out of football to a lender.
5. Where a sell-on chain exists, the failure propagates to third and fourth parties who had no relationship with the original defaulter and no visibility of its position.

The critical feature is timing. The gap between a missed instalment and an enforceable sanction runs to months. In a market where the largest single settlement dates cluster in July and August, a default in that period is not resolved before the next window’s commitments have already been made.

Cross-border enforcement

Where the counterparty is foreign, enforcement depends on the FIFA framework rather than on English insolvency law. Article 12bis of the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players governs overdue payables; the Football Tribunal, through the Players’ Status Committee, can impose warnings, fines and registration bans, with the Disciplinary Committee able to impose automatic six-point deductions and transfer bans for up to four consecutive registration periods for non-compliance with a decision.

Practitioner guidance published in July 2026 emphasises two protective clauses that receive less attention than they deserve. An acceleration clause allows the selling club to declare all future installments immediately due on default, permitting a single claim for the whole balance rather than a fresh claim for each missed payment. A default interest provision, calibrated within the limits FIFA now specifies under Article 23(5), preserves the time value of the receivable. Clubs that omit these clauses, and many do, hold materially weaker paper than they believe.

Receivables finance and the introduction of non-football creditors

The growth of transfer receivables financing is the most under-examined element of the structure. A club holding a £80 million receivable payable over four annual installments can assign that stream to a funder in exchange for immediate discounted cash. Two structures predominate: legal assignment, under which the buying club is notified and directed to pay the funder; and promissory notes, which are more common specifically in transfer receivables transactions.

The effect is to introduce into the football network a class of creditor that is external to it, holds enforceable security or assignment rights, is not bound by football’s loss-allocation conventions, and is invisible in aggregate because no register of these transactions exists. This is the precise mechanism by which the originate-to-distribute model removed underwriting discipline from mortgage credit: the originator retains the fee, the risk is distributed, and no participant holds the whole picture.

Relegation as the designated trigger

The Premier League central distribution is worth approximately £100 million to a mid-table club. Parachute payments taper it rather than replacing it, and cease entirely after the taper period. Instalment obligations, by contrast, do not taper. They are contracted in nominal terms and fall due on schedule regardless of division.

Relegation is therefore the designated trigger event for this market, and the cohort most exposed to it is, by construction, the cohort that has just spent most aggressively,  promoted clubs attempting to secure survival. The 2026/27 promoted group has committed materially more than any predecessor. West Ham United, in accounts filed in early 2026, disclosed that it was forecasting a liquidity shortfall in summer 2026 and modelled a “severe but plausible” relegation scenario. That disclosure is unusual only in its candour.

Regulatory gap analysis

What the incoming framework covers

From 2026/27 the Premier League replaces Profitability and Sustainability Rules with a Squad Cost Ratio capping squad spending at 85 per cent of football revenue, alongside a Sustainability and Systemic Resilience framework containing three balance sheet tests. The framework is a material advance on what preceded it. It is also, on the evidence of this window, calibrated to the wrong variable.

What is not measured at all

• There is no register of inter-club obligations, gross or net, at any level of the pyramid.
• There is no standardised disclosure of the maturity profile of transfer payables or receivables. Some clubs split within and beyond one year; others do not.
• Contingent consideration,  add-ons, appearance triggers, sell-on entitlements,  is disclosed inconsistently or not at all, despite being a material component of headline fees.
• There is no register of assignments, factorings or discountings of transfer receivables, and therefore no aggregate view of how much of the division’s receivable book has already been sold to third parties.
• No counterparty concentration limit exists. A club may accumulate unlimited exposure to a single debtor.
• No system-wide stress test of simultaneous default has been published by any authority.

Data limitations and caveats

This report is offered with the following limitations stated explicitly, and its conclusions should be read subject to them.

• The post-June 2025 position is modelled, not observed. No club has published accounts covering the 2025/26 season, and none will do so before the winter of 2026/27. Every figure in this report describing a position after 30 June 2025 is an estimate derived from stated assumptions.
• Window aggregates are reported on inconsistent bases. Sky Sports includes potential add-ons and excludes undisclosed fees; Deloitte excludes contingent consideration. The two diverged by approximately 6 per cent on summer 2025. All modelled outputs inherit that spread.
• Contingent consideration is excluded throughout. Add-ons, appearance and performance triggers, and sell-on entitlements are not modelled as liabilities because they are not consistently disclosed. Their exclusion means every payables figure in this report understates the true obligation, potentially materially.
• The deferral rate is inferred, not observed. No club discloses the proportion of an agreed fee settled on completion. The 65 per cent central assumption is derived from the aggregate gap between net player spend by cost and net cash outlay and is subject to significant dispersion between clubs.
• The intra-league proportion is a reported figure, not a filed one. The approximately 40 per cent figure for intra-Premier-League spending derives from contemporaneous window analysis rather than from audited data, and is used here as an order-of-magnitude indicator.
• Club-level estimates are indicative. Where individual club new-payable figures are given, they apply the divisional central deferral assumption to reported gross spend. Individual clubs will deviate substantially,  some settle a far higher proportion upfront, others a far lower one.
• Reporting entities differ. Club accounts are filed at varying levels of the group structure. Chelsea in particular reports across at least four entities with materially different pictures at each level, and the group position used here is the author’s estimate rather than a filed figure.