Bournemouth, rebuilt from the accounts: on the line, and everything is pledged

Six years of filed accounts and three charge registrations. Bournemouth's reconstructed squad cost ratio sits on the Premier League's green line this season, at about 85% with a wide band, not the 128% a high-side estimate gives; it is around seventeen points over UEFA's separate 70%. The filings also show a club that has assigned its League income and receivables to a security trustee, sells future instalments forward, and depends on its owner for going concern. They also correct a number this site published last week.

Bournemouth is the third club in this series, and the one this site has most to correct on. PSRwatch’s post-window review put the club’s squad cost ratio at 128%, “above red”. An earlier piece here put it at 91–116% on assumptions that the accounts, now read in full, don’t support. So this is both a rebuild in the same method as Fulham and Brentford, and a correction.

What the accounts say

AFC Bournemouth Ltd files full accounts to 30 June. The year to 30 June 2025:

• Revenue £181.7m: Premier League income £148.0m, sponsorship and advertising £18.1m, matchday £6.7m, hospitality £4.7m. Plus other operating income of £17.4m, of which £15.2m was loan fees received for players at other clubs.
• Wages and salaries £139.5m, social security £18.4m. Headcount: 271 playing staff and administration together, 116 academy, 536 matchday.
• Amortisation of player registrations £69.1m; profit on player sales £91.0m; profit for the year £14.9m after a £66.3m loss the year before.
• Registrations on the books: £398m cost, £222.1m net, after £104.3m of additions.
• Transfer payables £152.8m undiscounted (£92.0m due after a year); transfer receivables £109.8m (£76.4m after a year). Cash £47.2m.
• Bank loans £48.9m: a Goldman Sachs facility with £50m drawn, 7.65%, running to December 2029, and £15m more drawn since.

Two lines you don’t see in most accounts. Finance costs include £13.3m of “implied interest on trade payables with extended payment terms”: the accounting cost of paying transfer fees on instalments, stated as a number. And they include “interest costs incurred on the forward funding of certain future transfer receivables”: the club has sold, or borrowed against, part of what other clubs owe it.

Rebuilding the ratio

Same method, four inputs:

• Wages. The accounts give total employee cost and a headcount split that doesn’t separate players from administrators, so the squad’s share is an Orange Ledger estimate on a filed base. At 73–76% of wages and salaries plus employer charges: £116–120m for FY25, rolled forward through a £116m summer of 2025 and a £67m summer of 2026, with the departures of Huijsen, Kerkez and Zabarnyi and a European squad to pay: about £131m for 2026/27, band £121–141m. One caution on direction: Crystal Palace files its player wage costs as a KPI, and there they are about 87% of wages and salaries, not 75%; if Bournemouth’s share were similar, relevant wages would be roughly £20m higher and the ratio about eight points higher than shown. Palace’s definition isn’t stated, so the figure stays on the Maguire share with the band read as skewed upward.
• Amortisation. £69.1m in FY25 on a £222m book; about £80m for FY26; about £86m for 2026/27 after two heavy windows. The highest of the three clubs so far.
• Agents. The FA’s cash figure for Bournemouth isn’t yet pulled; an expensed portion of about £8m is assumed, band £6–11m.
• Revenue. £181.7m rolled to about £219m: a sixth-place finish feeding this season’s distributions, a first Europa League campaign worth perhaps £15–30m, and a smaller loan-fee line. Band £205–232m.

Then profit on player sales, which is where the correction lives.

The correction

The earlier piece assumed the summer of 2025 (Huijsen, Kerkez, Zabarnyi, Ouattara and others) produced roughly £100m of profit for the year to June 2026. The accounts’ post-balance-sheet note says something else: registrations disposed of after 30 June 2025 for £102.1m of initial consideration, producing £39.6m of accounting profit, to the date of the report.

A player-by-player ledger from reported fees shows why the two numbers differ. On headline fees and straight-line book values, those sales look like about £198m of consideration and £144m of profit. The most plausible reconciliation is that Huijsen, whose release clause was triggered in May 2025, and possibly Kerkez were recognised in FY25, which fits FY25’s filed £91.0m (Solanke plus Huijsen); the post-year-end note then covers Zabarnyi, Ouattara and the smaller sales, with profit stated after contingent consideration, which the club recognises “only when its receipt is virtually certain”, and after sell-ons and costs. Even so, £39.6m is low against the ledger, so either the guaranteed portions of the headline fees are well below what was reported or the book values are higher than a straight-line estimate gives. The filed figures govern. The earlier assumption counted a sale in the wrong year and used headline fees, and it is withdrawn.

