About
Independent estimates, built from the accounts and tested in public.
From this season the Premier League limits what a club may spend on its squad, but it does not publish the figure it tests. The Orange Ledger rebuilds that figure for every club from its own filed accounts, shows how confident each estimate is, and scores every forecast against the evidence as it arrives.
What it does
Who it is for
Supporters who want to know how much room their club has, and the people whose decisions depend on it:
- Clubs and owners, for an outside view of their own position and their rivals', built the way an analyst on the other side of a negotiation would build it.
- Agents and intermediaries, for whether a buying club can afford a deal, when it will need to sell, and who holds the leverage.
- Sponsors, lenders and investors, for the pressures behind a club's figures before they commit money to it.
- Law firms, for independent, sourced figures on a club's finances and on how the rules apply to them, for contract work, transfer disputes and litigation, where figures need a documented source, a public method and a dated record of every change.
- Journalists, researchers and regulators, for figures that can be cited with their version and date, and checked against a public method.
For work beyond what is published, get in touch.
How the numbers are made
Everything is built from public material: filed accounts at Companies House, the Premier League Handbook and UEFA's regulations, and reported transfer fees and contract terms. Five principles run through all of it:
- Every figure is labelled as filed, reported, calculated or estimated.
- Every estimate carries a range. Each uncertain input, above all the players' wage bill, is given a range rather than a single number, and a simulation draws 20,000 combinations of them. The published range is the spread of those draws between the assumed bounds, from the 10th to the 90th percentile. It is an assumption range, not a confidence interval, and a separate stress case sets every input at its unfavourable end at once.
- Where a rule is unsettled, both readings are shown, with the size of the difference. The disposal basis is an example.
- Corrections go at the top of the piece, dated, saying what was wrong and what changed. The changelog records every change to the model and the wage roll-forward note records its biggest failure in full.
- Forecasts are never rewritten. Each is frozen when published and scored later on the track record, and since 30 September 2026 the engine's state behind every published figure has been kept under version control.
The range measures uncertainty in the inputs, not whether the model itself is wrong. That is why errors are corrected in the open rather than absorbed into a wider range. None of it is an official calculation and none of it is advice. Clubs are described in terms of observable pressures and incentives, never in terms of solvency.
Why this matters now
For more than a decade clubs were judged by the Profit and Sustainability Rules, which allowed losses of up to £105m over three years. Some clubs managed that limit by selling assets such as women's teams, hotels and stadiums to companies under the same ownership, booking the profit in the year it counted. On 29 September 2026 the Premier League published the independent commission's decision in its case against Manchester City, which found every charge proven except one. Among its findings: owner money had been disguised as sponsorship income, so that it counted under the rules. No sanction has been set, and City say they will appeal.
From 2026/27 those rules are replaced by the Squad Cost Ratio, which compares a club's spending on its squad with the football revenue it earns, and by the Sustainability and Systemic Resilience rules, which test the balance sheet. The ratio is tested internally on 1 March each season and may never be published. It also depends on figures clubs do not disclose, above all what their players are paid. So from the outside, the first sign that a club is near its limit may be a player sold for an unusually large profit or, at the extreme, a points deduction. Every ratio on this site is therefore a reconstruction and a forecast, which is why each one is published with its method and tested against what follows.
Who is behind it
I'm Arthur van de Laak, a Dutch entrepreneur, and for many years the thing I have built most often is financial models. For e-commerce platforms I built models that predicted which items would sell best and the net profit on each. Later I built automated trading systems for the forex market and leased them out. That is where the ranges come from: a trading system never forecasts a single price, only a range between assumed bounds. The ranges here are the same idea: assumption ranges, not confidence intervals. Reconstructing a club's squad cost ratio is the same work pointed at a different industry: take what is published, build the model, check it against every figure that can be verified, and test it against what happens next.
The Orange Ledger is published by 2035 Agency LLP, the venture studio I run. It has no affiliation with any club, agency, league or betting company.
A declared bias
I became a PSV Eindhoven supporter at twelve and later studied business engineering in Eindhoven, with a season ticket at the Philips Stadion; in 1988 PSV won the European Cup, beating Benfica on penalties in Stuttgart to complete a treble. In 1998 I moved to London, where Arsenal had Dennis Bergkamp and Marc Overmars, and Arsenal became the club I married, so to speak, with PSV still my first love. As a Gunner I sat through the whole 22-year wait for another league title, from the Invincibles of 2003/04 to the champions of 2025/26, watching a financially careful club sell its best players while paying down the debt on the Emirates Stadium, and watching Manchester City and Chelsea grow on their owners' money. That is a bias. The safeguard is not pretending otherwise: it is publishing the method, the assumptions and the corrections, so that every figure can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Built on the work of others
Paul Quinn (The Esk), Swiss Ramble, Kieran Maguire (The Price of Football), Chris Weatherspoon (The Athletic), and the analysts who reconstruct their own clubs' accounts on X. Where a figure comes from one of them, it is credited.
Contact
For professional enquiries, use the contact form. Corrections are welcome by the same route or on X at @theorangeledger; they are the point.