01 · THE MONEY
£6.8bn in. £4.4bn out.
Matchday passed £1bn for the first time. Wages took £4.4bn of the £6.8bn.
Source · Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance 2026 · 8 July 2026
02 · WHAT A CAP SOUNDS LIKE
One rule, twenty different ceilings
Nearly two thirds of what the clubs earned from football went out as wages. So the new rule caps that spending as a share of what each club earns.
You think
A spending cap is one line drawn above every club. Nobody may cross it.
Actually
The line is drawn at 85% of each club's own revenue plus what it makes selling players, so there are twenty lines.
Same percentage, different revenue: Manchester City earned £694m, Bournemouth £182m.
85% of 2024/25 revenue is about £590m at Manchester City and about £155m at Bournemouth. Both real ceilings are higher, because player-sale profit adds to the base.
Source · Premier League rules and The Swiss Ramble club accounts, 2024/25
03 · THE VOCABULARY
Four terms, plainly
Think of two families told to spend at most 85% of what they earn. Same rule, different amounts.
Football revenue. Money a club earns from playing: broadcast, matchday and commercial income. Not owner money, not player sales.
Squad Cost Ratio. Squad spending (wages, agents' fees, transfer fees) as a share of revenue plus player-sale profit. Earn £100 that way, and £85 is your ceiling.
Amortisation. A transfer fee counted a slice at a time over the contract, not all at once.
PSR. The old rule: a club could lose at most £105m over three seasons, whatever its size.
Source · Premier League and The Swiss Ramble
04 · WHERE IT COMES FROM
Bournemouth's money is the shared money
The ceiling depends on revenue, so where does it come from? Three streams, and the league shares only one.
Broadcast money, shared nearly equally by the league, is 81.5% of Bournemouth's income. It is 40.2% of Manchester City's, whose biggest stream is commercial at 49.0%. Shares are of the three named streams.
05 · WHAT WAGES TAKE
Wages against revenue, seven clubs
So the smallest earner leans hardest on shared money. Now look at what wages alone take from each club.
Bournemouth spent 86.8% of revenue on wages. The league average was 65%. Of the seven, Manchester United spent the smallest share.
Source · The Swiss Ramble and Deloitte · 2024/25
06 · THE DENOMINATOR
The line falls as revenue rises
Wages are only part of a squad's cost, so add the transfer fees, spread over the contracts. Aston Villa already breaks UEFA's tighter 70% version, on The Swiss Ramble's reading. On the same reading, Bournemouth's squad cost more than it earned.
Each club's wages plus player amortisation, as a share of its 2024/25 revenue, from the accounts. The rule's own measure also counts agents' fees and player-sale profit, so every official figure sits lower. The fitted line slopes down, so clubs that earn more spend a smaller share.
07 · WHERE THE LOSSES CAME FROM
Wages barely moved. Losses grew sevenfold.
Those dots are already over the line, but the losses came from elsewhere. Aston Villa's £17m profit came from selling its women's team and property rights for £114m, not from football.
Pre-tax losses, 2024/25: £948m. Up from £135m the season before
Wages as a share of revenue: 65%. It was 64% the season before
Clubs in operating profit: 8. Thirteen managed it the year before
Total revenue: £6.8bn. A record, and up 8%
Wages went from 64% to 65% while losses rose sevenfold. The accountants Deloitte put much of the £812m rise down to decisions about selling players and club assets.
Source · Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance 2026 and The Swiss Ramble
08 · HOW IT PASSED
The clubs voted this in themselves
Wages were not the problem, yet the new rule targets wages plus transfer fees. Here is how it arrived.
- 2024
Clubs agree to explore a hard cap. A vote to investigate, not to adopt.
- 21 Nov 2025
Squad Cost Ratio approved. The hard cap fails. Shareholders backed one rule and not the other. The cap that would have narrowed the gap failed here.
- 8 Jul 2026
Deloitte counts £948m of losses. The season these rules answer.
- 2026/27
The rule binds. PSR is gone. Fines first payable from 2027/28.
A rule change needs fourteen of the twenty clubs, and this one got them.
09 · AN AMOUNT, NOT A SHARE
The IPL draws one line for ten
Enough clubs chose a share of themselves. A cap can be an amount instead, and you have seen that at a cricket auction.
The IPL cap is one amount for all ten. At the 2026 auction one franchise had ₹2.75 crore left and another ₹64.3 crore.
Source · ESPNcricinfo, IPL 2026 auction