The result:

Band on the central figure: 75–98%. Confidence Medium–Low, because the FY26 profit is filed only to the report date, the Europa League revenue is an estimate, and the wage share is an estimate. What survives the band: Bournemouth sits at or around the green line if profit is averaged, well over it if it isn’t, and its cost base before player trading exceeds its revenue on every reading. The 2026 summer (£67m in, £10m out) added cost and almost no profit.

The second test

Bournemouth are in the Europa League, so UEFA’s separate 70% cap applies, on the calendar year, with UEFA’s own numerator and a 36-month transfer result prorated to twelve. The reconstruction, so that the figure can be reproduced:

Around seventeen points over the 70% line on the central figure, with a band that straddles the twenty-point mark. That boundary matters more than the number:

• A first breach of more than 10 and up to 20 points over the limit falls in the 25–50% band of UEFA’s financial measure, a percentage of the excess withheld from prize money.
• More than 20 points over moves into the 50–75% band and is a “significant breach” on magnitude alone, which exposes the club to additional disciplinary measures under the CFCB’s rules.
• With a range of 80–98%, this reconstruction cannot say which side of that boundary the club falls; on the central figure it is inside it.

The decision comes in mid-2027. The final transfer window capable of changing the 2026 transfer-result component has closed; operating revenue and relevant squad costs continue to run to 31 December. So there is no January window available to manufacture additional disposal profit for the 2026 figure, though the revenue and cost lines can still move. On the League’s test Bournemouth is on the line; on UEFA’s it is well over it.

Six seasons on one method

Orange Ledger reconstructed ratios, the same formula every season, not observed ones.

Two things the series says:

• Bournemouth’s underlying costs have climbed every Premier League season: all-staff wages went from 71% of revenue in 2023 to 85% in 2024 and 87% in 2025, and the reconstructed ratio reached about 104% in FY24 before the 2025 sales brought it back. 2023’s comfortable 75% was flattered by the Championship-year sales still sitting in the average.
• The pattern is a large disposal every second year: £55.8m in FY21, £91.0m in FY25. This season sits on the line because of 2025’s £91m. When FY25 drops out of the three-year window in 2027/28, the ratio rises again unless there’s another.

What the club has pledged

The accounts say the Goldman Sachs facility is “secured against the assets of the company”. Companies House has the debenture, registered in December 2024 with Mount Street Mortgage Servicing as security trustee, and it is specific:

• The club assigns absolutely all Premier League media revenue, defined to include central funds and parachute payments; all Football League media revenue; and “all other Receivables”.
• A notice to the Premier League directs every such payment into a controlled Media Revenue Account; a Debt Service Reserve Account sits alongside.
• Anything not effectively assigned is caught by a fixed charge.
• In February 2026 a second charge added the leasehold of the stadium.

“All other Receivables”, on the deed’s own definitions, reaches the money other clubs owe Bournemouth for players: £110m at June 2025, £76m of it due after a year. The accounts add the forward funding of some of those receivables. So the security package covers the League’s payments to the club, its parachute payments if relegated, its ground, and, on its face, its transfer receivables; and part of the receivables have already been sold forward.

Above it sits the owner. Black Knight Football Club UK lent £77.5m in FY25, all of it converted to equity or repaid by the year-end; £124.3m had been converted the year before; £54.9m more arrived after the year-end. The going-concern statement says the club “remains dependent on financial support from its shareholder”, with a twelve-month commitment. That is the third owner pattern in three clubs: Fulham converts every year, Brentford has brought in partners and is repaying, Bournemouth converts and keeps lending.

What this doesn’t say

• That Bournemouth’s ratio is 85%. The band is wide, the FY26 profit is provisional, and the League’s inputs aren’t public.
• That the club is in difficulty. It has a bank facility to 2029, cash of £47m at the year-end, an owner who keeps converting, and a squad it has sold from profitably twice in five years.

What it does say: on a consistent method the accounts support a ratio around the League’s green line, not above its red one; the club’s cost base exceeds its revenue before trading; it is well over UEFA’s separate line for 2026 with no transfer window left to change the transfer component; and it has pledged its League income, its ground and, on the deed’s wording, its transfer receivables to a security trustee for an investment bank. Put the pieces together (£153m of transfer payables, £110m of receivables, £47m of cash, £50m-plus of bank debt, receivables forward-funded, League distributions assigned, owner support required, and £13.3m of implied interest on deferred transfer payments) and none of them says distress. Together they say Bournemouth is already actively financing the timing mismatch between what it pays for players and what it is paid for them. For any club agreeing to be paid by Bournemouth in instalments, that is the thing to read first.

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