Brentford, rebuilt from the accounts: a cost base climbing every season, held by sales
Four years of filed accounts and nine charge registrations. Brentford's reconstructed squad cost ratio has risen every season since promotion, from 54% to 82%, and sits at about 80% this season only because the summer of 2025 was a record. The filings also show the mechanism: an overdraft against next August's television money every year since 2022, bank loans taken to pay transfer creditors, and then two and a half seasons of Premier League income and the stadium pledged to Macquarie.
Brentford is the second club in this series, chosen for the same reason as Fulham. PSRwatch’s post-window review put the club’s squad cost ratio for 2026/27 at 99%, on the edge of the Premier League’s levy zone, on a wage figure of £147m that its own page acknowledged was every employee rolled forward. The accounts, rebuilt on the rule’s own perimeter, give a different number. They also give something more useful than a number: Brentford’s filings since 2022 describe, in the club’s own words and in nine registered charges, how a well-run Premier League club finances a transfer market that runs on instalments.
What the accounts say
Brentford FC Ltd files consolidated accounts to 30 June. The FY25 set, signed 12 December 2025:
- Turnover £173.1m: central distributions £139.5m, commercial £19.4m, matchday £12.4m.
- Wages and salaries £113.0m, social security £16.4m. Wages to turnover, the club’s own KPI: 76%, up from 69%.
- Headcount: 190 player and training staff, 189 administration and commercial staff.
- Amortisation of player registrations £47.6m; gain on player sales £27.2m; loss for the year £17.7m; net assets £60.0m.
- Registrations on the books: £294m cost, £182.4m net, after £100m of additions in the year.
- Player creditors £97.4m (£42.3m due after a year); player debtors £36.5m. Cash £2.0m, overdraft £26.5m.
And one line most accounts don’t contain: “Bank loans relate specifically to loans issued in the year by two banks, Macquarie Bank and OLB Bank, in relation to the repayment of transfer fee payables.” £43.9m of it.
Rebuilding the ratio
Same method as Fulham, four inputs:
- Wages. The rule counts players and the head coach. The accounts give total employee cost and headcount by category; they don’t give payroll by category, so the squad’s share has to be estimated. At the 73–76% of wages and salaries that Kieran Maguire has given for Premier League clubs, plus employer charges, that’s £94–99m for FY25: an Orange Ledger estimate applied to a filed base, not a figure from the accounts. Brentford’s admin and commercial headcount (189) equals its player and training staff (190), which is consistent with a high share but doesn’t establish it. 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 Brentford’s share were similar, relevant wages would be roughly £16m higher and the ratio about seven 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. Rolled forward for the summer of 2025 (Mbeumo, Wissa, Nørgaard, Flekken and Roerslev out; Ouattara, Milambo, Kayode, Kelleher in) and 2026 (Diouf £40m, Sangaré £39m, Anthony £17m, Schuster £16.5m and Wheeler-Henry in; Onyeka and Pinnock out): about £100m for 2026/27, band £92–108m.
- Amortisation. £47.6m in FY25 on a £182m book; about £56m for FY26 after £85m of signings; about £70m for 2026/27 after another £112m. This is the line that has changed most.
- Agents. The FA’s table shows £12.7m paid to intermediaries in the year to February 2026. That’s a cash figure, not the expense the rule counts: fees on acquisitions are usually capitalised into the registration and reach the ratio through amortisation, which is already counted. So the FA number is a cross-check and an upper bound; about £9m enters the numerator here, band £6–13m.
- Revenue. Flat at about £174m: a 17,000-seat stadium, no Europe, one lever, league position.
Then profit on sales, which is where Brentford differs from Fulham. FY25’s £27.2m was ordinary. The summer of 2025 was not, and because it does so much work in the result it needs its own ledger:
| Player | Sale | Bought | Est. book value at sale | Est. profit after costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mbeumo (Man Utd) | £65m + add-ons | £5.8m, 2019 | ≈nil | ≈£62m |
| Wissa (Newcastle) | £55m | £8.5m, 2021 | ≈£1.7m | ≈£50m |
| Nørgaard (Arsenal) | £10m + add-ons | £3m, 2019 | nil | ≈£9.5m |
| Flekken (Leverkusen) | £8.7m | £11m, 2023 | ≈£5.5m | ≈£3m |
| Roerslev (Southampton) | £2.5m | £0.4m, 2019 | nil | ≈£2.4m |
| Gross estimated profit | ≈£127m | |||
| Less estimated direct costs and sell-ons | ≈£9m | |||
| Net estimated profit | ≈£118m (band £110–125m) |
The accounts call it “record profit on player trading” without giving a figure; the estimate is from reported fees, purchase history and 5% direct costs, with unquantified sell-ons to Troyes and Lorient covered by the band. This summer’s two sales add about £8m. Averaged over three seasons, about £51m enters the denominator; counted single-year, £8m.
The result depends on that choice more than on anything else:
| Treatment | Ratio | Distance to 85% |
|---|---|---|
| Averaged profit (central) | ≈80% | +5 |
| Single-year profit | ≈98% | −13 |
| No profit (underlying) | ≈103% | −18 |
Band on the central figure: 70–91%. The finding is the range, not the point: Brentford can be below or above the green line depending on inputs nobody outside the club can observe. What survives the whole range is that the cost base has risen materially faster than revenue, that amortisation is climbing, that player-trading profit is doing important regulatory work, and that external financing has been used in connection with transfer-payment obligations. The accounts say the first of those in prose: costs “continued to increase significantly”, driven by “further investment in the playing squad”.
