Leeds · Financial analysis

Leeds' squad cost ratio: a Premier League squad priced player by player, not rolled forward from the Championship

Leeds' squad cost ratio for the 1 March 2027 test comes out at 68.6%, well inside the 85% green threshold with roughly £42m of annual headroom. Measured before profit on player sales it is 72.9%. The last filed accounts are from a Championship season, so the wage bill is estimated player by player for the 2026/27 squad rather than rolled forward from a second-tier payroll. Reconstructed from Leeds United Football Club Ltd's accounts and Appendix 2 of the Premier League Handbook.

By Arthur van de Laak21 September 2026Updated 2 November 2026 · View updates28 min read

Figures as of 2 November 2026, Orange Engine release V2CL · Latest figures · What the engine does not capture

Leeds last filed accounts for a season in the Championship. Their 2026/27 squad has been rebuilt from those accounts and from a player-by-player estimate of what the current squad is paid.

The squad costs £173.3m against £237.8m of the football revenue the rule counts, which is 72.9% before any player trading. The three-year average of profit on player sales, £15.0m a year, takes the figure to 68.6%. Neither the merit and European amounts nor selling does much of the work: merit above the fifteenth-place floor is only £3.8m, the value of one place in the table, Leeds have no European amounts, and the sale-profit average is small because Leeds have bought rather than sold since 2024.

• The squad cost is £173.3m, the parts rounded separately: £89.0m of wages, £70.4m of amortisation, £9.4m of agents’ fees, and £4.4m for the two players on loan from other clubs.
• The wage figure is a separate estimate of what each player in the 2026/27 squad is paid.
• Leeds spent about £84m in the 2025 window and £85m in 2026, and the 2025 signings are carried predominantly on four-year terms, so about a quarter of their cost is charged each year rather than a fifth.
• The two remaining revenue estimates, commercial and gate income for 2025/26, move the figure between about 61% and 76% at the ends of the ranges they are drawn from. Those accounts are not filed until spring 2027.

Taken together, the twenty clubs of this season’s Premier League come to 75.4% on the same basis; Leeds’s 68.6% is below that. The full table for every club in the series is at Premier League SCR 2026/27.

What the accounts say

Leeds United Football Club Ltd files group accounts to 30 June. The year to 30 June 2025 was the promotion season, in which Leeds won the Championship with 100 points. Turnover was £137.0m, of which £45.6m was parachute money, the payment the League makes to a relegated club, in the second year after relegation; none reaches the 2026/27 test, which counts this season’s League money, and commercial income, including merchandise and catering, rose from £43.2m to £58.1m after Red Bull became the front-of-shirt sponsor.

The wage line was £90.8m and, with £11.9m of social security and pension, the staff bill was £102.7m, across 50 full-time players, 20 apprentices, 40 football management staff and 182 administrative staff. Most of the £16.9m rise in the wage line was the promotion bonus. Amortisation of player registrations was £46.4m, a further £3.0m was written off in impairments, and profit on player sales was £24.8m, largely from the summer 2024 sales of Summerville, Gray and Rutter.

The loss before tax was £49.2m. The accounts also record £39.5m of bonuses payable if Leeds stayed up in 2025/26, and up to £22.7m of further transfer fees dependent on staying up and on appearances. Leeds finished fourteenth. The bonuses are pay, a cost of 2025/26 that does not reach the 2026/27 test. The transfer fees are different: a fee that becomes payable is added to the cost of the player’s registration and written off over what remains of his contract, so part of any fee triggered in 2025/26 is charged in 2026/27. Leeds have not said how much became payable or for which players, and this estimate adds nothing for it. If the whole £22.7m had become payable at the end of 2025/26 and been spread over the roughly two years those contracts then had left, it would add up to about £11m to this season’s amortisation and take the ratio to about 73.1%, still well inside the line; it would also reduce the profits or increase the losses on any of those players since sold. The assumption range makes no allowance for it.

Why the wage bill is estimated player by player

For most clubs in this series the players’ share of wages is estimated as a share of the filed staff cost, then moved forward through the transfer windows since the accounts date. At Leeds that route would mostly measure the promotion rather than the payroll. The £102.7m staff bill is a Championship bill that includes a one-off promotion bonus, and the adjustment needed to turn it into a Premier League payroll two seasons later would be more than a third of the starting figure and almost entirely assumption.

This reconstruction therefore estimates the 2026/27 wage bill directly, player by player, and uses the filed figure only as a check.

