Finance Guru: Leeds United player trading worst in Premier League as -£1m figure emerges
Leeds United have posted the worst player trading result in the Premier League in their accounts for the 2020/21 season.
Leeds uploaded their accounts to Companies House last week [6 April] and the numbers have since been crunched by the experts.
Swiss Ramble, an expert in football finances with over 200,000 Twitter followers, claims that Leeds’ £1million loss on player trading is the worst in the top-flight and “miles below” Manchester City [£69million] and Wolves [£61million].
Writing via their personal Twitter account, Swiss Ramble says: “Leeds’ profit would have been even higher if they had sold some of their talent.
“As it was, profit on player sales fell from £10m to a £1m loss.
“Unsurprisingly, this was the worst player trading result in the Premier League, miles below Man City’s £69m, Wolves’ £61m and Leicester’s £44m.”
How?
We won’t pretend to be experts on football finance but how can a club suffer a £1million loss on player sales?
No other club received a negative figure with Fulham the next worst as they broke even and seemingly didn’t sell any players.
Did Leeds pay for someone to take a player off them?
If that was the case, was it Jay-Roy Grot? It would make sense, in fairness.
Either way, Leeds’ financial sustainability will eventually start to depend a bit more on player trading.
If we use Wolves as an example, their Chinese owners Fosun pumped a lot of money into the coffers at Molineux and the West Midlands club was able to go out and sign players like Ruben Neves while they were in the Championship.
Wolves’ spending has eased up now and they look a lot more balanced in their approach to the transfer market, buying and selling players each summer.
Leeds could start to take on that approach this summer with it looking as though players like Raphinha and Kalvin Phillips could move on.
There have been signs that our squad has started to stagnate and the lack of depth has hurt the club’s Premier League form.
Selling a player like Raphinha could free up funds to bring in new faces and sort out those issues.
In other Leeds United news, Jeff Stelling took a swipe at Marcelo Bielsa at the weekend.