The series
The same formula applied to every season: estimated squad share of filed wages plus employer charges, filed amortisation, agents, and profit on sales averaged over the season and the two before it. These are Orange Ledger reconstructed ratios, not observed ones.
| Season | Turnover £m | Relevant wages £m | Amortisation £m | Reconstructed SCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021/22 (first PL season) | 140.9 | 50–52 | ≈20 | ≈54% |
| 2022/23 | 166.5 | 73–76 | 30.9 | ≈67% |
| 2023/24 | 166.5 | 84–87 | 35.6 | ≈74% |
| 2024/25 | 173.1 | 94–99 | 47.6 | ≈82% |
| 2026/27 (est.) | 174 | 100 | 70 | ≈80% |
Fulham’s series was flat. Brentford’s is a slope:
- The ratio has risen every season since promotion, on revenue that has barely moved.
- 2026/27 holds at about 80% only because 2025’s record sales are averaged in.
- Next summer, FY25’s £27m drops out of the three-year window and FY26’s ≈£118m has one year left. Without another material sale, the club moves up again.
The level isn’t alarming. The trajectory is the story.
The mechanism, in the filings
Nine charges registered against Brentford FC Ltd since 2022, read with the accounts, describe a machine and its upgrade.
The annual version (2022–2025). Three near-identical charges to Barclays, created in August 2022, September 2023 and August 2024. Each assigns to the bank the club’s “Basic Award Fund”, the UK broadcast distribution the League pays every July or August, and its central funds more broadly, as security for that year’s overdraft. Each was released when the next was signed. For at least three seasons, Brentford borrowed against the following summer’s television payment to get through the year, one season at a time.
The upgrade (15 July 2025 onward). On one day the last Barclays charge was satisfied and four new ones appeared:
- Charge 0033, Macquarie Bank: a fixed charge over all Premier League central funds due to the club from September 2025 to January 2027, with “Future Secured Assets” defined as the central funds, or the relegation payment, for every season to 2029/30.
- Charge 0032, Macquarie: a legal mortgage over the stadium leasehold at Lionel Road.
- Charge 0034, GLAS Trust as security agent: fixed security over the same property.
- Charge 0035 (January 2026), Macquarie: central funds from February 2026 to June 2027.
- Charge 0036 (21 July 2026), Macquarie: central funds from August 2026 to January 2028, with parachute payments as fallback to 2031.
Successive and partly overlapping security assignments of the League’s money to one bank, supporting the Macquarie financing package across two and a half seasons, plus the ground. Whether each secures a separate drawdown or the same facility, the documents don’t say.
The accounts explain what they’re for:
- In July 2025 the club “executed a £100m debt facility with Macquarie Bank to fund any monthly cash shortfalls in the 25/26 season and beyond”: a £75m four-year term loan and a £25m revolving facility, repayable annually.
- In a relegation scenario the revolver terminates and the term loan is repaid “following a profile in line with receipts of Premier League parachute payments”.
- The Barclays overdraft it replaced had been secured by a floating charge over future media-rights income.
- Interest payable in FY25 was £10.4m, of which £6.0m was the unwinding of discount on deferred transfer payables: the accounting cost of paying for players on instalments, stated as a line.
So the cycle is: buy players on instalments; when the instalments fall due, borrow from a bank against next season’s television money; pledge the season after that; sell players to book profit; repeat. What changed in 2025 was the scale and the lender: a one-year advance from a clearing bank became a four-year facility from a specialist in football receivables, with the stadium added to the security and the relegation case written into the repayment profile. Net transfer debt went from £17m to £61m in FY25. The summer of 2025 was what a year of this looks like when the sales come off; the summer of 2026 (€124m in, €13m out) is the machine re-run.
None of this is hidden and none of it is distress. Brentford’s going-concern statement names three sources of liquidity, in this order: the Macquarie facility; player trading (“if required it will do so again”); and the shareholders’ assurances. What the filings make visible is the order.
The owner
- April 2025: Matthew Benham moved his shares into a new holding company, Best Intentions Analytics Ltd.
- July 2025: two minority investors came in, Gary Lubner and Sir Matthew Vaughn, through their vehicles.
- The proceeds repaid all £24.6m of preference shares and £15.4m of Benham’s short-term loan.
- His remaining loans are interest-free, secured by debentures over the group’s assets, and callable on 367 days’ notice.
Owner-related balances were partly repaid while bank financing expanded, making external credit increasingly important to the club’s transfer-payment cycle. That’s a different willingness picture from Fulham’s, where the owner converts loans to equity every year, and it’s the kind of thing a selling club negotiating instalments with Brentford might want to know.
What this doesn’t say
- That Brentford’s ratio is 80%, or 99%, or any figure to the decimal. The inputs the League uses aren’t public, the squad’s share of wages is an estimate, and the treatment of player-trading profit isn’t settled.
- That the club is in trouble. It has a bank facility sized for relegation, a squad it has sold from profitably three summers running, and an owner with resources.
What it does say is that Brentford’s cost base has grown faster than its revenue every year since promotion; that its compliance depends on continuing to sell; and that external financing, secured on the League’s next two seasons of television income, has been used in connection with its transfer-payment obligations. Those three facts are in the filings. The percentage is only the summary.