• The permanent squad, about £62.0m a year of fixed salary, for the 22 senior players registered with Leeds, not counting the five out on loan. Two published wage sources were compared for each senior player and the midpoint taken. They are far apart on some players: James Trafford is put at £70,000 a week by one and £170,000 by the other, with a third report at £130,000. Across the squad the two sources bracket the total at £51.4m to £72.6m.
• Five senior players out on loan, Lucas Perri, Sebastiaan Bornauw, Willy Gnonto, Joël Piroe and Largie Ramazani, earn about £10.0m between them. The borrowing clubs’ share of those wages is not published, so half is assumed, and the full range from nothing to everything is about £5m either way.
• Academy and fringe professionals about £1.0m, the head coach about £3.0m (Daniel Farke is a relevant person under the rule), and an allowance of 10% on player pay for appearance and survival bonuses. There is no promotion bonus this season, because Leeds were not promoted into it.

That comes to £77.8m of gross pay: £62.0m, £5.0m, £1.0m, £3.0m and a bonus allowance of £6.8m. Employer social security and pension, at 14.4%, take it to £89.0m (£77.8m × 1.144; the range around the build is symmetric, so its midpoint adds nothing), with a range of about £75m to £103m once the disagreement between the wage sources is allowed for.

As a check, £89.0m is about 87% of the £102.7m Championship staff bill, which also paid 182 administrative staff and a promotion bonus. That is a plausible relationship, but the filing cannot confirm the estimate, and the wage figure is the largest single uncertainty in this reconstruction: it accounts for about half of the width of the published range.

The Premier League’s own squad returns for 2026/27 were used to check that no registered player was missing, and one was. Alex Cairns, the reserve goalkeeper, is registered on the senior list but had been left out of the wage estimate because one source showed his contract ending in June 2026. He has been added.

Rebuilding the rest of the ratio

Amortisation, £70.4m, in three parts.

• Registrations already on the books in June 2025 carried £88.8m of book value. Removing the players who have since left and spreading the rest over the roughly three years those contracts had left gives about £25.0m.
• The summer 2025 signings add £24.1m. They are carried predominantly on four-year terms: Anton Stach (£17m), Noah Okafor (£18m), Sean Longstaff (£12m), Gabriel Gudmundsson (£10m), James Justin (£8m) and Perri (£14m). For players signed since the last accounts, the cost written off is the reported fee plus 12%, which covers the League’s transfer levy, agents’ fees and the other costs of a signing that the rule counts. Each contract is measured from the day the player was registered to the June in which it ends, so a four-year deal signed in August runs a little under four years, and roughly a quarter of that cost is charged each year. The five-year cap in the rule only shortens contracts longer than five years; it does nothing to a four-year deal.
• The summer 2026 signings add £21.2m: Tarik Muharemović at £34m and Trafford at a £40m base fee, both on five-year contracts, and Nico Elvedi at £8.5m on a three-year contract.

Agents’ fees, about £9.4m, expensed. The FA publishes £14.0m paid by Leeds to agents in the year to February 2026, part of which is capitalised into the cost of signings rather than expensed.

Loan players, £4.4m. Melvin Bard (from Nice, with an option to buy) and Jean-Mattéo Bahoya (from Eintracht Frankfurt) cost about £1.8m in wages between them on the share Leeds are assumed to bear, £0.8m and £1.0m, plus Bard’s €1m loan fee, about £0.9m, and Bahoya’s €2m, about £1.7m, as the Yorkshire Evening Post reported it.

Revenue the rule counts, £237.8m.

The rows are rounded separately; the total is taken from the unrounded figures. Leeds are not a promoted club for this test, because they were in the Premier League in 2025/26, so the ordinary limbs of the rule apply. The merit payment is taken at the best of last season’s finish, the three-year mean and the fifteenth-place floor. Leeds finished fourteenth and spent the two previous seasons in the Championship. The rule does not say how a season outside the League enters the three-year mean; left out or counted below twentieth, the mean is no better than fourteenth, so fourteenth sets it, one place above the floor. That one place is worth £3.8m, the only merit above the floor, and with no European amounts, measuring merit at the floor gives 74.1% before player trading and about 69.6% after it.

The facility fee is not published club by club. Leeds were shown live in the UK 28 times in 2025/26, and the £18.1m used here is what remains of their reported total Premier League payment once the equal share and the merit payment are taken out.

