Fulham, rebuilt from six years of accounts
One club, six sets of filed accounts, one method. Fulham's reconstructed squad cost ratio runs at 82–91% in every Premier League season since promotion and about 88% this season, not the 113% a high-side estimate gives. The accounts also say who borrowed the £125m and what the club pledged, and the players aren't expressly in it.
Every squad cost ratio published for a Premier League club this month is an estimate, including the ones on this site. The question is what the estimate is built from. For the earlier pieces here the answer was a mixture: our own reconstructions for seven clubs, other people’s for the rest. That isn’t good enough for a ranking, and I said so. So this is the first of a series that starts from the only source every club shares: the accounts it files at Companies House. One club at a time, one method, every figure tagged as filed, reported, calculated or estimated.
Fulham first, for two reasons. PSRwatch’s post-window review put the club at 113%, “near red”, and the gap between that and what the accounts support is large. And six years of filings cover a relegation, a Championship season and four years back in the Premier League, which is the full cycle.
What the accounts say
Fulham Football Club Ltd files full accounts to 30 June. The FY25 set, signed 9 December 2025 and filed in April:
- Turnover £194.8m: central awards £128.8m, gate receipts £18.0m, commercial £31.2m, other broadcasting £12.7m, compensation £4.0m.
- Wages and salaries £145.5m, social security £20.5m.
- Headcount: 66 players, 262 administrative and ground staff.
- Amortisation of player registrations £61.5m; profit on player sales £41.0m; loss for the year £39.0m.
- Registrations on the books: £294m cost, £138.8m net.
- Player transfer creditors £98.1m (£42.9m due after a year); player transfer debtors £45.3m (£31.6m after a year). Cash £13.2m.
Three earlier sets give the same lines back to FY21, the relegated Premier League season, and FY22, the Championship year.
Rebuilding the ratio
The ratio counts players’ and the head coach’s wages, amortisation and agents’ fees against football revenue and player-trading profit. Four inputs:
- Wages. The accounts give one staff-cost figure for 328 employees and a headcount split; the rule wants the squad’s share, which isn’t disclosed. This is where published ratios diverge most, and it’s an estimate here too. A rolled-forward estimate that uses the whole £166.5m of staff costs, and grows it, reaches a numerator near £187m and a ratio of 113%. The first-team share Kieran Maguire has given for Premier League clubs, 73–76% of wages and salaries, plus employer charges, gives £121–126m for FY25, rolled to about £128m for 2026/27 after two modest windows (Kevin in; Lukić, Diop, Jiménez and Wilson out; six young signings for about £88m). That one choice is worth about 25 points of ratio. It is an Orange Ledger estimate applied to a filed base, with a band, not a figure from the accounts. One caution on the direction of the estimate: Crystal Palace, alone among the clubs rebuilt so far, files its player wage costs as a KPI, and there they are about 87% of wages and salaries, not 75%. If Fulham’s share were similar, relevant wages would be roughly £20m higher and the ratio roughly ten points higher than shown here. Whether Palace’s definition matches the rule’s perimeter isn’t stated, so the figure below stays on the Maguire share, but the band should be read as skewed upward.
- Amortisation. £61.5m in FY25, rising to about £68m as this summer’s £88m of signings lands on the book.
- Agents. The FA’s table shows £11.4m paid to intermediaries in its latest period. 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, already counted. So the FA number is a cross-check and an upper bound; about £7m enters the numerator here.
- Revenue. £194.8m rolled to about £208m with the Riverside Stand fully open.
Profit on player sales, which the rule is understood to average over three seasons, comes from filed and estimated figures:
| Regulatory season input | Disposal profit |
|---|---|
| FY25 | £41.0m filed |
| FY26 | ≈£13m (£12.2m filed post-year-end, plus any January) |
| FY27 | ≈£14m (Lukić and Diop, estimated) |
| Three-year average | ≈£23m |
Put together: numerator £203m, denominator £231m, ratio about 88%, band 77–101%, with the wage perimeter as the dominant uncertainty and the risk on the upside. The three treatments, for comparison with Brentford:
| Treatment | Ratio | Distance to 85% |
|---|---|---|
| Three-year averaged profit (central) | ≈88% | −3 |
| Current-season profit only | ≈91% | −6 |
| No disposal profit (underlying) | ≈98% | −13 |
What that means:
- Above the League’s 85% green line on every treatment; below the 115% red line on every treatment.
