1881

Another interesting/depressing article is the one on club branding https://theesk.org/2026/05/23/the-analysis-series-premier-league-club-brand-value-analysis/

As I have mentioned elsewhere theesk.org is an excellent site if you have in interest in the finances of the game. There are many excellent articles within his analysis series and his latest article on Newcastle can be found here: https://theesk.org/2026/04/14/the-analysis-series-analysis-of-newcastle-united-limited-financial-results-2024-2025/

It’ll never happen but there really should be a rule about how many professional players a club can have on it’s roster and it should take into account “partner” clubs.

I emailed Paul Quinn this morning who is the man behind the excellent theesk.org and he confirmed that (a third of) transfer profits from 2024/25 and 2025/26 will be included for SCR purposes in 2026/27. His latest article on SCR is here: https://theesk.org/2026/05/16/the-analysis-series-the-new-and-existing-squad-cost-ratio-and-sustainability-and-systemic-resilience-rules/ he did a couple of other articles before https://theesk.org/2026/05/16/the-analysis-series-the-new-and-existing-squad-cost-ratio-and-sustainability-and-systemic-resilience-rules/ https://theesk.org/2026/05/17/the-analysis-series-the-new-and-existing-squad-cost-ratio-and-sustainability-and-systemic-resilience-rules-part-ii/

That makes sense but I assume clubs will still lose out because you lose the three-year flexibility you had over when you spent the money you accumulated from sales. But I guess the main issue is that under PSR an owner could potentially pump in £35m a year to aid transfers/wages but they can no longer do this under SCR as it all has to come from income now?

A question for those who understand these things better than me but possibly no-one knows for sure. Under the new SCR rules the checks are done on a seasonal basis therefore any money we made from the Champions League is irrelevant in terms of next season”s available expenditure. In reality we probably needed it to satisfy this year’s PSR rules. The rules regarding player sales are also changing so that the profit is split over the year the sale was made and the following two seasons. The question is during 2026/27 will we get a third of the profits we made from sales profits during 2025/26 and 2024/25. In other words is there some form of transition? Which leads to the Alexander Gordon sale which I believe is going through officially in June. Will this count as taking place in 2026/27 and under the new rules? Of course we may have rushed the sale through to satisfy this year’s PSR rules if we overestimated how much income we would generate. It would also appear that the new way of treating profits from sales is going to have a major negative impact on clubs which rely heavily on income from player sales (ie all but Big 6) as when they sell one of their best players they can only reinvest a third of that money in new players in that season. Just adds to the whole cartel con.

With the new rules ensuring that profits made on player sales are split over three years it is going to be very important what they do about transfers that occurred prior to the new rules being introduced. You would have thought that the “fairest” way of doing this would be to take them into account so in the 2026/27 year a third of any profits from sales in 2024/25 and 2025/26 should contribute. It would certainly help to have a third of the Isak profit! Unfortunately fairness does not usually come into the rules.

Take your point, but we were in the Champions League and therefore were looking for a different level of player, probably mistakenly as it happens.

Totally agree, sportsmanship has given way to cheating and identifying every single way a team can gain advantage, particularly when it comes to trying to win free-kicks around the area and penalties. It is easy to blame the referees but it is the managers who should be being called out as it will be them who are instructing players what to do. Not sure how you stop it as cheating has become endemic.

As far as I understand it, money made from sales is split over three years and money spent on purchases is (as before) split over the length of the contract up to a maximum of five years.

Unfortunately, it means we will continue to lose our best players and, as the prices are all pushed up by the Sky 6, then the prices of the average players (see Wissa and Elanga) are pushed up too so it is actually lose-lose for us.

Arteta: "I watched all the penalties in the Champions League this season during the last 72 hours to understand what is a penalty and what's not, and that can easily be a penalty”. ie - looked at the various ways we could “engineer” a penalty

If they are correct I agree, but if you look at the Sky Sports reports they are quite clear that they believe this is not the case.

If Sky are correct and the £69.3m quoted is inclusive of the potential £10m add-ons I would say it is only an ok fee for him even though I agree he was very inconsistent for us and I am not sorry to see him go.

I know but the details being put out now are vague and Sky Sports are the only ones I have seen making this clear distinction. Hopefully they are wrong as it starts to look like not such a great fee!

If this is correct and I am reading it correctly the deal is perhaps not as good as we thought.

Don’t know if someone had already mentioned it but Keith Downie has now said a few times that their understanding is that the £69.3m fee includes the add ons which have been quoted as being £10m.

good question! However I also assume that this three year rule would need to be backdated although I have not seen that confirmed anywhere. If it is the case then we should also have available money from transfers from the previous two years including a third of the Isak sale profit?

One important difference with SCR is how sales are treated. Previously (under the current rules) if you made a sale then the “profit” made was all included in the year that the sale was made. Therefore if we made a £48 profit on Gordon that would have all counted towards the current year. Under SCR the profit from sales is split over three years. Therefore if we made a £48 profit on Gordon that would be counted as £16m towards each of 2026/27, 2027/28 and 2028/29. Therefore much less available this year and as transfer fee inflation continues to rise significantly the money carried forward becomes worth less in effect

In the latest video from “the Football Boardroom” the Brighton CEO states the main factor in how they operate successfully in the transfer market is because they always seek to sign a (star) player’s replacement before they sell them. With the simple reasoning that if other clubs know you have just had a cash windfall then they will push-up their price if you come after one of their players. Can’t help feeling that until we also get ahead of the game in this way we are going to struggle to get value for money in our purchases.

Wonder if the alleged fall-out between Bruno and Gord as well as Bruno’s spat with Willock are related to the Isak factor as I imagine Bruno would have been one of the players who was really angry with Isak whilst the other two were obviously big buddies with him.

Was at both the Charlton and QPR capitulations, so no wonder I always expect the worst. Remember at half-time in the QPR game we were singing All we want for Christmas is a plastic pitch”.

100% agree but if players are already low on confidence the crowd at the game can make them play worse.

We’ve had worse before and even had the players being jeered onto the pitch, but as that nice, friendly manager Bill McGarry one said “ a cheer is always better than a jeer”. However, he was talking about Graham Oates, therefore it was bollocks.

How do you know that players and/or their families do not read the forum? Anyway I am really referring to match-going fans. I don’t know how many on here do.