The 2025/26 commercial figure is the most uncertain revenue line. Those accounts are not filed, so it is an estimate, made by one published method that is the same for every club (how we estimate last season’s commercial revenue): the £58.1m filed for 2024/25, a Championship season, grown by 14.6%, the rate the method gives a commercial income of that size, which is £66.6m. Leeds take that rate, and not the larger rise the method reads from past promotions, because their 2024/25 figure is nearly four times the largest of the figures those promotions started from. The method knows nothing of contracts, and no sponsorship is an input. The estimate is drawn between £45.4m and £94.3m. The club outsourced its retail operation to Fanatics from 1 July 2025. The rule counts merchandise at gross profit, sales less the cost of the goods, and a club that has handed its shop to a partner may count the gross profit it would have made running it (Rule A.1.24(b)). The 2024/25 base is a year in which Leeds ran their own shop, so the estimate holds merchandise at sales value and the cost of the goods comes off once. Clubs whose filed base already holds only the net receipts from a partner, such as Manchester City and Everton, have nothing taken off. If Leeds do not make that adjustment, the rule would count their receipts under the Fanatics agreement instead, which are not published. Leeds file no figure for that cost. It is an estimate, not a filed figure: £11.1m, the £24.6m of merchandising income filed for 2024/25 at the 55% margin taken from the clubs that publish one, in a range of £8.6m to £16.0m. That leaves £55.5m of commercial revenue as the rule counts it.

What player trading does to it

The rule adds the profit or loss on sales in the six most recent transfer windows and divides it by three (Rules A.1.13 and A.1.53). For the March 2027 test that period starts on 2 February 2024, five months before Leeds’s 2024/25 year.

£173.28m divided by £237.75m plus £14.98m gives 68.6%.

Profit is the fee less what remains on the books, which is why an academy graduate is worth so much more to the calculation than a signing sold for the same price. Struijk’s £15m was almost all profit because Leeds never paid a fee for him. The average is small because Leeds were buying, not selling, in both summers since promotion, and it falls further next year, to about £5.6m, when the 2024/25 sales leave it: all but Kristensen’s of June 2025, which falls in a later transfer window and stays in for one more test (Rule A.1.53).

The loan and the purchase clause

The clubs’ own descriptions conflict. Leeds’s announcement and the English version of Eintracht Frankfurt’s describe an option to buy. Frankfurt’s German announcement of 2 September 2026 and its update of 4 October describe a purchase obligation, which the update says takes effect under certain conditions. Reports put the package at €30m and tie the trigger to his appearances and to Leeds staying up; the definitive terms are not published. Whether he becomes a permanent signing cannot be judged from outside, so the central figure treats him as a loan; the table gives the case in which he is a permanent signing.

Either contract is measured as every other is, from the day he was registered, 2 September 2026, to the 30 June that length points to: 4.82 years or 3.82. The headline retains the loan treatment because neither the nature of the clause nor any condition attached to it can be established from public evidence. The permanent-treatment rows show the alternative if he is bought. They use the guaranteed fee of €23m, about £19.8m, as the Yorkshire Evening Post reported it, without the add-ons, which depend on future events. The loan fee is charged in full beside it.

How the owners fund it

• The owner funds the club through equity paid directly into the company rather than loans: £108.0m in 2024/25 in four instalments, and £140.7m the year before. The parent, 49ers Enterprises Global Football Group LLC, is registered in the United States and files no UK accounts.
• The accounts carry a £22.45m loan note to a group undertaking at 6%, listed on The International Stock Exchange and repayable in April 2026; whether it was repaid will show in the accounts for 2025/26, not yet filed.
• A £36.8m loan secured on the 2024/25 parachute payments was repaid during that year. Leeds also sold £33.1m of the transfer fees owed to them by other clubs, and the £34.9m liability for that factoring sits in other loans.
• Leeds owed £96.1m in transfer fees at June 2025 and were owed £104.8m, so the transfer book was roughly balanced before the 2025 and 2026 signings.

What this doesn’t say

• That Leeds’ ratio is exactly 68.6%. The published range is 62.8 to 73.7%, and about half of that width is the wage estimate. The commercial and gate figures for 2025/26 add a spread of about 61% to 76% at the ends of the ranges they are drawn from, and the Bahoya branch reaches 70.9%. The transfer fees that depended on staying up could add up to about four and a half points, which the range does not include.
• That the range covers every way the estimate could be wrong. The assumption range, 62.8% to 73.7%, sits entirely below 85% and reflects the input bounds used here. The stress case, the worst case on costs alone with revenue held at the central estimate, is 76.9%.
• That the wage figure matches Leeds’ own books. It is a player-by-player estimate checked against the Premier League’s squad returns and a Championship filing, not a disclosed figure. The 2025/26 accounts, due in spring 2027, will be the first Premier League payroll Leeds have filed since 2023.
• Anything about the profitability and sustainability rules, which are a separate test.