QUOTE(zhou.xingxing @ Jun 6 2025, 09:59 AM)
confusing stuff. i thought its over a period of 3 years. they have not spend big for the past 3 years iirc... same with city who does a lot of mega buck selling... and minimal purchase until recent 2 windows including current.
Liverpool (estimated pre-tax loss limit in 2024-25: £75m)
Despite breaking even since Fenway Sports Group bought the club in October 2010, Liverpool’s pre-tax result for 2023-24 was their worst ever — £57.1m was shipped, which on top of a £9m deficit a year earlier put the club’s combined loss at £66.1m for the first two years of the current PSR cycle.
Liverpool haven’t been funded by equity recently, so their losses are limited to £15million over three seasons. They do, however, have chunky allowable costs. The club’s infrastructure accounts for around £16m in annual depreciation charges, while they also run one of the more expensive youth setups in England.
We estimate Liverpool could have lost £75million in their 2024-25 accounting period (which ended on Saturday) and still have been compliant with Premier League rules. In reality, with booming revenues and player sale profits of £41.9m (around double the size of 2023-24), Liverpool were considerably more likely to have been profitable last season than to have strayed anywhere close to their loss limit.
Manchester United (estimated pre-tax loss limit in 2024-25: £141m)
As detailed by The Athletic, Manchester United’s PSR position is calculated using the accounts of Red Football Limited (RFL), rather than Manchester United plc (RFL is a subsidiary of the plc entity).
That’s a pretty big factor, as in recent years the pre-tax result of those companies has diverged significantly. In 2023-24, Manchester United plc lost £130.7million before tax; for RFL, the deficit was just £36.2m. Per UEFA’s most recent European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report, pre-tax loss figures for United were €22m (£19m at the exchange rate used in the report) in 2022-23 and €42m (£36m) in 2023-24 — an exact mirror of the pre-tax results in RFL’s accounts.
The difference stems partly from RFL including none of the costs borne by the plc as part of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s share purchase in February 2024, but also from the structure of loans within the wider Manchester United group. RFL’s bottom line benefited from booking interest income on intra-group loans owed to RFL by entities further up the corporate chain, as well as recharging staff time to elsewhere in the business (sources have told The Athletic this time comprised plc-related business undertaken by executives, such as investor relations, rather than football-related activities). Foreign exchange differences in RFL were more favourable than at the plc level, too.
Based on RFL’s loss figures, it’s a struggle to see how there were ever any PSR worries at the club — though that’s only true once Ratcliffe’s arrival was accompanied by equity investment, which raised United’s three-year PSR loss limit from £15m to £105m.
There is also the complication whereby we do not know exactly which costs United were required to add back into their PSR calculation. Both the Premier League and UEFA use a ‘reporting perimeter’ that requires you to include all costs “in respect of (that club’s) football activities”, including any amounts that occur under the auspice of other legal entities.
According to Old Trafford sources, for the purposes of their PSR calculation, United are required to strip out any foreign exchange differences and the impact of intra-group loan interest. That means United’s pre-tax loss in its PSR calculation is larger than that shown in RFL’s accounts, though still below the loss in the plc entity.
RFL’s pre-tax loss across the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons was £55.1million, and United’s loss limit across the three-year PSR cycle is £105m following Ratcliffe’s injections of equity in 2024. After taking into account allowable costs, and adjusting for exchange differences and the intra-group interest, we reckon United could lose around £141m in 2024-25 and still comply with Premier League rules. In other words, they’ll be fine this summer, however surprising that may seem.