- If confirmed above green, the excess consumes part of the club’s allowance and lowers its following-season red threshold: on the central figure, about three points, implying a 2027/28 red line of about 112%.
- Set against Brentford’s underlying 103% and central 80%, Fulham is less dependent on historical trading profit for its regulatory position: the trading effect is about ten points here against about twenty-three there.
Six seasons on one method
The point of building from the accounts is that the same formula runs backwards. These are Orange Ledger reconstructed ratios, the same method every season, not observed ones.
| Season | Turnover £m | Relevant wages £m | Amortisation £m | Reconstructed SCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 (relegated) | 116.1 | 84–87 | 56.5 | ≈124% |
| 2021/22 (Championship) | 71.6 | 66–68 | 31.0 | ≈132% |
| 2022/23 | 182.3 | 101–105 | 45.6 | ≈82% |
| 2023/24 | 181.6 | 113–118 | 57.4 | ≈91% |
| 2024/25 | 194.8 | 121–126 | 61.5 | ≈87% |
| 2026/27 (est.) | 208 | 128 | 68 | ≈88% |
Two things the series says:
- Fulham has lived just above the new green line for four Premier League seasons and closed the gap with a sale most years: £8.7m of profit in 2023, £32.7m in 2024, £41.0m in 2025. This season is in line with its own history, not a lurch toward the red line.
- The two grey seasons are what relegation does to the ratio when revenue falls and the cost base doesn’t: 124% in the season Fulham went down, 132% in the Championship year, with wages alone at 126% of turnover. That is the relegation cliff when Fulham’s historical accounts are viewed through the new SCR framework, which was not operating in those seasons.
What the bank holds
The accounts note a £125m JPMorgan Chase facility, drawn in July 2024 for the Riverside Stand, at SONIA plus 3.625% over five years with debt-service covenants, “secured against the Company’s assets”. Companies House also has the charge instrument, and it’s more specific than that sentence:
- The borrower is Fulham Stadium Ltd, a sister company, not the club. At group level the facility finances the stadium company.
- The club is a chargor with limited recourse: the lender’s claim on it is satisfied “solely out of the Security Assets”.
- Those assets are the club’s rights under contracts paying it £1m or more a year (fixed charge) and its “Non-Borrower Revenues” (floating charge), plus a negative pledge.
- Player registrations and transfer receivables are not expressly identified as security in the club’s charge.
So the facility is the stadium company’s; Fulham FC Ltd’s role is limited-recourse security over specified contractual rights and revenues. That is a materially different credit picture from the accounts’ own summary, and it comes from a document that costs nothing to read.
The group accounts (Cougar Holdco London Ltd) show where the debt sits, and the capital filings show what’s behind it:
- The £125m loan is due after one year; £6.7m of interest was capitalised in FY25; tangible assets £390m; net assets £312m after £145.2m of shareholder loans were converted to equity in the year.
- The pattern: Shahid Khan lends, the loans convert to equity, the share capital is reduced, and it repeats. More than £600m had been converted by April 2023; £44.4m in October 2024; £22.0m in June 2025; £62.7m more came in after the year-end.
- The support letter says what they all say: there is “no certainty that this support will continue”.
What this doesn’t say
- That Fulham’s number is 88%. The League computes its ratio on revenue inputs agreed with each club before the season, which aren’t public, and on a rule text I haven’t read; the squad’s share of wages is an estimate.
- That the club is in any difficulty.
What it does say is that on a consistent, disclosed method the accounts support a ratio in the high 80s to low 90s; that the club has run there for four years; and that the principal difference from the 113% high-side estimate is the wage perimeter: that model uses total staff costs as a conservative proxy, whereas this reconstruction estimates the relevant squad and head-coach share.
And it says something the ratio can’t:
- Fulham’s transfer book lengthened on both sides last year: creditors due after a year up from £14m to £43m, debtors due after a year from £2m to £32m.
- Net transfer debt is £53m; cash is £13m.
- The going-concern statement depends on the owner.
None of that is distress. All of it is the shape of a club that buys and sells on instalments and is funded by one man’s willingness, which is what most of the league now looks like.
Brentford is next, and its accounts say something different.